While CNBC Make It reporter Zack Guzman has reported on side hustles, he himself had never launched one. CNBC |

With the first two parts of my challenge complete, I set my eyes on the third and looked to ramp up marketing efforts in order to maximize profits. Following the advice of Trevor Chapman, an e-commerce expert who had his company acquired for over $10 million, I planned to use Reddit posts to help spread the message about CryptoCrow.co. The first post that went up in the /r/Bitcoin subreddit a day after launch garnered over 5,000 views. The traffic led to one sale, then two, then nine by day's end.

After testing the site with sales from friends and family on launch day, true sales poured in after posting on Reddit. Crypto Crow LLC |

"You just have a cash generating machine," Chapman tells me. "It's kind of like the dream scenario." And to be fair, it did feel like a dream. Every hour or so after posting, another Shopify notification would pop up on my phone explaining that a human somewhere in the world wanted to pay $20 for one of my shirts. I even woke up to sales that closed while I was sleeping — another $20 in profit. The dream didn't last long, however. I wore out my welcome in other subreddits that weren't as receptive to what was seen as an advertising ploy. One user commented, "it's getting annoying, to the stage I don't want to support it lol."

CryptoCrow.co's first customer James Sun (left) and CNBC's Bryce Churchill and Zack Guzman sport early designs from CryptoCrow.co. CNBC |

Plenty of others who saw my posts disagreed — to the tune of over $1,200 in sales just after CryptoCrow.co's first week. In all, the work amounted to about a 40 percent profit margin (after Shopify and Printful took their cuts). Another Redditor, entrepreneur Mubashar Iqbal, even offered to help profile my shop on Product Hunt, a site dedicated to showcasing noteworthy startups. It received some attention, but ultimately only led to one sale. Testing an early business idea with your target audience on sites like Reddit and Product Hunt makes sense when launching, but it doesn't compare to the sustainability and automation of Facebook's platform, according to Chapman.

CryptoCrow.co founder Zack Guzman quickly realizes selling crypto gear on the street might not be the best marketing idea. CNBC |

"Facebook is great to acquire customers because you can hone down so insanely well," he says. "The data on each individual is astounding. … Before, this kind of consumer targeting would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars." It's a large part of what Chapman teaches in his online marketing course, Academy of Arbitrage. The first thing that struck me about using Facebook Business's ad platform was that it's surprisingly cheap. At a minimum cost of $1 a day, I could target those who were interested in cryptocurrency, then further limit age ranges, gender, income levels and even, you guessed it, political affiliation. Using photos of some of my bestsellers, I was able to launch ads that track when and how often people click through to my site in just a matter of hours. It was also fairly easy to duplicate those ads over to Instagram. The ease of use might be one reason why in a CNBC survey, more than four in 10 small-business retailers (42 percent) said they had advertised on Facebook within the past few months.

CNBC's Richard Washington models CryptoCrow.co's popular "Hello, my name is Satoshi Nakamoto" signature bucket hat. CNBC | Zack Guzman