Teen used prize money to fund lucrative Amazon side hustle GuineaLoft [Video]

At age 12, Bella Lin spent an hour every week “scraping, scrubbing and power washing” excrement off her two guinea pig cages.

“It was essentially a [mini] porta potty,” Lin, now 17, tells CNBC Make It.

The experience was taxing and gross enough to prompt Lin to design her own cages: first on notebook paper, then with bricks and plastic in her backyard in Sunnyvale, California and now in a factory in Hangzhou, China.

Lin is the founder and CEO of GuineaLoft, a small pet accessory brand that sells on Amazon. GuineaLoft’s cages are made with acrylic walls and a disposable wax-coated paper bottom that makes them easier to clean. She launched the cages in November 2022 after about a year of prototyping.

This year, GuineaLoft has brought in roughly $71,000 a month in revenue so far, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. That’s up more than double compared to last year, when the company brought …