How Invalid.jp sidebars went viral on TikTok and became profitable

When Jason Seo’s car accessories business first went viral, he was completely “unprepared.”

It was October 2021, and a TikTok video about one of his products — an LED-lined rearview mirror — started getting views. They turned into sales: $12,000 in one day, Seo told CNBC Make It.

Siu, then a freshman at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, ran to Office Depot and stayed for hours, printing and then hand-cutting labels to fill orders. A year later, another of his videos — one featuring an LED-powered light-up poster — went viral, with more than 9 million views and counting.

Invalid.jp generated $38,000 in revenue over the next 24 hours, Seo says.

In total, the company generated $512,000 in revenue in 2022, and has already surpassed those sales this year, according to documents reviewed by Make It. SEO estimates that approximately 30% of these profits are profits.

Invalid.jp isn’t a side hustle anymore: Siu says he works at least 40 hours a week on top of his full semester workload. Before renting a warehouse last summer, he ran his business out of his parents’ two-bedroom apartment in Honolulu.

“I’m very nervous all the time,” says Seo, 21. “It’s not just a business in my life.” [parents’] A home where I can just pause it anymore. Now it should really work.”

Here’s how he developed his side business, and how he manages his dual life as a business owner and college student.

Siu created Invalid.jp when he was a high school student and worked at a valet company. He wanted extra money to buy accessories for his own car, a Nissan Rogue SUV, and the stickers were popular among his peers. He spent $300 of his savings from a previous side project on a $300 vinyl printer, selling stickers for $3 to $5 apiece to his friends on Snapchat.

Eventually, Seo’s goal turned to something more expensive: new parts for his car. This means that he needs to sell a more profitable product. While searching, he found an LED backlit rearview mirror on Instagram. “I could be the one selling this,” he remembers thinking.

He ordered a $20 mirror from a factory in China, then took out the glass and put LED lights inside — along with his most popular sticker, which says “Safe Driving.” The backlight made the label visible when he replaced the glass.

A friend told him he could increase sales through TikTok, so he started posting videos “as much as possible,” he says. As the purchases poured in, Siu remembers thinking to himself: “Maybe this is a real business.”

Shortly after his online debut, which came months later, Seo quit his job as a server.

Once interest dried up, so did Siu’s profits. Looking for more consistent sales, he turned to social media advertising — and ran into difficulties.

“I was wasting thousands of dollars,” Siu says. “I was barely breaking even, some months I even lost money. It was very unmotivating.”

Ads on Snapchat, YouTube, and Twitter, now known as X, apparently didn’t help his sales, so he reallocated his marketing budget to TikTok, Google, Facebook, and Instagram. He says the quality and reach of his campaigns has improved.

Siu added new product lines, such as cup holders, masks, and license plates — which she purchased in bulk, customized, and resold for profits. His two most in-demand products were posters and LED mirrors, so he combined them to create illuminated posters, which were customizable and could change colors when controlled with a small remote control.

Siu does not recommend leaving it on while driving.

He attributes the viral video about the stickers — which again came just months after the product was created — to his social media advertising and commitment to posting TikTok videos regularly.

Viral days can be very profitable. Social media advertising helps keep Invalid.jp’s cash flow more consistent through the rest of the year, Siu says.

Siu schedules most of his college classes before noon, so he can spend the second half of the day working on Invalid.jp. He says his warehouse costs $1,500 a month, and he financed a Toyota 4Runner SUV — larger than the Scion coupe he drove — to make fewer shipping trips to the post office.

He says his mother and girlfriend help him manage and fill the orders. He recently hired two contractors to help him film and edit his TikTok videos.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to run a highly profitable business and act like a traditional college student, Siu says — and for now, the business is a success. In the long term, he hopes to employ enough people so he can spend less time in the warehouse and more time with his family and friends at the beach.

He’s not exactly sure how long that will take, and says he’s starting to explore other side ideas with friends he met online.

“I’m trying to figure that part out,” he says.

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