Shan Shan Fu, 33, lives in San Francisco, California, and earns $226,000 a year as a business owner. She owns her company, Millennials In Motion, which sells quality face masks, gaiters and socks. Shan Shan also has an O-1 visa, which is for individuals who possess extraordinary ability in science, art, education, business, or athletics.

This is an installment of CNBC Make It's Millennial Money series, which profiles people across the globe and details how they earn, spend and save their money.

Read more about about her budget breakdown here: https://cnb.cx/3snDdAh

Shan Shan Fu can pinpoint the exact moment she was inspired to become an entrepreneur.

It was March 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic was quickly spreading across the U.S. Fu, 33, remembers watching a news segment that showed a long line of people waiting outside a food pantry, while the anchor detailed how Americans were getting laid off in droves.

As she watched, the San Francisco resident realized that doing nothing didn't feel OK anymore. So she decided to start a side hustle. Her idea: sell quality face masks. "When the surgeon general said everybody should wear face masks, none of my friends had good face masks," Fu tells CNBC Make It. 

She launched Millennials in Motion in April 2020, working on the business at night and on the weekends while maintaining her full-time job at a consulting firm during the day. 

For the first few months, there was no time off. I worked seven days a week, every waking minute.

"I would work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the consulting firm and 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. [on my side hustle]," she says. "For the first few months, there was no time off. I worked seven days a week, every waking minute."

After six months, in October 2020, Millennials in Motion's income was close to what she earned at the consulting firm, so Fu decided to focus on it full-time. Overall in 2020, Fu earned $115,000 from her consulting job and her business brought in another $111,000, for a total of $226,000.  

Growing her business

One of Fu's favorite quotes comes from Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind." "When a civilization is growing, you make slow money, but when a civilization is crashing, you make fast money," Fu paraphrases.

Although the onset of a global pandemic was a risky time to start a new business, Fu saw an opportunity to help people while capitalizing on a burgeoning industry. She knew she could make "fast money," while also helping others. Millennials in Motion donates a portion of its proceeds to Feeding America.

Fu had no prior experience in ecommerce when she decided to launch her business, so she turned to YouTube. "I swear I learned top to bottom how to start an ecommerce company for free from YouTube," she says. 

She leveraged family connections to find a factory overseas that could produce masks, and she invested $3,000 in inventory and supplies. She started out slow, selling a few masks a week. But within a few months, she was selling 20 to 30 masks a week. 

As the business continued to grow, she got a feel for what products her customers liked most and began selling them through Amazon and Walmart as well. 

To keep the business viable long-term, Fu wants to branch out into other projects, she says. Because masks appeal to such a broad consumer base, she expects she'll need to sell a variety of products to continue to generate the same amount of income. 

"Eventually, I want to have any products that a millennial would want, especially a trendy millennial," she says.

Building a better life

Success is important to Fu in part because of how she grew up. For her parents, "money was probably the number-one thing that was a stress factor," she says.

Fu was born in China, where her parents were educated and well-respected in their careers; her father was an engineer and her mother was a doctor. They moved to the U.S. when Fu was six, and found they were no longer able to use their degrees to get jobs, so they ended up working in grocery stores to make ends meet.

"I remember my dad told me when he was working at the grocery store, all of the workers were Asian and they all had master's degrees and PhDs," she says. "There were a lot of people struggling at the time."

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Living On $226K A Year In San Francisco | Millennial Money