From dropshipping to daytrading to reselling, Angelo has tried everything when it comes to side hustles, and now he’s helping all of us learn how to make more money through side hustles!
Angelo’s story starts back in high school, when he felt like he didn’t really have any passion or focus, almost like he was sleepwalking through life. He was just focusing on trying to make his parents happy and stay in the same classes as his friends, so when the time came to apply to college, Angelo had no idea what to do. The only study he could connect with his personal identity was nursing, because of the stereotype around Filipinos commonly going into nursing . He applied to college as a public health major with the intention of switching into nursing, but everything changed for Angelo that summer.
In the summer, Angelo saw an episode of Gary Vee’s Trash Talk series, where Gary would go to garage sales and buy things for a dollar and flip them for five on eBay. This concept was exciting to Angelo, since before then he’d only worked part-time jobs and only had experience with trading his time for money, not working for himself. That weekend, Angelo went out to three garage sales but only ended up buying one item, a Lilo and Stitch bubble blower for $1. He was then able to flip it for $15 online, but didn’t end up making anything because shipping got messed up. Even so, this was like a proof of concept for Angelo, showing him that it's possible to turn $1 into $15.
From that point forward, he stopped looking at money as being only for buying things, but rather as a tool that can be used to get freedom. Angelo continued working on flipping items and also picked up reading business books out of passion, as he wanted to learn everything he could about the space. Even though many of his early ventures didn’t ended up working out, Angelo loved the way that what he got out was a direct result of the amount of work and thought he put in. Because of his passion for business and working for himself, Angelo switched his major away from public health and into business.
When the end of summer came and Angelo was heading to college, he needed something that wouldn’t require lots of space for inventory like flipping on eBay does. That’s when he found Amazon FBA, a program where you get a product and ship it to amazon, then they’ll hold it in their warehouse and ship it to the customer once an order comes through. Amazon holding inventory for him was perfect, so Angelo jumped in headfirst with selling used books.
With Amazon FBA, freshman year was crazy. Angelo was skating around campus and ubering around town trying to find new books, all while keeping up a social life, hitting the gym, and getting grades. This was also the time when Angelo started to put more of a focus on efficiency by waking up early, journaling, and generally being more intentional about self-care.
That takes us to 2020, when the world shut down and Angelo had to head home for lockdown, which meant sales plummeted because he couldn’t go out hunting for more used books. Angelo started diving into all the different types of side hustles he could find, from daytrading to instacart to dropshipping. Day trading was fun, but depressing at the same time. While day trading, Angelo’s schedule looked something like: wake up at 6:30, see account in the red, go back to sleep. After trying out plenty of different ways to make money, Angelo moved back to his roots- Amazon business.
Over the course of a year, Angelo scaled his amazon business to 6 figures, and it was simultaneously the best and most stressful time in his entire life. His house turned into a warehouse and his family often pitched in to help ship things since there was just so much business. One time, Angelo woke up to the sound of his dad panicking because a massive truck filled with 60 patio heaters (50 lbs each) came through. Their neighborhood has a strict HOA, so Angelo was scrambling to hide stock outside under tarps and spent all day trucking back and forth to the post office to ship the patio heaters. Each one was 60 lbs, so it also did some serious damage to his back. Angelo did $6k in profit that day, but that experience was when he realized that the amazon business just wouldn’t be sustainable if he wanted to scale his operation further.
All the while, Angelo had been documenting his progress on social media through educational videos, so if you scroll back far enough you can actually see the progression of him learning and building his businesses. Social media started to get real traction when Angelo made a video about money laundering that totally went viral, which was inspired by him watching Breaking Bad at the time.
The educational videos were doing well, and as he ventured into different topics, he started to get the hang of social media. After some research and learning how value personal branding can be, he immediately locked himself in his room and started making at least 2 videos a day, sometimes as many as 4. Those first videos were really rough, but Angelo didn’t really care because no one was really seeing them anyway. He knew that it would only take one big chance for him to make it big. The more videos Angelo made, the better he got, and he even took a semester off of school to just focus on the business full time.
During Angelo’s semester off, he was making massive progress, but felt terrible. He started to let his health go in favor of working more, and got to the point where he had terrible mental health and was just stressed out all the time. A large factor in this was focusing on the wrong thing. Up until this point, Angelo’s primary focus was making as much money as possible, but at this point that goal was leading him to self-destruct. After some soul-searching, Angelo remembered that one of the reasons he originally wanted to be a nurse was to have a positive impact on people, and now through social media he has the potential to help millions of people through his content. Money and attention are awesome, but this type of personal fulfillment is far more valuable. Angelo also decided to go back to school to do both at the same time.
This takes us to now, where Angelo is juggling full-time school, his content creation business, his membership in a business frat, and the gym. It sounds like a lot, but your youth is the time when you should really be pushing yourself to find out what you’re really capable of, and to build a strong foundation for the rest of your life. If you want to join Angelo on this journey, you can find him on TikTok @profitplug, Instagram @profitplugg, and YouTube @Profitplug.
