December 16, 2025 • 49 mins
Check out my newsletter at https://TKOPOD.com and join my community at https://TKOwners.com
━
beehiiv is the newsletter platform I’ve used for over a year and a half because their data shows you exactly what’s working. Get 30% off three months at beehiiv.com/chris
━
I sat down with Mindi Reinke and we walked through one of the simplest, lowest risk reselling businesses I’ve seen in a long time. She shared how she bought pallets of school books for $1, which is what she usually pays, used eBay and ChatGPT to sort and list the inventory, and turned that into roughly $5,000 in revenue. We talked about why curriculum is the real money maker, how book arbitrage actually works, and why this is a business almost anyone can start with just a phone and very little upfront cost. You can find Mindi Reinke on X at https://x.com/hey_mindi
Enjoy!
---
Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-yt
Ask me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-ask
Learn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjk
Learn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cof
Follow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-x
Free weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nl
Share this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-all
Scrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os
---
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
If you're looking for something that is basically free, that has
a low time investment, and that you could do with only your
phone, the book arbitrage is so wild.
The barrier to entry. It's non existing because you
don't have to buy a pallet. You turned $1.00 into $5000.
Since then we've bought more pallets, all for a dollar.
I was spending maybe 3 hours a week on this.
(00:21):
You had no presence, no account,no following, $75.00 an hour.
If you were doing this as like afull time business, 40 hours a
week, that's 150,000 a year. He has an over $1,000,000 book
operation. The time constraints of being a
mom. There's only so much time in the
day that I can dedicated to this.
I snap the pictures and then AI literally does everything else
for me. Oh, your husband's a
(00:42):
firefighter, Your stay at home mom, you just had your fourth
child. Limited on time, limited on
resources. But there's no excuses.
So I applaud you for that. So last week I came across this
lady on Twitter that is buying pallets of books for $1.00 and
selling them for $5000. This can be done in any market
(01:04):
on multiple different platforms.It's not sexy, but it's very,
very profitable. And it's kind of funny because
this business wouldn't even be possible before ChatGPT because
there's a lot of tediousness to it that ChatGPT completely
solves. So if you've ever wanted to make
thousands or 10s of thousands ofdollars from getting free books
and selling them, or if you wantto learn more about what not and
live selling and how to take $6 items and sell them for $40,
(01:27):
this is the episode for you. Please enjoy.
So my husband was looking to build a home gym.
We bought this property. We live in a you know really
small town. We have some acreage.
So he built his dream shop this big 40 by 60 shop and he wanted
to make a section of it into a home gym.
So he's on Gov deals looking at liquidation equipment.
(01:49):
Schools are getting rid of theirgym stuff all the time.
And so he finds one that's near ish to us and he'd been trolling
the site for weeks and weeks looking for this equipment and I
had never paid attention to it, but he was like, hey, this is
interesting. They have they have some kids
stuff on here. So I get on there and I start
looking and they have these bookpalettes and like being a
(02:12):
homeschool mom, I have this likebook addiction.
It gets weird. You're like, Oh my gosh.
We're not even homeschoolers, but we have the same addiction.
It's just a beautiful part of childhood.
Just having like a rich literature environment has been
super important. I see these pallets of books on
there and I'm like, what? You can buy a whole pallet of
books for a dollar. Like what is this?
Oh wow, They're just throwing them away.
(02:33):
Basically, yeah. At this point, I, I didn't
realize the scale of it and the accessibility of it because
this, this entire thing is brandnew to me.
So I make an account side by side, sitting with him at the
dinner table and I throw a bid on it because I don't know that
a bid is binding. Like you put a bid on there and
you win it. You got to go get it.
(02:55):
What? Was your bid for?
A dollar. I just bid a dollar.
I'm like, there's no way I'm going to get this for a dollar.
He's bidding on all this exercise equipment.
And anyway, it comes to the closing of all these auctions.
He lost every single exercise equipment that he had put on and
(03:17):
I won the dollar book pallets. And he'd been investing weeks
into this and you're just like, I don't know, let's freaking
throw a dollar bid in there. Oh my.
Gosh, he was like, we have to drive, like we have to tow the
trailer to go pick this up. What are we going to do with all
these? And I'm like, so excited, you
know, my home library, like about to be so epic.
So again, at this point, like, I'm not even thinking about
(03:39):
selling these. I'm just thinking this is a
treasure trove. This is going to be so fun for
me and the kids. So we drive out.
It was actually 3 1/2 hours fromus.
So it's not a small jaunt. We get these pallets, we bring
them home, the kids and I are going through them and I was
like 8 months pregnant. So these ended up sitting for, I
(04:01):
don't know, several weeks. We're in the middle of this big
remodel. We added like an entire second
level to our home. We've got kid #4 coming in hot.
And so my father-in-law is over.This is like weeks and weeks
later, right? So we've, we've combed through
it all. We've put stuff on our
bookshelves and there's all thiscurriculum that I'm like, what
(04:21):
am I going to do with this stuff?
I've no idea what any of it is. So we're in, you know, the
downstairs, my husband and his dad are cutting sheetrock and
I'm sitting on the floor so pregnant looking at all this
curriculum. I looked on eBay, which again,
like had no idea people were still using eBay. eBay is a wild
(04:42):
place. Like for how long it's been
around and how how heavily it's still used.
So I get on there and I take a picture, you know, they have
their little AI thing and I lookup this curriculum I'm holding
and I see all these listings forlike 370, five, $400.
O375. $375 for it was like a sixbook set and mind you, I and.
(05:03):
You had the four. Set, yes, yeah.
So I was like, Oh my gosh, you guys this someone selling this
for 375. So I throw it up for 350, sold
five days later. And then I was like, OK.
Now tell me about how many bookswere on this pallet, just so I
(05:24):
have some idea of scale. I ended up bidding on 2, so I
got 2 pallets each for $1.00. So my investment now is like
$2.26 taxes or something. And there was hundreds and
hundreds of picture books, probably at least 15 or 20 boxes
of curriculum and then a lot of chapter books.
(05:45):
Is that kind of like the three categories of books, chapter
books, picture books, curriculum?
Yeah, I would say so. The other piece of this is most
of the time when you're purchasing these from a school
district, liquid, liquidating anything that they have, you've
no idea what's inside. So there's two pieces to it.
It's pretty boring. It's a boring category for most
(06:07):
people, right. I, I would say I'm more of an
anomaly. I'm not bored.
It's like, sounds freaking awesome.
That's like you and I be fast friends in the wild, but there's
this element of like, you have no idea what's inside, right?
Like, it could be, it could be anything.
It could be dictionary. Yeah, but it's a dollar.
Worst case you throw it away like, yeah, whatever.
(06:29):
I mean, there's a lot of stuff all sellable that I've got, but
a lot of things that like for mewith the time that I have and
the time that I wanted to dedicated to this, I didn't want
to sell one off chapter books and one off picture books.
There's a lot of big sellers on eBay that are doing that.
I think it could be really successful on Facebook
Marketplace, but it was just notsomething that I necessarily
(06:50):
wanted to create the time for. And so my local library was
stoked. They took off so much of off my
hands. And they'll use it for community
fundraising at events, you know,where they set up and do, you
know, pay by donation or whatever.
But the gold in there for me wasthe curriculum.
And I found that out so fast when I made that first sale,
(07:11):
those $350.00. And so from there I started just
piercing out the curriculum and I'm taking all of these
different sets and ChatGPT was was my assistant.
I got the $20, you know, like upgraded membership.
I would take a picture of it. It did all of the time consuming
nitty gritty work for me. It told me what it's selling
(07:33):
for, what pieces go together. Because a lot of times you know,
you'll get like these boxes and it's like teachers manuals and
student manuals and all these handbooks and then readers that
go along with it. And I have no context for it.
So I don't know what to set and and what isn't.
So ChatGPT did that all for me. OK, so with those 3 categories,
picture books, chapter books, curriculum, what kind of
(07:54):
percentage would you say was, you know, each category give or
take? On the palette, yeah, I had a
full palette of novels of like middle school novels, and then
the other palette was probably 50% children's picture books and
50% curriculum. So 50% chapter books, 25 picture
books, 25 curriculum. When you say picture books, you
(08:17):
mean like children's books? Yeah, ages like 2 to 6 or
whatever, 2 to 8. Yeah, from just elementary age
typically. Yeah.
And it was just a really broad variety.
A lot of these like I had a lot of teacher classroom sets where
these are like teachers purchasethese or were they were handed
down to them, which is super common within schools.
(08:39):
And so, you know, they had really limited markings on them,
which is excellent for resale. And then a lot of them were ex
library copies, So a little bit heavier wear, but still, I mean,
there's so much opportunity if you live in a market where you
can sell on Facebook marketplaceand you can bundle these
together. For me, that's living so
rurally. People, people oddly don't
really use Facebook Marketplace.So that's why I sold exclusively
(09:02):
on eBay. But I think there's huge
opportunity for somebody that has access to or lives in a
metropolitan area. And that's kind of, you know,
why I started sharing about thisis the opportunity to make money
here is significant and the barrier to entry.
It's non existent because you don't have to buy a pallet.
You could hop on Facebook marketplace right now and find
(09:22):
endless listings of people trying to get rid of books.
It's like the book arbitrage is go wild.
Or you can go to a thrift store and buy a paperback book for
$0.10. Yeah, it's not like you just
found this random 2 pallet goldmine deal and no one else
can find anything that good. Again, like these deals
everywhere. Not just on Gov deals, but all
over the place. Right, If you have a phone, you
(09:45):
can do this business. You could literally do it today.
I saw a guy recently, actually, this is how we connected.
I had commented on Saul. I don't know his last name, but
on XI think he's a big Amazon seller now and I could be miss
speaking there soon. But anyway, he started in book
resale and he just posted a flyer up said we'll pick up free
(10:05):
books. And he that's how he like made
his entrance as an entrepreneur.And I feel like that's still
very doable in 2025. South of the 75% that were
picture books or chapter books, did you sell or attempt to sell
any of those or did you donate all those to the library?
I donated almost all of the chapter books, the picture books
(10:26):
I have done bundles of and sold.It's very few by comparison.
The bulk of what I do, I would say is like 98% curriculum is
what I sell on eBay. There's a lot of classroom sets
where you have, you know, many copies of the same title, and
I'll sell those sometimes on eBay.
So you know, somebody's picking up 20 copies of 1 picture.
(10:48):
Yeah, because one listing is 20 listings, right?
And one basically. It's easy and then the quantity
too is, you know, sometimes I'llI'll get a pallet that has like
I just since then we've bought more pallets all for a dollar, I
think I. Paid.
Yeah, we'll get into that. For one, but you know, there's
like 350 copies of hardback picture books, Stella Luna, just
(11:11):
like super popular children's picture book.
So yeah, that you can bundle andand sell to somebody that's
running a Co-op, somebody that'sdoing homeschooling in a group
or a teacher. I have oftentimes teachers will
message me and say, hey, I'm looking for this.
I'm a new teacher. My school is underfunded.
Can I buy this from you or do you have this and I can put
together custom listings for them and give them something
(11:33):
that's incredibly affordable because it's coming out of their
own pocket. So it's cool that way, too.
You know, you're supporting, like, so many different
situations. Yeah.
OK. So when it comes to selling like
bundles of the picture books, what are the unit economics of
that? Like how many books are you
putting together? Are you grouping them together
like by age or like Stella and Luna?
And then what are you selling them for on average?
(11:54):
And is it eBay, Facebook Marketplace or both?
Yeah, OK. So this is this is where it gets
really good and where AI has been incredibly supportive for
me again, the the time constraints of being a mom,
right? Like there's only so much time
in the day that I can dedicated to this.
So what I did was I put the picture books and the chapter
(12:16):
books in boxes where you could see the spines.
I took pictures, so I lined it up like 20 boxes.
I took pictures of each box. I uploaded all of those pictures
into ChatGPT and I gave it all of these metrics.
I want you to create a master manifest, include the box
number, tell me every title, author, reading level, and then
create bundles of 10 by reading level, genre.
(12:39):
I had all of these different ways that I could mix and match
and then I had to create me a pick list.
So then I have APDF spreadsheet that says, you know, this is the
bundle title. It gives me a complete SEO
listing for eBay and it'll tell me this title in box number one,
this title in box #5 this, you know, and you just create the
(13:00):
pick list. I rubber bandit throw the
listing up. You know, pictures are
important. I use literally a white poster
board on a fold up Costco table.I snap the pictures so that
they're clean and that you can see anything.
And then and AI literally does everything else for me, another
kind of important piece to this,because I think it's important
for, I think it's pretty prevalent that you have a stay
(13:22):
at home mom that has this, you know, like desire to contribute
financially in some kind of a way.
And time is a big thing when you're a parent.
And so for me, how I made this work is I would spend an hour
every couple of days. I mean, my time investment in
this is so significantly low andI think that's important for
people to know. So I would take an hour during
(13:43):
nap time. I would have a batch of books
that I'm going to list. I hammer it out really quick,
literally in my living room. And then at bedtime, my kids go
to bed. Instead of laying and scrolling
Instagram or scrolling whatever,I would do eBay listings.
I'd spend 30-40 minutes throwingthem up.
And I just did that every week over and over and over again.
(14:04):
And. Then before you know it, you've
got, you know, you wake up to three sales, then you wake up to
4, then you get 7 during the dayand it just compounds over time,
right? Yeah, totally.
And the eBay algorithm too, it favors if you're, you know,
consistently showing up and posting things.
And I saw that reflected significantly in how much I was
selling, the velocity and how quickly things were moving
(14:26):
depends on how frequently you'reposting them.
So I would do those batches and then, you know, I'd throw 3
listings up and then the next night I would do the next three.
And so it was just kind of consistent adding to my
storefront that way. Yeah, again, most of this
business has been the curriculumand the picture books.
I did do 1 whatnot show trying to live sell them just to kind
(14:48):
of like offload them to get morespace since the curriculum is
the main focus. And I think that that's there's
a big opportunity there too, especially if you don't have a
market where Facebook Marketplace is utilized because
I think that's probably the bestplace to sell picture books and
chapter books. I could be wrong.
And you can use media mail when shipping them right?
So it's a lot cheaper. Yeah, and that's something else
(15:09):
that I did. It's free shipping on every
single one of my listings. There's something about the
psychology of that, you know, when you're looking at
something, even if the price point is like ends up being the
same or more, if it's free shipping, people just tend to
favor the listing. OK, so on eBay, when you're
selling these bundles of picturebooks, roughly how many per
bundle and what are you selling each bundle for?
(15:30):
There's a big spectrum and it depends specifically on the
curriculum, if there's certain curriculums that schools are
offloading that are really easy to move and at what I would
think is a high price point, especially when your investment
is like a penny. So most of the time what I what
I sell is like a three to six book curriculum bundle, which is
(15:53):
like a teacher guide, a student guide, materials and my average
sale price from when I started. So over the last six months, I
think my average sale price is Ihave it right here, $45.00.
There's a pretty broad range. I try not to list anything
that's like under $15 because atthat point it's like you're
paying for shipping and it's, you know, you're not really
(16:14):
making the margins aren't great on that.
But then I have, you know, theseother curriculum sets that are
350 dollars, $200. I picked one up today.
Actually this morning a school was auctioning off these
specific curriculums that I've sold multiple times.
They're 50 bucks a pop and I picked 10 of them up for a
dollar literally this morning. On details.
Oh my goodness. Oh my gosh, 99% off, Like 98%
(16:37):
off. So roughly you're selling these
bundles for like 40 to $400.00, right?
Yeah, closer to 40 if they're picture books, closer to 400 if
they're curriculum, maybe 200 or300.
Yeah. So of the two pallets, hundreds
of books or thousands of books, are we talking the 1st 2
pallets? Definitely over 1000.
(16:57):
Wow, I think I. Had 606 hundred chapter books.
Best guess is like 2000 books were on those two pallets.
OK. And how long once you actually
started working on them, becauseI know you took a little break
right after you got them once you started like moving them,
how long did it take you to get rid of them all, either give
them to the library or selling them?
(17:17):
And then what would you say yourrevenue was for those first two
pallets in total? Yeah, about two months it took
me to move through the bulk of the inventory and that was,
yeah, that includes me donating that lot to the library.
And my total revenue at that point was around $5000.
Whoa. OK.
(17:39):
So in two, in two months, it turned $1.00 into $5000.
And 4999 of that was gross profit.
Like you had like time you you had to drive to the library to
donate them, right. Whatever.
Yeah. But there's, you know, the
platform fees and my shipping fees and so my dad is is lower
(18:01):
than that. However, the kicker to this is I
was spending maybe 3 hours a week on this.
It was just so minimal. Once I understood how to look
within these boxes for certain things.
Once I sold a few things, I kindof started to understand what
that market was. The time investment was so
small. Let.
(18:21):
Me guesstimate here, yeah, correct me if or when I'm wrong.
So 3 hours a week, let's just say it's 4th speak conservative,
9 weeks, right? So that's 36 hours give or take
of work, let's say 40 hours. So it's like a full work week
worth of work, 40 hours of working.
Let's say your platform fees are15%, your shipping is 15%, so
(18:43):
30, so 70% Net margin. Is that kind of accurate?
I. Was about 60, about 60.
Percent. We'll say 60.
Yeah, cool. Then that is what's that $3000
profit for 40 hours of work? Divide 3000 by forty $75.00 an
hour, which is pretty Dang good.If you were doing this as like a
(19:05):
full time business, 40 hours a week every week, which you're
not even trying to do, that's 150,000 a year without like
really like trying to optimize or scale.
Like that's your first deal. Like it only gets better from
there, right? Right, right.
And I many times have thought, Oh my goodness, what would
happen if I doubled my time on this?
What would happen if, you know, I had children that were going
(19:28):
to school during the day? Like the possibilities are
really, really huge if you're willing to do something that
maybe isn't super interesting toyou, right?
It's a very niche market. I always tell people that you
need to fall in love with business and like then it
doesn't matter what you do, you're selling porta potties,
(19:48):
you're selling books. It's it'll all be interesting to
you. And I think the people listening
to or watching this are interested in business.
So I, I do think maybe the average layman weirdo on the
street that isn't a serial idea generating entrepreneur, right?
Maybe they find it boring, but we don't care about them.
We're not making this podcast for them, right.
So I think people will find thisinteresting.
(20:10):
I mean, you could hire like a high school kid to come in in
the afternoon to pay him 15 bucks an hour and you're still
making. 60 bucks an hour not having to do the work.
Something I thought about there's some kids that are a
little bit older. My oldest is 8, so not quite
there where he's gonna take highquality photos of inventory.
But I thought again, have like one of these 12 or 13 year olds
(20:32):
come over and they're at that age, you're so excited to make
any amount of money and have them take pictures.
And then at night, you know, I, I'm spending an hour listing
them. There's significant opportunity
for sure. And I would be doing that if I
wasn't dabbling in another space, which is the next, yeah,
(20:54):
evolution of the story. But real quick, I wanted to tell
you one more thing that that wasis super helpful for me now that
I know, which I didn't when I first started because, you know,
I mentioned a lot of the times you don't know what's on these
pallets. So I got on Gov deals this
morning just to like see what's what's happening on there with
books and other markets. There's a lot on there right
now. That's in Georgetown, TX.
(21:16):
You're in Texas, right? Just outside of Austin.
Yeah, So this is Elementary Classroom Resources.
It's up for 10 bucks. There's no bids on it.
And the pictures on this are actually, they're extremely good
because you can actually see what's there.
So if it were me when I was in Texas, I would screenshot this
listing photo. I would send it to ChatGPT or
(21:37):
there's probably other AIS, but it may be better at this.
I don't, I haven't dabbled much in that space, but for me, I'd
send it to ChatGPT and I would just ask it, tell me the names
of anything that you can see on this palette and then I take
that I go into. E-mail.
What do I do right now? Let's do it.
Let's do it right now. Yeah.
Send, send me the picture. I'm gonna buy this myself.
I I hate to cut you off. I'm just like, so excited.
(21:59):
I want you to finish that thought.
How can I send this to you e-mail?
Yeah, yeah, e-mail and then I'llshare my screen and I'll I'll
show everyone what chat GPD spits out.
OK, cool. Do you have to pick these up
yourself or can you organize shipping?
Right now is actually the perfect time to start something.
And you guys know I'm always talking about starting local
newsletters. Local newsletters for your city,
(22:20):
job listings for your field, a weekly roundup for your hobby.
You know, just taking whatever you know and sharing it with
people who want to learn. This is one of the lowest risk
ways to build something that pays you over and over.
And Beehive is by far the easiest way to do it.
You can monetize and grow your subscribers with their built in
ad network. You can sell digital products or
(22:41):
paid subscriptions directly to your audience.
And yes, they've even got an AI website builder and a podcast
integration now. I've been using Beehive for two
years and I cannot recommend it enough.
It is not just a newsletter platform anymore, it is the
entire creator infrastructure. So don't wait for January.
Start now. Head to beehive.com/chris for
(23:04):
30% off your first three months.That's B EE HII v.com/chris.
I've never seen shipping on the books and I think just the
weight of them probably would itwould be so significant,
wouldn't be worth it. So these are local pick up and
that's what you would want to doon on Gov deals or like public
surplus is another one that doesschool auctions.
(23:26):
You can set your search radius, you know, So I'll always do like
250 miles and it'll show me what's what's within that for
me. I might need to make a trip to
Georgetown. I'm serious.
Is it 1 pallet? Yeah, it's not quite a full
palette. It makes it more interesting
because it's more reasonable forsomebody that's brand new.
You know, it's like you could fit this in the back of your
(23:48):
minivan. Yeah.
Or whatever you when you say, yeah, when you say classroom
resources, I feel like they're hinting at like it's more of
like a curriculum thing than just a bunch of worthless books.
Totally and that's what that's what this is the other thing Gov
deals is really good at answering questions.
And so you can ask like any ideawhat's inside what level this
(24:08):
is? Are they teaching resources or
are these are these reading books?
You're showing your hand a little bit then cuz then
somebody else you know that maybe didn't know that can see
have insight. But I watch these auctions
constantly, and it is a very rare occasion that these pellets
are getting bit up. They're usually going for their
opening bid, which is most of the time a dollar.
(24:30):
This one's 10 bucks. If someone were to only focus on
Gov deals, it's so nice that youare able to talk about this
because like this is a very localized thing.
And so like I'm assuming I'm making an assumption here,
correct me if I'm wrong, But like the fear of someone like
competing against you directly, that risk is not very big
because it's such a local thing.You got to go pick it up and
(24:50):
you're in Eastern Washington, right?
So it's like anyone can go do this in any local market.
How how many listings are there on Gov deals at any given market
for books like these? It really varies.
For some reason, Washington state has a lot.
I'm not sure what drives that. It might be funding where
they're, you know, like I, I've noticed when I'm shipping things
(25:11):
out, a lot of my orders are going to the Midwest and the
East Coast. I very rarely have anything on
the West Coast. So I think maybe it has
something to do with how schoolsare funded and how rapidly
they're replacing things. This is really interesting.
Shannon Jean, who you've had on multiple, multiple times, he
always talks about find out whatyou can sell it for before you
buy it. What's interesting about the
(25:33):
curriculum space is when you go on eBay and you look up sold
listings, often times there either aren't any or they're so
infrequent. And so if I didn't already know
this from experience, that wouldmake me a little apprehensive.
The reason why that is, is because there's so few people
selling these resources on eBay.There's one curriculum in
(25:54):
particular. I think I'm one of three sellers
on the entire platform that has it, and I sell it because I'm
one of the only people that does.
So, you know, I think I think it's important obviously to do
your research before you're bidding on stuff.
Again, the risk profile on this is so low.
It's not. Yeah.
I mean, you're sacrificing some of your time and you know, you
(26:17):
got to be able to lift the boxesand stuff to load them.
So that counts for. Something that's fine, yeah.
But yeah, there's not a lot of people that are doing this on
eBay. All right, so you think I should
upload these three pictures to ChatGPT?
Yeah, that's what I would do. I would screenshot it and just
say tell me the names of the resources that you can identify
in these photos. All right, let's do this.
(26:40):
So basically, what can you tell me about these books?
Yeah, I would say what can you identify any titles of these
books? All right, Units of study by
Lucy Calkins, plus units of study and phonics and units of.
How does it get that from this picture I can't see anything?
(27:02):
Isn't that wild? I've had many goodbyes for that
reason. To my eye, I cannot see what it
is, but Chuck T somehow can. I love this business because
this wasn't nearly as intriguing3 years ago before Chad.
GBT like this is a lot of tedious stuff before Chad.
GBT, it would have, it would be such a slog.
I, I would have donated everything that we didn't keep
(27:24):
for our personal library. Like there's no way.
I was just telling a family member recently, she was talking
to me about like her apprehensions about AI and I was
like, well, let me give you a different perspective.
This is created a business for me.
It is my $20.00 a month assistant that saves me.
I mean, it would have taken me the better part of a year to
identify all of those books and group them together.
(27:45):
Like there's just no way it wouldn't be worth it.
That is crazy. So it says right here, it says
the grades, it says what they are and then at the bottom it
says could be worth 10 to 25,000in retail, which obviously this
is not. Should I ask like what could
they be worth like used on eBay?Yeah.
Yeah, that's, that's where I would go next.
You know, schools are paying topdollar for these because they're
(28:06):
buying them directly from the publishers.
But to me immediately as a potential purchase, I'm seeing
that price. That's what the schools paid for
it. That's very interesting.
What's like the most you pay forthis stuff or is it always, is
it kind of like a 1 to $10 or bust?
For a pallet. Yeah, or a listing.
The most I've ever paid for a pallet is $32 and that's because
(28:28):
I could see what's on it and I really wanted it.
Like I knew at that point I had sold so many things, you know, I
could identify. I'm like, I sell one book off of
that and I'm, I'm like, you know, whatever, 5-6 times my
investment. Yeah.
Have you ever lost money on a pallet or a deal or a listing?
No, that's crazy. How many pallets would you say
(28:48):
you've purchased so far? I bought 11 and that is truly
like 3 months of time. Yeah, that's incredible, $100.
Does this seem right? Like these prices?
Let's. See.
Might be hard to see. They're very, very good, $100
for the three grade bundle. Yeah.
So I popped a couple of these into the eBay research tool just
(29:10):
to see if people had this listedand it's anywhere between like
45 to $100. That's one thing that I will say
is the pricing that ChatGPT gives you is sometimes pretty
off. And so I always ask it because I
want to know, do you, does it see any value anywhere on the
Internet? And then I'll always double
check it. But a lot of the times I'm
(29:30):
looking for are these listed like current listings as well as
have there been sold listings because it's so niche, you know,
there might not necessarily be very many recent sold listings.
So I base a lot of my pricing off of what the current pricing
of other sellers are on there. Gotcha, and this makes sense to
me. As good as ChatGPT is for
(29:50):
organizing and researching, you don't really try to rely on it
for pricing. Yeah.
So for this one, it's like one of these boxes in this picture
that, you know, like this top one that has the number 2 on it.
You could probably sell that for100 bucks.
How many of those boxes are on this pallet?
Like in these photos I can see 123456 7 from 1 angle.
(30:11):
It's very interesting. This could be $1000 pallet for
$10 a. 100% I think you would easily make $1000 off this
pallet, it said. Did it say Heineman on there?
On ChatGPT. Yeah, when I identified it.
I thought, that does sound familiar.
Yeah. Lucy Calkins slash Heineman.
Yeah, I've sold quite a bit of Heineman, Not this specific one,
(30:32):
but that author or publisher or whatever.
I don't even know actually. So it's very interesting and
they just, like I said, they popup frequently.
I had actually, there's a schooldistrict that I've bought
multiple times from. It's in Washington.
I won't say which one it is because this could be upsetting
I guess to some people, but I had their purchasing person
purchasing manager reach out to me last week and say hey, we
(30:55):
have 50 pallets of curriculum, it's going to the trash.
You can take whatever you want. Do you want that?
Could be 50 grand. It could be so many things and
you know the this particular 1. I actually there was somebody
that I connected with through Shannon Jean's mastermind, that
is he has a over $1,000,000 bookoperation and I connected with
(31:20):
him on X and he was really gracious with his time and he
talked through it with me to kind of look up a couple things
cuz he sells on Amazon and like is there any, you know,
wholesale opportunity with this?Cuz it's such a large amount.
But my point in sharing that is the opportunity is so
significant and the alternative to people not purchasing these
is they're going to a landfill, which is just like, it's so sad.
(31:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're doing, you're doing a
dual purpose, you're making income and you're also you're
doing something really significant for the environment.
Yeah, there's no losers in this.Yeah, I mean, I just looked up
books on Gov deals and there's 1300 results.
Obviously they're they're not all going to be relevant, but.
Yeah, but there's like, I mean, if you see, if you ever see
(32:03):
anything that says like classroom materials, learning
materials, textbooks, there's, there's a couple textbook deals.
Let's see, we're like there's one elementary teacher resources
that's super interesting. Those are usually high ticket
sellers and textbooks can be hitor miss, but usually you can see
a textbook on the pallet or you could ask could submit a
(32:26):
question on there. There's a pallet of textbooks in
Wentzville, MO for 10 bucks. Yeah, and it looks like it's a
precalculus textbook. They're all the same, so I don't
know what that's worth. You could find out really quick.
And then you that's an interesting because you list it
one time quantity 100 or you bundle them and ship them as a
box. Are you willing to share what
(32:47):
your eBay name is? Yeah, it's homeschool Y so
homeschool and then IE at the end.
I want to look at your listings,and then I got to hear about
what you've been doing here lately.
Yeah, what does your husband do for work?
He's a firefighter. Oh awesome.
Yeah. So that's been super supportive
to doing this resale stuff is his schedule allows me, you
know, to have time when he's home.
(33:08):
So he's home for, you know, it'sstacking his shifts.
So he's gone for a few days and then home for a few.
Did he ever find his workout equipment?
No, the poor guy, his shop's full of books instead of his
workout equipment. He can lift the books.
Totally. Yeah, he's, he's getting his
workout in for sure. OK, 100% positive feedback.
(33:29):
That's awesome. Pictures look great.
A lot of curriculum. OK, tell us what you've been
doing here lately. So I'm driving one day and my
husband sent me one of your interviews with Shannon Jean and
I'm listening to this. And at this point I had no like
I'm trolling up deals looking for books every day, you know?
(33:52):
But I had no idea that there's an entire world of auctions and
arbitrage that's available outside of Gov deals.
So I'm listening to this interview and I'm like, what in
the world? Like, what is this?
And that week I had started thinking about just my husband
(34:13):
had mentioned like, what if we, you know, added on to this,
like, could we add toys to this or what else could you sell
under the homeschooling brand oneBay?
And I had all this money from the books that I'm like, what am
I going to do with it? Like, I want to do something
bigger. Do I want to scale the books or
should I dabble in something else?
And so I ended up landing on these, this Rent the Runway
(34:38):
auction to Rent the Runway. You know, when they have a piece
of clothing that is slightly blemished or maybe significantly
blemished, they're not going to rent it out anymore and so they
get rid of it. Tell us what they do.
It's for those listening. It's a, a women's clothing, I
believe they also have handbags and accessories now where you
can pay a subscription fee and you get to pick high end
(34:59):
designer pieces and they ship them to you.
You wear them for whatever the occasion is and then you ship
them back. So you're paying literally to
rent a high end piece of clothing, which makes so much
sense, right? Like they have a, you know, a
$1500 designer dress that maybe you want to wear to a gala or a
wedding or whatever. And you just wear it, rent it
(35:20):
for, you know, $8000 and send itback.
OK, so you bought a Rent the Runway listing?
Yeah. So they liquidate anything that
has a slight blemish on it. And there were a couple pallets
that came up on bee stock and sorent the runways on there.
And so I see this, I'm like, well, this is super interesting.
This, you know, MSRP on these two pallets was I think
(35:42):
$355,000. So I took my book money and
that's what I bought and I got it with the intention of listing
it on Poshmark. And then it arrived at my home
and I realized, Oh my goodness, I there's no way.
I have 900 items. Most of them are unique items.
It's not like I have 10 of the same thing.
(36:04):
It's going to take take me the rest of my life to sell this.
And so I learned about live selling.
I had no idea this was a thing. And so that's what I'm doing
now. I'm live selling high end
designer clothing on what not. Oh my gosh, did you ever think
you'd be doing that? Not in a million years.
You said it was like MSRP was like 350,000 What did you pay
(36:26):
for it all? $6.00 an item.
Wow, I'm nervous. And 9:00. 100 items someone.
Yeah, yeah. So I think no, no $5400 was my
total investment for $350,000 ofmerchandise.
So like 98% off again, just likethe books.
The margins are insane and the thing with Whatnot is people are
looking for a deal. Have you been on there?
(36:46):
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Yeah, it's addicting. As a buyer, it's addicting.
It is a wild, Wild West of shopping.
It is so crazy, but people are looking for a deal on there.
And so it's like I have this really valuable merchandise.
What do I sell it for? And ultimately I'm like, well, I
(37:06):
paid $6 for this, so let's find out.
I don't know, you know, I'm brand new.
I've done 6 shows like I'm by nomeans like established on there.
You know, I think it's a grind to get established and get a
following and, you know, start seeing higher prices on things.
But the risk for me financially was it's so low.
(37:27):
I took, yeah, I spent a dollar on some books.
I made some money on that. I took it and I rolled it into
something else and I ran numberson this.
You're playing with house money still, like you spent everything
you earned, but you started witha dollar basically, right?
You were saying you ran some numbers.
Yeah, I ran numbers on, you know, but like what's my, what's
my bottom, you know, if I, you do start prices on there.
(37:48):
So a lot of people, you know, it's enticing to start at a
dollar. I'm, I'm not doing that yet.
I think I will at some point. But I ran numbers on, you know,
if I start at $29.00, if I, whatif I sold every one of these
pieces for $29.00 easy, we'll clear $30,000 after fees.
How long will that take me? I don't know, a couple months.
(38:10):
And that's if I'm like consistently showing up and
doing it. But I've done 6/1 hour live
streams on there. I've done $1200 in sales with 0
following. And to me I'm like, these are
small numbers right in the long game at they're small numbers.
But it's again, like just what you're willing to put into it.
And I'm putting such minimal time into it cuz that's why I
(38:32):
have I'm a mom and I got 4 little kids.
So I'm putting minimal effort and minimal time.
And I think the opportunity for literally anybody to do this is
there anyone can make a seller account on what not.
You had no presence, no account,no following and you've made 200
an hour so far. Yeah, 1200 in six hours, right.
And like, Yep, of course you're you paid 6 to $10 per item, but
(38:55):
OK, sorry, $180 profit per hour so far, right.
With no following. Yeah, before you, before you
continue that thought, I have torun to my closet and show you my
what? Not regret that I bought it's
you're going to laugh. You're.
Good. OK, All right, So I have a good
friend, his name's Jared. He sells a lot of stuff on
(39:17):
Whatnot. I think he has 40,000 followers,
multiple shows a day. Yeah, they do a lot.
Sports cards, watches, clothing,handbags.
Anyway, we were talking about itand he's like, you got to come
to a show. You got to come to a show.
So I downloaded Whatnot. I'm out of breath because I
sprinted to my closet, but I downloaded Whatnot and I was on
a show and they were doing T-shirts, like vintage T-shirts.
(39:39):
And he pulled out this shirt andI just fell in love.
It was this shirt that was just so ugly but so cool at the same
time. And my wife was next to me.
She's like, don't you buy that shirt?
Like don't you buy that shirt? And most of these shirts are
going for like 5 to $10. And this one just started going
crazy. And I was committed.
(40:01):
I was going to buy this shirt nomatter what.
And I think I paid like $70.00 for it.
And Are you ready to see it? Yeah, let's see it.
So here we go. And it's way too big by the way.
It does not fit me so. Yes.
That's the that's. The epitome of what whatnot is
right there in AT shirt. I'm sad you didn't wear that for
(40:23):
this interview. So.
It doesn't fit well, it's huge, but I don't even think I've ever
worn it and I paid way too much for it.
But it's my whatnot memory of course.
It smells like a story. It's weird, isn't it?
Like when you, because I've, youknow, I played around for like a
solid month. I'm trying to learn like, how
does this work? What works?
What could I do better than, youknow, certain shows that I'm
(40:46):
watching whatever. And I did the same thing.
I'm like, oh, I'm going to bet on that.
Oh, and it's so fast. It is, yeah.
It's like your heart starts racing.
You're like and like, it's almost kind of sad because
there's like a lot of people that spend way too much money on
there. Oh, I'm.
Sure, like they're addicted to it.
Yeah. Anyway, all right, so you're
(41:06):
selling these dresses. Are these kind of like, are
these like nice formal dresses? A lot of them are, yeah.
It depends. The lot that I got had a pretty
significant amount of like sweaters and outerwear and
jeans. The makeup of them are always
different. And it'll tell you it gives you
a full manifest of every single item that's on there and it'll
(41:26):
break it up by category. But there's a significant amount
of dresses and I would say maybelike 5050 of like really formal
dresses versus a more casual like cocktail type attire.
Man, so you're so far, you're glad you did it.
I mean, you've made like 1/5 of your money back already. 1/4 of
it, Yeah. And are you going to buy more
(41:48):
stuff or are you just going to like work through this until
it's gone and then buy somethingelse?
This is such a good question. I think the What not platform is
extremely interesting and I am very invested on establishing
myself on it right now. They just got, you know, this
huge round of funding like $250 million at the end of last
month. So I think the platform is in
(42:09):
its infancy still and there's significant opportunity as a
reseller on there. And so, yeah, I'm committed to
that. I don't know.
I don't know if the high end designer if I'll continue with
it or not. I guess it kind of is going to
depend on how quickly I can movethrough it.
Some of the lower retail items might be more interesting and it
(42:31):
might work better. I think it just kind of depends.
It's hard to know right now, like who is my buyer?
I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm, I'm just so new.
Now I picture like your traditional what not seller as
being like super outgoing, like super high energy all over the
place. Is that you or is there hope for
people that are not like that naturally?
Oh man, you have the full spectrum on whatnot.
(42:54):
There are 70 year old women sitting at their dining room
table selling jewelry. And then you have this guy
that's in a full Charlie and theChocolate Factory Willy Wonka
outfit packing, you know, Reese's into a into a flat rate
ship box. I think truly, and I was I'm a
pretty extroverted person. I, you know, I feel pretty
(43:16):
comfortable in just like having conversation with people, but I
was nervous to get on there. And something that calmed my
nerves was watching all these other shows and seeing such a
broad spectrum of personalities.And there are people on there
that absolutely, you know, are more introverted.
And if you are that person and you're looking for an additional
stream of income and whatnot is interesting to you, but you
(43:39):
don't want to show your face. There are tons of shows where
people are just setting up theircamera and you never see the
person, you're only seeing the product.
And so I think it's that's the barrier to entry.
Again, it's, it's so accessible and reasonable and you can make
it whatever you want. You can be a personality on
there and those shows do great. Or you could never ever show
yourself and you could also makea killing.
(44:01):
That's amazing. What would you suggest other
people do? Like how could someone learn
from your mistakes? It doesn't really sound like
you've made any, but like what would you have done differently?
How can people make money at this that you haven't already
touched on? It's a great question.
Knowing what I know now with thebooks, I think you could make a
more educated buying decision based on visual, like what you
(44:22):
can see on a pallet. And I didn't do that.
And again, my intention when I bought it wasn't to sell it.
So I didn't really have that on my radar.
I was just excited about, you know, like this instant huge
library that would be like one of my top things to tell people
is I think that you really can do your due diligence in getting
a decent idea of your profit margins on a book purchase.
(44:45):
When it comes to live selling. My my biggest piece of advice is
figure out the shipping. No matter what you're selling,
the what not back end of the shipping can be really confusing
as a new seller and if you don'thave that dialed in right, you
can make a big financial mistakeright out of the you.
Can literally lose your shirts you.
(45:06):
Can literally. Lose your shirts.
You could be so upside down so fast because you're going to eat
the shipping if you do it wrong.And I've heard that story told
multiple times. So I spent more hours than I
would like to admit watching YouTube tutorials on the
shipping. And so that's really important.
My encouragement to people is ifyou're looking for something
(45:27):
that is basically free, that hasa low time investment, but it
doesn't require a significant amount of space and that you
could do with only your phone. You don't have to hire anyone.
You don't have overhead costs. Hop on Facebook Marketplace and
throw up a post to your local community.
Go on a community page and say, hey, does anyone have any
curriculum that they're looking to get rid of?
(45:49):
Or does anybody have any books? However you want to do it and
start by spending nothing and just see how it goes.
Pick up some stuff, or if you have the space and you have a
truck and you're willing to liftsome boxes, pick up a deals
auction. Or go rent A truck from Home
Depot or a trailer. It's like 30 bucks.
What are like some sure tells onthese books, like like the
(46:09):
condition or like the brand, thepublisher, like we've talked
about the curriculums or the money makers, but like, is there
anything else that just quickly passed the eye test for you?
That listing that you pulled up that we looked at that has
visible sets, you know, it has the original packaging of the
sets of books. Like you can tell that there's
(46:29):
that's probably a complete set. That's a tell for me that that's
valuable. There's two different kinds of
buyers too. There's people that are
supplementing what they already have and they're looking for
only one thing. What's really interesting about
this for me as a potential purchase is that there's so much
on this pallet of the same thingthat you could take part of it
and individually list it and youcould also sell complete sets.
(46:51):
So you're hitting two different types of buyers within the same
curriculum set. That's a tell for me.
There are certain curriculums and publishers that I know will
move fast for me. So I'm I'm always looking for
those. Like that one that I told you
this morning that I saw. I've sold multiple of those
already that came mixed on another pallet.
(47:13):
This just happened to be a pallet of all the same thing.
And so I'm always looking for that.
I'm looking for, you know, I've,I've sold this before.
Like SRA is an example of one that moves super quick at a high
price point. I sell them left and right for
60 to $100 a set. And these are, I mean they cost
me 7-8 bucks to ship. That's amazing, Mindy.
(47:36):
This was incredible, even betterthan my high expectations
expected. That's really kind to say.
Well, it's true. Where can people find you if
they have questions, they want to learn more, etcetera?
I think X is the best place that.
Is we can link to you there? What's your name on there?
It's hay under score, Mindi. MINDI.
(47:57):
Like igloo. Yeah, that's kind of the melting
pot because, you know, these aretwo.
This is kind of a wild combo. I'm a bookseller and I sell high
end designer clothes so I'm marrying those two on XI.
Feel like it works there. Yeah.
I mean, you sell whatever peopleare buying.
That's that's how it should be. Yeah, the beautiful thing about
this is I have this book business going almost in the
(48:18):
background. So, you know, I'm throwing
listings up periodically here. But that money is what's funding
whatever I'm buying on B stock or you know, whatever I'm going
to do next on what not my book money is going to fund it.
And that pretty cool. I don't really have a lot of
skin in the game risk wise, right?
Yeah, there's skin in the game. I shouldn't have said that, but.
(48:39):
No, right? It's all it's all very mitigated
risk. There's a lot to be impressed
with here. Like your husband's a
firefighter, you're stay at homemom, you just had your fourth
child. Like you limited on time,
limited on resources, but there's no excuses.
Like you're making it happen, like you're living the American
dream and you're showing other peoples how to do the same.
So I applaud you for that. Thank you so much.
(49:02):
Thank you for this. I'm, I'm absolutely flattered
for the invitation to come here and chat with you.
So cool, Chris, what you've, what you've built is incredible.
And I'm so excited to talk aboutthis more and kind of use X as a
journal, right? And tell people all the things
what I did right, what I did wrong.
Make it easier for the next person that's going to buy a big
(49:23):
old pallet of books. Yeah, I love it.
All right. Well, thank you, Mindy.
Thank you all. Right, what do you think?
Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on
the Kerner office.
If you're looking for something that is basically free, that has
a low time investment, and that you could do with only your
phone, the book arbitrage is so wild.
The barrier to entry. It's non existing because you
don't have to buy a pallet. You turned $1.00 into $5000.
Since then we've bought more pallets, all for a dollar.
I was spending maybe 3 hours a week on this.
(00:21):
You had no presence, no account,no following, $75.00 an hour.
If you were doing this as like afull time business, 40 hours a
week, that's 150,000 a year. He has an over $1,000,000 book
operation. The time constraints of being a
mom. There's only so much time in the
day that I can dedicated to this.
I snap the pictures and then AI literally does everything else
for me. Oh, your husband's a
(00:42):
firefighter, Your stay at home mom, you just had your fourth
child. Limited on time, limited on
resources. But there's no excuses.
So I applaud you for that. So last week I came across this
lady on Twitter that is buying pallets of books for $1.00 and
selling them for $5000. This can be done in any market
(01:04):
on multiple different platforms.It's not sexy, but it's very,
very profitable. And it's kind of funny because
this business wouldn't even be possible before ChatGPT because
there's a lot of tediousness to it that ChatGPT completely
solves. So if you've ever wanted to make
thousands or 10s of thousands ofdollars from getting free books
and selling them, or if you wantto learn more about what not and
live selling and how to take $6 items and sell them for $40,
(01:27):
this is the episode for you. Please enjoy.
So my husband was looking to build a home gym.
We bought this property. We live in a you know really
small town. We have some acreage.
So he built his dream shop this big 40 by 60 shop and he wanted
to make a section of it into a home gym.
So he's on Gov deals looking at liquidation equipment.
(01:49):
Schools are getting rid of theirgym stuff all the time.
And so he finds one that's near ish to us and he'd been trolling
the site for weeks and weeks looking for this equipment and I
had never paid attention to it, but he was like, hey, this is
interesting. They have they have some kids
stuff on here. So I get on there and I start
looking and they have these bookpalettes and like being a
(02:12):
homeschool mom, I have this likebook addiction.
It gets weird. You're like, Oh my gosh.
We're not even homeschoolers, but we have the same addiction.
It's just a beautiful part of childhood.
Just having like a rich literature environment has been
super important. I see these pallets of books on
there and I'm like, what? You can buy a whole pallet of
books for a dollar. Like what is this?
Oh wow, They're just throwing them away.
(02:33):
Basically, yeah. At this point, I, I didn't
realize the scale of it and the accessibility of it because
this, this entire thing is brandnew to me.
So I make an account side by side, sitting with him at the
dinner table and I throw a bid on it because I don't know that
a bid is binding. Like you put a bid on there and
you win it. You got to go get it.
(02:55):
What? Was your bid for?
A dollar. I just bid a dollar.
I'm like, there's no way I'm going to get this for a dollar.
He's bidding on all this exercise equipment.
And anyway, it comes to the closing of all these auctions.
He lost every single exercise equipment that he had put on and
(03:17):
I won the dollar book pallets. And he'd been investing weeks
into this and you're just like, I don't know, let's freaking
throw a dollar bid in there. Oh my.
Gosh, he was like, we have to drive, like we have to tow the
trailer to go pick this up. What are we going to do with all
these? And I'm like, so excited, you
know, my home library, like about to be so epic.
So again, at this point, like, I'm not even thinking about
(03:39):
selling these. I'm just thinking this is a
treasure trove. This is going to be so fun for
me and the kids. So we drive out.
It was actually 3 1/2 hours fromus.
So it's not a small jaunt. We get these pallets, we bring
them home, the kids and I are going through them and I was
like 8 months pregnant. So these ended up sitting for, I
(04:01):
don't know, several weeks. We're in the middle of this big
remodel. We added like an entire second
level to our home. We've got kid #4 coming in hot.
And so my father-in-law is over.This is like weeks and weeks
later, right? So we've, we've combed through
it all. We've put stuff on our
bookshelves and there's all thiscurriculum that I'm like, what
(04:21):
am I going to do with this stuff?
I've no idea what any of it is. So we're in, you know, the
downstairs, my husband and his dad are cutting sheetrock and
I'm sitting on the floor so pregnant looking at all this
curriculum. I looked on eBay, which again,
like had no idea people were still using eBay. eBay is a wild
(04:42):
place. Like for how long it's been
around and how how heavily it's still used.
So I get on there and I take a picture, you know, they have
their little AI thing and I lookup this curriculum I'm holding
and I see all these listings forlike 370, five, $400.
O375. $375 for it was like a sixbook set and mind you, I and.
(05:03):
You had the four. Set, yes, yeah.
So I was like, Oh my gosh, you guys this someone selling this
for 375. So I throw it up for 350, sold
five days later. And then I was like, OK.
Now tell me about how many bookswere on this pallet, just so I
(05:24):
have some idea of scale. I ended up bidding on 2, so I
got 2 pallets each for $1.00. So my investment now is like
$2.26 taxes or something. And there was hundreds and
hundreds of picture books, probably at least 15 or 20 boxes
of curriculum and then a lot of chapter books.
(05:45):
Is that kind of like the three categories of books, chapter
books, picture books, curriculum?
Yeah, I would say so. The other piece of this is most
of the time when you're purchasing these from a school
district, liquid, liquidating anything that they have, you've
no idea what's inside. So there's two pieces to it.
It's pretty boring. It's a boring category for most
(06:07):
people, right. I, I would say I'm more of an
anomaly. I'm not bored.
It's like, sounds freaking awesome.
That's like you and I be fast friends in the wild, but there's
this element of like, you have no idea what's inside, right?
Like, it could be, it could be anything.
It could be dictionary. Yeah, but it's a dollar.
Worst case you throw it away like, yeah, whatever.
(06:29):
I mean, there's a lot of stuff all sellable that I've got, but
a lot of things that like for mewith the time that I have and
the time that I wanted to dedicated to this, I didn't want
to sell one off chapter books and one off picture books.
There's a lot of big sellers on eBay that are doing that.
I think it could be really successful on Facebook
Marketplace, but it was just notsomething that I necessarily
(06:50):
wanted to create the time for. And so my local library was
stoked. They took off so much of off my
hands. And they'll use it for community
fundraising at events, you know,where they set up and do, you
know, pay by donation or whatever.
But the gold in there for me wasthe curriculum.
And I found that out so fast when I made that first sale,
(07:11):
those $350.00. And so from there I started just
piercing out the curriculum and I'm taking all of these
different sets and ChatGPT was was my assistant.
I got the $20, you know, like upgraded membership.
I would take a picture of it. It did all of the time consuming
nitty gritty work for me. It told me what it's selling
(07:33):
for, what pieces go together. Because a lot of times you know,
you'll get like these boxes and it's like teachers manuals and
student manuals and all these handbooks and then readers that
go along with it. And I have no context for it.
So I don't know what to set and and what isn't.
So ChatGPT did that all for me. OK, so with those 3 categories,
picture books, chapter books, curriculum, what kind of
(07:54):
percentage would you say was, you know, each category give or
take? On the palette, yeah, I had a
full palette of novels of like middle school novels, and then
the other palette was probably 50% children's picture books and
50% curriculum. So 50% chapter books, 25 picture
books, 25 curriculum. When you say picture books, you
(08:17):
mean like children's books? Yeah, ages like 2 to 6 or
whatever, 2 to 8. Yeah, from just elementary age
typically. Yeah.
And it was just a really broad variety.
A lot of these like I had a lot of teacher classroom sets where
these are like teachers purchasethese or were they were handed
down to them, which is super common within schools.
(08:39):
And so, you know, they had really limited markings on them,
which is excellent for resale. And then a lot of them were ex
library copies, So a little bit heavier wear, but still, I mean,
there's so much opportunity if you live in a market where you
can sell on Facebook marketplaceand you can bundle these
together. For me, that's living so
rurally. People, people oddly don't
really use Facebook Marketplace.So that's why I sold exclusively
(09:02):
on eBay. But I think there's huge
opportunity for somebody that has access to or lives in a
metropolitan area. And that's kind of, you know,
why I started sharing about thisis the opportunity to make money
here is significant and the barrier to entry.
It's non existent because you don't have to buy a pallet.
You could hop on Facebook marketplace right now and find
(09:22):
endless listings of people trying to get rid of books.
It's like the book arbitrage is go wild.
Or you can go to a thrift store and buy a paperback book for
$0.10. Yeah, it's not like you just
found this random 2 pallet goldmine deal and no one else
can find anything that good. Again, like these deals
everywhere. Not just on Gov deals, but all
over the place. Right, If you have a phone, you
(09:45):
can do this business. You could literally do it today.
I saw a guy recently, actually, this is how we connected.
I had commented on Saul. I don't know his last name, but
on XI think he's a big Amazon seller now and I could be miss
speaking there soon. But anyway, he started in book
resale and he just posted a flyer up said we'll pick up free
(10:05):
books. And he that's how he like made
his entrance as an entrepreneur.And I feel like that's still
very doable in 2025. South of the 75% that were
picture books or chapter books, did you sell or attempt to sell
any of those or did you donate all those to the library?
I donated almost all of the chapter books, the picture books
(10:26):
I have done bundles of and sold.It's very few by comparison.
The bulk of what I do, I would say is like 98% curriculum is
what I sell on eBay. There's a lot of classroom sets
where you have, you know, many copies of the same title, and
I'll sell those sometimes on eBay.
So you know, somebody's picking up 20 copies of 1 picture.
(10:48):
Yeah, because one listing is 20 listings, right?
And one basically. It's easy and then the quantity
too is, you know, sometimes I'llI'll get a pallet that has like
I just since then we've bought more pallets all for a dollar, I
think I. Paid.
Yeah, we'll get into that. For one, but you know, there's
like 350 copies of hardback picture books, Stella Luna, just
(11:11):
like super popular children's picture book.
So yeah, that you can bundle andand sell to somebody that's
running a Co-op, somebody that'sdoing homeschooling in a group
or a teacher. I have oftentimes teachers will
message me and say, hey, I'm looking for this.
I'm a new teacher. My school is underfunded.
Can I buy this from you or do you have this and I can put
together custom listings for them and give them something
(11:33):
that's incredibly affordable because it's coming out of their
own pocket. So it's cool that way, too.
You know, you're supporting, like, so many different
situations. Yeah.
OK. So when it comes to selling like
bundles of the picture books, what are the unit economics of
that? Like how many books are you
putting together? Are you grouping them together
like by age or like Stella and Luna?
And then what are you selling them for on average?
(11:54):
And is it eBay, Facebook Marketplace or both?
Yeah, OK. So this is this is where it gets
really good and where AI has been incredibly supportive for
me again, the the time constraints of being a mom,
right? Like there's only so much time
in the day that I can dedicated to this.
So what I did was I put the picture books and the chapter
(12:16):
books in boxes where you could see the spines.
I took pictures, so I lined it up like 20 boxes.
I took pictures of each box. I uploaded all of those pictures
into ChatGPT and I gave it all of these metrics.
I want you to create a master manifest, include the box
number, tell me every title, author, reading level, and then
create bundles of 10 by reading level, genre.
(12:39):
I had all of these different ways that I could mix and match
and then I had to create me a pick list.
So then I have APDF spreadsheet that says, you know, this is the
bundle title. It gives me a complete SEO
listing for eBay and it'll tell me this title in box number one,
this title in box #5 this, you know, and you just create the
(13:00):
pick list. I rubber bandit throw the
listing up. You know, pictures are
important. I use literally a white poster
board on a fold up Costco table.I snap the pictures so that
they're clean and that you can see anything.
And then and AI literally does everything else for me, another
kind of important piece to this,because I think it's important
for, I think it's pretty prevalent that you have a stay
(13:22):
at home mom that has this, you know, like desire to contribute
financially in some kind of a way.
And time is a big thing when you're a parent.
And so for me, how I made this work is I would spend an hour
every couple of days. I mean, my time investment in
this is so significantly low andI think that's important for
people to know. So I would take an hour during
(13:43):
nap time. I would have a batch of books
that I'm going to list. I hammer it out really quick,
literally in my living room. And then at bedtime, my kids go
to bed. Instead of laying and scrolling
Instagram or scrolling whatever,I would do eBay listings.
I'd spend 30-40 minutes throwingthem up.
And I just did that every week over and over and over again.
(14:04):
And. Then before you know it, you've
got, you know, you wake up to three sales, then you wake up to
4, then you get 7 during the dayand it just compounds over time,
right? Yeah, totally.
And the eBay algorithm too, it favors if you're, you know,
consistently showing up and posting things.
And I saw that reflected significantly in how much I was
selling, the velocity and how quickly things were moving
(14:26):
depends on how frequently you'reposting them.
So I would do those batches and then, you know, I'd throw 3
listings up and then the next night I would do the next three.
And so it was just kind of consistent adding to my
storefront that way. Yeah, again, most of this
business has been the curriculumand the picture books.
I did do 1 whatnot show trying to live sell them just to kind
(14:48):
of like offload them to get morespace since the curriculum is
the main focus. And I think that that's there's
a big opportunity there too, especially if you don't have a
market where Facebook Marketplace is utilized because
I think that's probably the bestplace to sell picture books and
chapter books. I could be wrong.
And you can use media mail when shipping them right?
So it's a lot cheaper. Yeah, and that's something else
(15:09):
that I did. It's free shipping on every
single one of my listings. There's something about the
psychology of that, you know, when you're looking at
something, even if the price point is like ends up being the
same or more, if it's free shipping, people just tend to
favor the listing. OK, so on eBay, when you're
selling these bundles of picturebooks, roughly how many per
bundle and what are you selling each bundle for?
(15:30):
There's a big spectrum and it depends specifically on the
curriculum, if there's certain curriculums that schools are
offloading that are really easy to move and at what I would
think is a high price point, especially when your investment
is like a penny. So most of the time what I what
I sell is like a three to six book curriculum bundle, which is
(15:53):
like a teacher guide, a student guide, materials and my average
sale price from when I started. So over the last six months, I
think my average sale price is Ihave it right here, $45.00.
There's a pretty broad range. I try not to list anything
that's like under $15 because atthat point it's like you're
paying for shipping and it's, you know, you're not really
(16:14):
making the margins aren't great on that.
But then I have, you know, theseother curriculum sets that are
350 dollars, $200. I picked one up today.
Actually this morning a school was auctioning off these
specific curriculums that I've sold multiple times.
They're 50 bucks a pop and I picked 10 of them up for a
dollar literally this morning. On details.
Oh my goodness. Oh my gosh, 99% off, Like 98%
(16:37):
off. So roughly you're selling these
bundles for like 40 to $400.00, right?
Yeah, closer to 40 if they're picture books, closer to 400 if
they're curriculum, maybe 200 or300.
Yeah. So of the two pallets, hundreds
of books or thousands of books, are we talking the 1st 2
pallets? Definitely over 1000.
(16:57):
Wow, I think I. Had 606 hundred chapter books.
Best guess is like 2000 books were on those two pallets.
OK. And how long once you actually
started working on them, becauseI know you took a little break
right after you got them once you started like moving them,
how long did it take you to get rid of them all, either give
them to the library or selling them?
(17:17):
And then what would you say yourrevenue was for those first two
pallets in total? Yeah, about two months it took
me to move through the bulk of the inventory and that was,
yeah, that includes me donating that lot to the library.
And my total revenue at that point was around $5000.
Whoa. OK.
(17:39):
So in two, in two months, it turned $1.00 into $5000.
And 4999 of that was gross profit.
Like you had like time you you had to drive to the library to
donate them, right. Whatever.
Yeah. But there's, you know, the
platform fees and my shipping fees and so my dad is is lower
(18:01):
than that. However, the kicker to this is I
was spending maybe 3 hours a week on this.
It was just so minimal. Once I understood how to look
within these boxes for certain things.
Once I sold a few things, I kindof started to understand what
that market was. The time investment was so
small. Let.
(18:21):
Me guesstimate here, yeah, correct me if or when I'm wrong.
So 3 hours a week, let's just say it's 4th speak conservative,
9 weeks, right? So that's 36 hours give or take
of work, let's say 40 hours. So it's like a full work week
worth of work, 40 hours of working.
Let's say your platform fees are15%, your shipping is 15%, so
(18:43):
30, so 70% Net margin. Is that kind of accurate?
I. Was about 60, about 60.
Percent. We'll say 60.
Yeah, cool. Then that is what's that $3000
profit for 40 hours of work? Divide 3000 by forty $75.00 an
hour, which is pretty Dang good.If you were doing this as like a
(19:05):
full time business, 40 hours a week every week, which you're
not even trying to do, that's 150,000 a year without like
really like trying to optimize or scale.
Like that's your first deal. Like it only gets better from
there, right? Right, right.
And I many times have thought, Oh my goodness, what would
happen if I doubled my time on this?
What would happen if, you know, I had children that were going
(19:28):
to school during the day? Like the possibilities are
really, really huge if you're willing to do something that
maybe isn't super interesting toyou, right?
It's a very niche market. I always tell people that you
need to fall in love with business and like then it
doesn't matter what you do, you're selling porta potties,
(19:48):
you're selling books. It's it'll all be interesting to
you. And I think the people listening
to or watching this are interested in business.
So I, I do think maybe the average layman weirdo on the
street that isn't a serial idea generating entrepreneur, right?
Maybe they find it boring, but we don't care about them.
We're not making this podcast for them, right.
So I think people will find thisinteresting.
(20:10):
I mean, you could hire like a high school kid to come in in
the afternoon to pay him 15 bucks an hour and you're still
making. 60 bucks an hour not having to do the work.
Something I thought about there's some kids that are a
little bit older. My oldest is 8, so not quite
there where he's gonna take highquality photos of inventory.
But I thought again, have like one of these 12 or 13 year olds
(20:32):
come over and they're at that age, you're so excited to make
any amount of money and have them take pictures.
And then at night, you know, I, I'm spending an hour listing
them. There's significant opportunity
for sure. And I would be doing that if I
wasn't dabbling in another space, which is the next, yeah,
(20:54):
evolution of the story. But real quick, I wanted to tell
you one more thing that that wasis super helpful for me now that
I know, which I didn't when I first started because, you know,
I mentioned a lot of the times you don't know what's on these
pallets. So I got on Gov deals this
morning just to like see what's what's happening on there with
books and other markets. There's a lot on there right
now. That's in Georgetown, TX.
(21:16):
You're in Texas, right? Just outside of Austin.
Yeah, So this is Elementary Classroom Resources.
It's up for 10 bucks. There's no bids on it.
And the pictures on this are actually, they're extremely good
because you can actually see what's there.
So if it were me when I was in Texas, I would screenshot this
listing photo. I would send it to ChatGPT or
(21:37):
there's probably other AIS, but it may be better at this.
I don't, I haven't dabbled much in that space, but for me, I'd
send it to ChatGPT and I would just ask it, tell me the names
of anything that you can see on this palette and then I take
that I go into. E-mail.
What do I do right now? Let's do it.
Let's do it right now. Yeah.
Send, send me the picture. I'm gonna buy this myself.
I I hate to cut you off. I'm just like, so excited.
(21:59):
I want you to finish that thought.
How can I send this to you e-mail?
Yeah, yeah, e-mail and then I'llshare my screen and I'll I'll
show everyone what chat GPD spits out.
OK, cool. Do you have to pick these up
yourself or can you organize shipping?
Right now is actually the perfect time to start something.
And you guys know I'm always talking about starting local
newsletters. Local newsletters for your city,
(22:20):
job listings for your field, a weekly roundup for your hobby.
You know, just taking whatever you know and sharing it with
people who want to learn. This is one of the lowest risk
ways to build something that pays you over and over.
And Beehive is by far the easiest way to do it.
You can monetize and grow your subscribers with their built in
ad network. You can sell digital products or
(22:41):
paid subscriptions directly to your audience.
And yes, they've even got an AI website builder and a podcast
integration now. I've been using Beehive for two
years and I cannot recommend it enough.
It is not just a newsletter platform anymore, it is the
entire creator infrastructure. So don't wait for January.
Start now. Head to beehive.com/chris for
(23:04):
30% off your first three months.That's B EE HII v.com/chris.
I've never seen shipping on the books and I think just the
weight of them probably would itwould be so significant,
wouldn't be worth it. So these are local pick up and
that's what you would want to doon on Gov deals or like public
surplus is another one that doesschool auctions.
(23:26):
You can set your search radius, you know, So I'll always do like
250 miles and it'll show me what's what's within that for
me. I might need to make a trip to
Georgetown. I'm serious.
Is it 1 pallet? Yeah, it's not quite a full
palette. It makes it more interesting
because it's more reasonable forsomebody that's brand new.
You know, it's like you could fit this in the back of your
(23:48):
minivan. Yeah.
Or whatever you when you say, yeah, when you say classroom
resources, I feel like they're hinting at like it's more of
like a curriculum thing than just a bunch of worthless books.
Totally and that's what that's what this is the other thing Gov
deals is really good at answering questions.
And so you can ask like any ideawhat's inside what level this
(24:08):
is? Are they teaching resources or
are these are these reading books?
You're showing your hand a little bit then cuz then
somebody else you know that maybe didn't know that can see
have insight. But I watch these auctions
constantly, and it is a very rare occasion that these pellets
are getting bit up. They're usually going for their
opening bid, which is most of the time a dollar.
(24:30):
This one's 10 bucks. If someone were to only focus on
Gov deals, it's so nice that youare able to talk about this
because like this is a very localized thing.
And so like I'm assuming I'm making an assumption here,
correct me if I'm wrong, But like the fear of someone like
competing against you directly, that risk is not very big
because it's such a local thing.You got to go pick it up and
(24:50):
you're in Eastern Washington, right?
So it's like anyone can go do this in any local market.
How how many listings are there on Gov deals at any given market
for books like these? It really varies.
For some reason, Washington state has a lot.
I'm not sure what drives that. It might be funding where
they're, you know, like I, I've noticed when I'm shipping things
(25:11):
out, a lot of my orders are going to the Midwest and the
East Coast. I very rarely have anything on
the West Coast. So I think maybe it has
something to do with how schoolsare funded and how rapidly
they're replacing things. This is really interesting.
Shannon Jean, who you've had on multiple, multiple times, he
always talks about find out whatyou can sell it for before you
buy it. What's interesting about the
(25:33):
curriculum space is when you go on eBay and you look up sold
listings, often times there either aren't any or they're so
infrequent. And so if I didn't already know
this from experience, that wouldmake me a little apprehensive.
The reason why that is, is because there's so few people
selling these resources on eBay.There's one curriculum in
(25:54):
particular. I think I'm one of three sellers
on the entire platform that has it, and I sell it because I'm
one of the only people that does.
So, you know, I think I think it's important obviously to do
your research before you're bidding on stuff.
Again, the risk profile on this is so low.
It's not. Yeah.
I mean, you're sacrificing some of your time and you know, you
(26:17):
got to be able to lift the boxesand stuff to load them.
So that counts for. Something that's fine, yeah.
But yeah, there's not a lot of people that are doing this on
eBay. All right, so you think I should
upload these three pictures to ChatGPT?
Yeah, that's what I would do. I would screenshot it and just
say tell me the names of the resources that you can identify
in these photos. All right, let's do this.
(26:40):
So basically, what can you tell me about these books?
Yeah, I would say what can you identify any titles of these
books? All right, Units of study by
Lucy Calkins, plus units of study and phonics and units of.
How does it get that from this picture I can't see anything?
(27:02):
Isn't that wild? I've had many goodbyes for that
reason. To my eye, I cannot see what it
is, but Chuck T somehow can. I love this business because
this wasn't nearly as intriguing3 years ago before Chad.
GBT like this is a lot of tedious stuff before Chad.
GBT, it would have, it would be such a slog.
I, I would have donated everything that we didn't keep
(27:24):
for our personal library. Like there's no way.
I was just telling a family member recently, she was talking
to me about like her apprehensions about AI and I was
like, well, let me give you a different perspective.
This is created a business for me.
It is my $20.00 a month assistant that saves me.
I mean, it would have taken me the better part of a year to
identify all of those books and group them together.
(27:45):
Like there's just no way it wouldn't be worth it.
That is crazy. So it says right here, it says
the grades, it says what they are and then at the bottom it
says could be worth 10 to 25,000in retail, which obviously this
is not. Should I ask like what could
they be worth like used on eBay?Yeah.
Yeah, that's, that's where I would go next.
You know, schools are paying topdollar for these because they're
(28:06):
buying them directly from the publishers.
But to me immediately as a potential purchase, I'm seeing
that price. That's what the schools paid for
it. That's very interesting.
What's like the most you pay forthis stuff or is it always, is
it kind of like a 1 to $10 or bust?
For a pallet. Yeah, or a listing.
The most I've ever paid for a pallet is $32 and that's because
(28:28):
I could see what's on it and I really wanted it.
Like I knew at that point I had sold so many things, you know, I
could identify. I'm like, I sell one book off of
that and I'm, I'm like, you know, whatever, 5-6 times my
investment. Yeah.
Have you ever lost money on a pallet or a deal or a listing?
No, that's crazy. How many pallets would you say
(28:48):
you've purchased so far? I bought 11 and that is truly
like 3 months of time. Yeah, that's incredible, $100.
Does this seem right? Like these prices?
Let's. See.
Might be hard to see. They're very, very good, $100
for the three grade bundle. Yeah.
So I popped a couple of these into the eBay research tool just
(29:10):
to see if people had this listedand it's anywhere between like
45 to $100. That's one thing that I will say
is the pricing that ChatGPT gives you is sometimes pretty
off. And so I always ask it because I
want to know, do you, does it see any value anywhere on the
Internet? And then I'll always double
check it. But a lot of the times I'm
(29:30):
looking for are these listed like current listings as well as
have there been sold listings because it's so niche, you know,
there might not necessarily be very many recent sold listings.
So I base a lot of my pricing off of what the current pricing
of other sellers are on there. Gotcha, and this makes sense to
me. As good as ChatGPT is for
(29:50):
organizing and researching, you don't really try to rely on it
for pricing. Yeah.
So for this one, it's like one of these boxes in this picture
that, you know, like this top one that has the number 2 on it.
You could probably sell that for100 bucks.
How many of those boxes are on this pallet?
Like in these photos I can see 123456 7 from 1 angle.
(30:11):
It's very interesting. This could be $1000 pallet for
$10 a. 100% I think you would easily make $1000 off this
pallet, it said. Did it say Heineman on there?
On ChatGPT. Yeah, when I identified it.
I thought, that does sound familiar.
Yeah. Lucy Calkins slash Heineman.
Yeah, I've sold quite a bit of Heineman, Not this specific one,
(30:32):
but that author or publisher or whatever.
I don't even know actually. So it's very interesting and
they just, like I said, they popup frequently.
I had actually, there's a schooldistrict that I've bought
multiple times from. It's in Washington.
I won't say which one it is because this could be upsetting
I guess to some people, but I had their purchasing person
purchasing manager reach out to me last week and say hey, we
(30:55):
have 50 pallets of curriculum, it's going to the trash.
You can take whatever you want. Do you want that?
Could be 50 grand. It could be so many things and
you know the this particular 1. I actually there was somebody
that I connected with through Shannon Jean's mastermind, that
is he has a over $1,000,000 bookoperation and I connected with
(31:20):
him on X and he was really gracious with his time and he
talked through it with me to kind of look up a couple things
cuz he sells on Amazon and like is there any, you know,
wholesale opportunity with this?Cuz it's such a large amount.
But my point in sharing that is the opportunity is so
significant and the alternative to people not purchasing these
is they're going to a landfill, which is just like, it's so sad.
(31:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're doing, you're doing a
dual purpose, you're making income and you're also you're
doing something really significant for the environment.
Yeah, there's no losers in this.Yeah, I mean, I just looked up
books on Gov deals and there's 1300 results.
Obviously they're they're not all going to be relevant, but.
Yeah, but there's like, I mean, if you see, if you ever see
(32:03):
anything that says like classroom materials, learning
materials, textbooks, there's, there's a couple textbook deals.
Let's see, we're like there's one elementary teacher resources
that's super interesting. Those are usually high ticket
sellers and textbooks can be hitor miss, but usually you can see
a textbook on the pallet or you could ask could submit a
(32:26):
question on there. There's a pallet of textbooks in
Wentzville, MO for 10 bucks. Yeah, and it looks like it's a
precalculus textbook. They're all the same, so I don't
know what that's worth. You could find out really quick.
And then you that's an interesting because you list it
one time quantity 100 or you bundle them and ship them as a
box. Are you willing to share what
(32:47):
your eBay name is? Yeah, it's homeschool Y so
homeschool and then IE at the end.
I want to look at your listings,and then I got to hear about
what you've been doing here lately.
Yeah, what does your husband do for work?
He's a firefighter. Oh awesome.
Yeah. So that's been super supportive
to doing this resale stuff is his schedule allows me, you
know, to have time when he's home.
(33:08):
So he's home for, you know, it'sstacking his shifts.
So he's gone for a few days and then home for a few.
Did he ever find his workout equipment?
No, the poor guy, his shop's full of books instead of his
workout equipment. He can lift the books.
Totally. Yeah, he's, he's getting his
workout in for sure. OK, 100% positive feedback.
(33:29):
That's awesome. Pictures look great.
A lot of curriculum. OK, tell us what you've been
doing here lately. So I'm driving one day and my
husband sent me one of your interviews with Shannon Jean and
I'm listening to this. And at this point I had no like
I'm trolling up deals looking for books every day, you know?
(33:52):
But I had no idea that there's an entire world of auctions and
arbitrage that's available outside of Gov deals.
So I'm listening to this interview and I'm like, what in
the world? Like, what is this?
And that week I had started thinking about just my husband
(34:13):
had mentioned like, what if we, you know, added on to this,
like, could we add toys to this or what else could you sell
under the homeschooling brand oneBay?
And I had all this money from the books that I'm like, what am
I going to do with it? Like, I want to do something
bigger. Do I want to scale the books or
should I dabble in something else?
And so I ended up landing on these, this Rent the Runway
(34:38):
auction to Rent the Runway. You know, when they have a piece
of clothing that is slightly blemished or maybe significantly
blemished, they're not going to rent it out anymore and so they
get rid of it. Tell us what they do.
It's for those listening. It's a, a women's clothing, I
believe they also have handbags and accessories now where you
can pay a subscription fee and you get to pick high end
(34:59):
designer pieces and they ship them to you.
You wear them for whatever the occasion is and then you ship
them back. So you're paying literally to
rent a high end piece of clothing, which makes so much
sense, right? Like they have a, you know, a
$1500 designer dress that maybe you want to wear to a gala or a
wedding or whatever. And you just wear it, rent it
(35:20):
for, you know, $8000 and send itback.
OK, so you bought a Rent the Runway listing?
Yeah. So they liquidate anything that
has a slight blemish on it. And there were a couple pallets
that came up on bee stock and sorent the runways on there.
And so I see this, I'm like, well, this is super interesting.
This, you know, MSRP on these two pallets was I think
(35:42):
$355,000. So I took my book money and
that's what I bought and I got it with the intention of listing
it on Poshmark. And then it arrived at my home
and I realized, Oh my goodness, I there's no way.
I have 900 items. Most of them are unique items.
It's not like I have 10 of the same thing.
(36:04):
It's going to take take me the rest of my life to sell this.
And so I learned about live selling.
I had no idea this was a thing. And so that's what I'm doing
now. I'm live selling high end
designer clothing on what not. Oh my gosh, did you ever think
you'd be doing that? Not in a million years.
You said it was like MSRP was like 350,000 What did you pay
(36:26):
for it all? $6.00 an item.
Wow, I'm nervous. And 9:00. 100 items someone.
Yeah, yeah. So I think no, no $5400 was my
total investment for $350,000 ofmerchandise.
So like 98% off again, just likethe books.
The margins are insane and the thing with Whatnot is people are
looking for a deal. Have you been on there?
(36:46):
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Yeah, it's addicting. As a buyer, it's addicting.
It is a wild, Wild West of shopping.
It is so crazy, but people are looking for a deal on there.
And so it's like I have this really valuable merchandise.
What do I sell it for? And ultimately I'm like, well, I
(37:06):
paid $6 for this, so let's find out.
I don't know, you know, I'm brand new.
I've done 6 shows like I'm by nomeans like established on there.
You know, I think it's a grind to get established and get a
following and, you know, start seeing higher prices on things.
But the risk for me financially was it's so low.
(37:27):
I took, yeah, I spent a dollar on some books.
I made some money on that. I took it and I rolled it into
something else and I ran numberson this.
You're playing with house money still, like you spent everything
you earned, but you started witha dollar basically, right?
You were saying you ran some numbers.
Yeah, I ran numbers on, you know, but like what's my, what's
my bottom, you know, if I, you do start prices on there.
(37:48):
So a lot of people, you know, it's enticing to start at a
dollar. I'm, I'm not doing that yet.
I think I will at some point. But I ran numbers on, you know,
if I start at $29.00, if I, whatif I sold every one of these
pieces for $29.00 easy, we'll clear $30,000 after fees.
How long will that take me? I don't know, a couple months.
(38:10):
And that's if I'm like consistently showing up and
doing it. But I've done 6/1 hour live
streams on there. I've done $1200 in sales with 0
following. And to me I'm like, these are
small numbers right in the long game at they're small numbers.
But it's again, like just what you're willing to put into it.
And I'm putting such minimal time into it cuz that's why I
(38:32):
have I'm a mom and I got 4 little kids.
So I'm putting minimal effort and minimal time.
And I think the opportunity for literally anybody to do this is
there anyone can make a seller account on what not.
You had no presence, no account,no following and you've made 200
an hour so far. Yeah, 1200 in six hours, right.
And like, Yep, of course you're you paid 6 to $10 per item, but
(38:55):
OK, sorry, $180 profit per hour so far, right.
With no following. Yeah, before you, before you
continue that thought, I have torun to my closet and show you my
what? Not regret that I bought it's
you're going to laugh. You're.
Good. OK, All right, So I have a good
friend, his name's Jared. He sells a lot of stuff on
(39:17):
Whatnot. I think he has 40,000 followers,
multiple shows a day. Yeah, they do a lot.
Sports cards, watches, clothing,handbags.
Anyway, we were talking about itand he's like, you got to come
to a show. You got to come to a show.
So I downloaded Whatnot. I'm out of breath because I
sprinted to my closet, but I downloaded Whatnot and I was on
a show and they were doing T-shirts, like vintage T-shirts.
(39:39):
And he pulled out this shirt andI just fell in love.
It was this shirt that was just so ugly but so cool at the same
time. And my wife was next to me.
She's like, don't you buy that shirt?
Like don't you buy that shirt? And most of these shirts are
going for like 5 to $10. And this one just started going
crazy. And I was committed.
(40:01):
I was going to buy this shirt nomatter what.
And I think I paid like $70.00 for it.
And Are you ready to see it? Yeah, let's see it.
So here we go. And it's way too big by the way.
It does not fit me so. Yes.
That's the that's. The epitome of what whatnot is
right there in AT shirt. I'm sad you didn't wear that for
(40:23):
this interview. So.
It doesn't fit well, it's huge, but I don't even think I've ever
worn it and I paid way too much for it.
But it's my whatnot memory of course.
It smells like a story. It's weird, isn't it?
Like when you, because I've, youknow, I played around for like a
solid month. I'm trying to learn like, how
does this work? What works?
What could I do better than, youknow, certain shows that I'm
(40:46):
watching whatever. And I did the same thing.
I'm like, oh, I'm going to bet on that.
Oh, and it's so fast. It is, yeah.
It's like your heart starts racing.
You're like and like, it's almost kind of sad because
there's like a lot of people that spend way too much money on
there. Oh, I'm.
Sure, like they're addicted to it.
Yeah. Anyway, all right, so you're
(41:06):
selling these dresses. Are these kind of like, are
these like nice formal dresses? A lot of them are, yeah.
It depends. The lot that I got had a pretty
significant amount of like sweaters and outerwear and
jeans. The makeup of them are always
different. And it'll tell you it gives you
a full manifest of every single item that's on there and it'll
(41:26):
break it up by category. But there's a significant amount
of dresses and I would say maybelike 5050 of like really formal
dresses versus a more casual like cocktail type attire.
Man, so you're so far, you're glad you did it.
I mean, you've made like 1/5 of your money back already. 1/4 of
it, Yeah. And are you going to buy more
(41:48):
stuff or are you just going to like work through this until
it's gone and then buy somethingelse?
This is such a good question. I think the What not platform is
extremely interesting and I am very invested on establishing
myself on it right now. They just got, you know, this
huge round of funding like $250 million at the end of last
month. So I think the platform is in
(42:09):
its infancy still and there's significant opportunity as a
reseller on there. And so, yeah, I'm committed to
that. I don't know.
I don't know if the high end designer if I'll continue with
it or not. I guess it kind of is going to
depend on how quickly I can movethrough it.
Some of the lower retail items might be more interesting and it
(42:31):
might work better. I think it just kind of depends.
It's hard to know right now, like who is my buyer?
I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm, I'm just so new.
Now I picture like your traditional what not seller as
being like super outgoing, like super high energy all over the
place. Is that you or is there hope for
people that are not like that naturally?
Oh man, you have the full spectrum on whatnot.
(42:54):
There are 70 year old women sitting at their dining room
table selling jewelry. And then you have this guy
that's in a full Charlie and theChocolate Factory Willy Wonka
outfit packing, you know, Reese's into a into a flat rate
ship box. I think truly, and I was I'm a
pretty extroverted person. I, you know, I feel pretty
(43:16):
comfortable in just like having conversation with people, but I
was nervous to get on there. And something that calmed my
nerves was watching all these other shows and seeing such a
broad spectrum of personalities.And there are people on there
that absolutely, you know, are more introverted.
And if you are that person and you're looking for an additional
stream of income and whatnot is interesting to you, but you
(43:39):
don't want to show your face. There are tons of shows where
people are just setting up theircamera and you never see the
person, you're only seeing the product.
And so I think it's that's the barrier to entry.
Again, it's, it's so accessible and reasonable and you can make
it whatever you want. You can be a personality on
there and those shows do great. Or you could never ever show
yourself and you could also makea killing.
(44:01):
That's amazing. What would you suggest other
people do? Like how could someone learn
from your mistakes? It doesn't really sound like
you've made any, but like what would you have done differently?
How can people make money at this that you haven't already
touched on? It's a great question.
Knowing what I know now with thebooks, I think you could make a
more educated buying decision based on visual, like what you
(44:22):
can see on a pallet. And I didn't do that.
And again, my intention when I bought it wasn't to sell it.
So I didn't really have that on my radar.
I was just excited about, you know, like this instant huge
library that would be like one of my top things to tell people
is I think that you really can do your due diligence in getting
a decent idea of your profit margins on a book purchase.
(44:45):
When it comes to live selling. My my biggest piece of advice is
figure out the shipping. No matter what you're selling,
the what not back end of the shipping can be really confusing
as a new seller and if you don'thave that dialed in right, you
can make a big financial mistakeright out of the you.
Can literally lose your shirts you.
(45:06):
Can literally. Lose your shirts.
You could be so upside down so fast because you're going to eat
the shipping if you do it wrong.And I've heard that story told
multiple times. So I spent more hours than I
would like to admit watching YouTube tutorials on the
shipping. And so that's really important.
My encouragement to people is ifyou're looking for something
(45:27):
that is basically free, that hasa low time investment, but it
doesn't require a significant amount of space and that you
could do with only your phone. You don't have to hire anyone.
You don't have overhead costs. Hop on Facebook Marketplace and
throw up a post to your local community.
Go on a community page and say, hey, does anyone have any
curriculum that they're looking to get rid of?
(45:49):
Or does anybody have any books? However you want to do it and
start by spending nothing and just see how it goes.
Pick up some stuff, or if you have the space and you have a
truck and you're willing to liftsome boxes, pick up a deals
auction. Or go rent A truck from Home
Depot or a trailer. It's like 30 bucks.
What are like some sure tells onthese books, like like the
(46:09):
condition or like the brand, thepublisher, like we've talked
about the curriculums or the money makers, but like, is there
anything else that just quickly passed the eye test for you?
That listing that you pulled up that we looked at that has
visible sets, you know, it has the original packaging of the
sets of books. Like you can tell that there's
(46:29):
that's probably a complete set. That's a tell for me that that's
valuable. There's two different kinds of
buyers too. There's people that are
supplementing what they already have and they're looking for
only one thing. What's really interesting about
this for me as a potential purchase is that there's so much
on this pallet of the same thingthat you could take part of it
and individually list it and youcould also sell complete sets.
(46:51):
So you're hitting two different types of buyers within the same
curriculum set. That's a tell for me.
There are certain curriculums and publishers that I know will
move fast for me. So I'm I'm always looking for
those. Like that one that I told you
this morning that I saw. I've sold multiple of those
already that came mixed on another pallet.
(47:13):
This just happened to be a pallet of all the same thing.
And so I'm always looking for that.
I'm looking for, you know, I've,I've sold this before.
Like SRA is an example of one that moves super quick at a high
price point. I sell them left and right for
60 to $100 a set. And these are, I mean they cost
me 7-8 bucks to ship. That's amazing, Mindy.
(47:36):
This was incredible, even betterthan my high expectations
expected. That's really kind to say.
Well, it's true. Where can people find you if
they have questions, they want to learn more, etcetera?
I think X is the best place that.
Is we can link to you there? What's your name on there?
It's hay under score, Mindi. MINDI.
(47:57):
Like igloo. Yeah, that's kind of the melting
pot because, you know, these aretwo.
This is kind of a wild combo. I'm a bookseller and I sell high
end designer clothes so I'm marrying those two on XI.
Feel like it works there. Yeah.
I mean, you sell whatever peopleare buying.
That's that's how it should be. Yeah, the beautiful thing about
this is I have this book business going almost in the
(48:18):
background. So, you know, I'm throwing
listings up periodically here. But that money is what's funding
whatever I'm buying on B stock or you know, whatever I'm going
to do next on what not my book money is going to fund it.
And that pretty cool. I don't really have a lot of
skin in the game risk wise, right?
Yeah, there's skin in the game. I shouldn't have said that, but.
(48:39):
No, right? It's all it's all very mitigated
risk. There's a lot to be impressed
with here. Like your husband's a
firefighter, you're stay at homemom, you just had your fourth
child. Like you limited on time,
limited on resources, but there's no excuses.
Like you're making it happen, like you're living the American
dream and you're showing other peoples how to do the same.
So I applaud you for that. Thank you so much.
(49:02):
Thank you for this. I'm, I'm absolutely flattered
for the invitation to come here and chat with you.
So cool, Chris, what you've, what you've built is incredible.
And I'm so excited to talk aboutthis more and kind of use X as a
journal, right? And tell people all the things
what I did right, what I did wrong.
Make it easier for the next person that's going to buy a big
(49:23):
old pallet of books. Yeah, I love it.
All right. Well, thank you, Mindy.
Thank you all. Right, what do you think?
Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on
the Kerner office.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Burden
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.