Tired of 'Culturally Obtuse' Products, This 27-Year-Old Took His Side Hustle From $1,000 a Month to 7-Figure Revenue: 'Pick the Right Opportunity to Pursue'
It's the era of the side hustle, and if you've ever considered starting one to earn some extra cash outside of your 9-5, you're in good company. These days, more than one-third of U.S. adults have side hustles, and their supplemental gigs make an average of $891 a month, according to recent research from Bankrate. Of course, the most successful side hustlers see much higher earnings, especially when they start a business that brings in nearly as much as — or significantly more than — their full-time sources of income.
Victor Guardiola, 27, of Austin, Texas, is one of them. Learn more about Guardiola's business journey, here. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Want to read more stories like this? Subscribe to Money Makers, our free newsletter packed with creative side hustle ideas and successful strategies. Sign up here.
What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?I was working at another CPG (consumed packaged goods) startup at the time, assisting the founder with fundraising and working on the marketing team. I worked as his right hand in fundraising primarily, and that helped me develop the skillset to fundraise for my brand.
Where did you find the inspiration for your side hustle turned full-time business?There were two primary reasons why I started Bawi. First, the nostalgic Mexican beverages my community and I were drinking were significantly impacting health. I dove into the academic literature around sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and found that they were causing devastating metabolic health issues for millions of Latinos. This lack of health innovation was a strong motivator to bring a novel better-for-you, culturally relevant product to market. The second motivator was the lack of cultural representation in the CPG industry.
Image Credit: Garnish Studios
The cost to start a physical goods company is very high, and this results in less participation from minority groups who find it much more difficult to fund their startup. Nearly all startup funding comes from friends and families, and when you have a socioeconomic group with 5x less wealth than an average white household, you get less cultural innovation. To add insult to injury, the cultural innovators who are able to scale their products are rarely from the communities of the products' origin. This means that you often find culturally obtuse products made from a board room as diverse as a summer in the Hamptons, competing against minority groups who are trying to represent their culture's flavors on shelf.
Secondly, agua fresca is a ubiquitous product that has yet to be successfully commercialized for a mass market. This felt like a huge opportunity as the agua fresca category has wide consumer recognition and is culturally salient for many Latinos and non-Latinos alike. We began experimenting with a lower-sugar agua fresca that was fruit juice forward and used minimal ingredients. After taking the concept through an entrepreneurship practicum at The University of Texas at Austin, I realized that a better-for-you, culturally significant product like Bawi has legs to stand on. Health innovation and cultural representation were the two flagship motivations for starting Bawi.
What were some of the first steps you took to get your business off the ground?Starting a business for anyone is tumultuous. The largest hurdle for most entrepreneurs in my category is fundraising. In order to have an investable business, we had to show signs of traction. We quickly launched into farmers markets to test the product-market fit. Nick Mares from Kettle & Fire actually gave us a grant to buy our initial farmers market setup. We wanted to know that a better-for-you agua fresca was a significant enough offering to be innovative within the beverage category. We spent about six months in the farmers markets tweaking the formula, trying to generate cash to fund the business, then the pandemic reared its head and on-site consumption was no longer allowed.
We had to pivot as I was beginning my role at the startup that would ultimately change my life. I learned to fundraise from my former boss, and in about a year, I landed my first investor. That investor was Patrick Terry from P. Terry's Burger Stand, an Austin icon and restaurateur. That was enough capital for 20-year-old me to quit my job and pursue this full-time. After Patrick, many other investors got involved, including Michael Rypka from Torchy's Tacos, and many former CPG executives.
Image Credit: Garnish Studios
I aggressively cold-emailed for years to effectively raise capital for Bawi and add more significant subject-matter experts and notable names in the industry. I had followed up with my initial batch of investors at least a dozen times before I received a response — and that was a hard skill to learn. I learned to add value to each and every follow up, nurture relationships and create win-win outcomes for all stakeholders.
Are there any free or paid resources that have been especially helpful for you in starting and running this business? I am a bit jaded with most incubators, as most of these programs and pitch competitions don't speak to the actual needs of most entrepreneurs. Joining a community to network is one thing, but I would not rest your laurels on an accelerator changing the trajectory of your business. Many of these programs offer accounting or finance workshops, and when they're genuinely helpful to you, use them. Most of the entrepreneurs I mentor and coach who have already established some semblance of product-market-fit struggle with fundraising squarely, as their core constraint. They are not able to get to the next threshold without outside investment.
The most compelling piece of advice I would give is to network genuinely and intentionally. Reach out to anyone and everyone out of genuine interest and make it as easy as possible for someone to pick up the phone or answer your email. You need to build a golden bridge for others to walk across, and you do that by having a small ask (15 minutes of your time) and being direct and concise. It is much more effective to reach out to someone who has scaled their business and ask for advice, as opposed to leading with your investment deck and asking for funding. If someone wants to be helpful and is excited about what you're doing, they'll communicate it. Send more cold emails — they are all additive. Building a network from zero is remarkably difficult for first-generation immigrants, but if I can do it…anyone certainly can. Fundraising and networking are skills just like anything else.
If you could go back in your business journey and change one process or approach, what would it be, and how do you wish you'd done it differently?I wish that I would have hired the right people sooner, even if they were a bit more expensive. Those early-stage hires have a tremendous impact on the trajectory of the business, and having the wrong people involved can hamstring you in such profound ways. Every entrepreneur should think of the next hire sooner. The cost of having the wrong people involved in your team is extraordinarily high at an early stage. If anyone is causing friction in the business and not adding value, you need to move on. The cost of letting someone go only compounds with time.
When it comes to this specific business, what is something you've found particularly challenging and/or surprising that people who get into this type of work should be prepared for, but likely aren't?The sheer amount of relationships to manage in the CPG business is immense. Scaling a business requires you to point your attention at the right problems, as you likely don't have the team to attend to any and every opportunity. This goes to my earlier point of networking, too. The entrepreneurs in my circles who fall flat when faced with a steep challenge often lack the network and context to address the issue.
How long did it take you to see consistent monthly revenue? How much did the side hustle earn?
My side hustle became a full-time position in 2022. That was when we were starting to go from farmer's markets doing about $1,000 to $2,000 per month to our canned beverage business that began doing $10,000 per month in our first year. This was enough traction to realize that we were onto something.What does growth and revenue look like now?
Growth is significantly more aggressive now that we raised our series seed last year and added a few important team members. We had our best month in March 2025, broke that record again in May and are on track to surpass seven figures this year.
Image Credit: Garnish Studios
How much time do you spend working on your business on a daily, weekly or monthly basis? How do you structure that time; what does a typical day or week of work look like for you?At a minimum, I am working on Bawi roughly 50 hours per week. My typical day includes meeting with my team members in their respective departments, doing business development (pitching us for new sales opportunities) and taking care of miscellaneous administrative tasks across the company. Every week, I am focused on getting one to three major projects across the finish line, and I find that focusing on any more than that reduces the quality of my output. Investor relations are a key component of my role, as all our investors ultimately reach out to me for any opportunities or questions.
My usual Monday through Friday schedule follows:
- 5:30 a.m. - 7:00 a.m. - Wake up, hydrate, tidy up, emails
- 7:00 a.m. - 8:45 a.m. - gym, sauna, meditate
- 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. - Bawi HQ
I am usually pulled into events on the weekend and have one or two calls with investors or team members. Small teams are effective but require more management and that's simply the stage we're at right now.
I also want to note that I am vehemently against excessive hustle culture. You can work hard and take care of yourself at the same time. In fact, taking care of yourself makes you better at your job. This schedule works for me, after trying every amalgamation of a morning routine and work day possible. This is all subject to change with time; it's vital to work hard but not be so rigid in your lifestyle. Everything in moderation, even moderation.
What do you enjoy most about running this business?Every can of Bawi is a vessel of culture. We are reshaping attitudes around Hispanicity, cultural innovation and representation. I truly enjoy being at the forefront of shaping the landscape of how my community interacts with our cuisine. It has been wonderful to receive messages from my hispanic consumers who feel seen by our package design and heard by our nutritional profiles. We are causing the industry to change for the better, one Bawi at a time.
What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?Pick the right opportunity to pursue. Many entrepreneurs embark on their journey with grandiose ambitions of scaling a seven-figure company into a massive exit. These opportunities only exist if there is exceptional product-market fit and best-in-class execution. The TAM (total addressable market) for the opportunity has to be big enough to attract a large market. Before even beginning the fundraising conversation, you need to ensure that your innovation fits a large enough opportunity to be worth pursuing. I started officially hosting office hours for minority entrepreneurs last year, and I'd say less than 5% have a business innovative enough to be worth pursuing.
This isn't to take away from the passion behind an entrepreneurial idea that captivates someone; this is just necessary context and perspective before embarking on this journey. As soon as you raise capital for your concept, you have to do right by your backers and pursue the opportunity aggressively. As an example, if I were pitched an Ashwaganda-infused probiotic Zebra milk, I'd take pause. The beverage market for Zebra milk doesn't seem compelling enough to pursue. Think long and hard about how innovative your product really is within its category and establish traction before putting real time or energy behind anything.
This article is part of our ongoing Young Entrepreneur® series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of being a young business owner.
entrepreneur
