She Turned $1 Into $5,000 With This Overlooked Side Hustle⏐Ep. #257

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 existent because you don't have to buy a palette.

You turned $1 into $5,000.

Since then we've bought more palettes, all for a dollar. I was spending maybe three hours a week on this.

You had no presence, no account, no following. $75 an hour. If you were doing this as like a full time business, 40 hours a week, that's 150,000 a year.

He has an over million dollar book operation. The time constraints of being a mom, there's only so much time in the day that I can dedicate to this. I snap the pictures and then AI literally does everything else for me.

Oh, your husband's a firefighter, you're a stay at home mom, you just had your fourth child, you're 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, that is buying pallets of books for $1 and selling them for $5,000. This can be done in any market 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 tens of thousands of dollars from getting free books and selling them, or if you, if you want to learn more about whatnot and live selling and how to take $6 items and sell them for $40, 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. Schools are getting rid of their gym stuff all the time and so he finds one that's near ish to us. And he had been trolling this 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 book palettes and like being a homeschool mom. I have this like book addiction. It gets weird. You're like, oh my gosh, my home.

Life, 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. So 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, basically.

Yeah. At this point I, I didn't realize the scale of it and the accessibility of it. Cause this, this entire thing is brand new 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 gotta go get it.

Yeah.

And he's bidding on.

What was your bid for?

A dollar? I just bid a dollar. I'm like, there's no way I'm gonna get this for a dollar.

Yeah.

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 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 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 three and a half hours from us, so it was not a small jaunt. We get these pallets, we bring them home. The kids and I are going through them. And I was like eight months pregnant. So these ended up sitting for, I 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 number four 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 this curriculum that I'm like, what am I going to do with this stuff? I have 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, standing 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 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 look up this curriculum I'm holding and I see all these listings for like 375, 400. Oh, 375, $375 for. It was like a six book set. And mind you, I know.

And you had the thousands.

Yes.

Yeah.

So I was like, oh my gosh, you guys, this some. Selling this for 375. So I throw it up for 350, sold five days later. And then I was like, okay.

Now tell me about how many books were on this palette. Just so I have some idea of scale.

I ended up bidding on two. So I got two pallets each for $1. 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.

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 have no idea what's inside. So there's two pieces to it. It's pretty boring. It's a boring category for most people. Right. I. I would say I'm more of an anomaly.

I'm not bored. Sounds freaking awesome.

That's why you and I'd 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 dictionaries.

Yeah, but it's a dollar. Worst case, you throw it away. Like. Yeah, whatever.

I mean, there's a lot of stuff all sellable that I've got, but a lot of things that, like, for me, with the time that I have and the time that I wanted to dedicate 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 not something that I necessarily 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 was the curriculum. And I found that out so fast when I made that first sale, those $350. And so from there I started just piecing out the curriculum and I'm taking all of these different sets and chat GPT 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 for, what the description together. Because a lot of times, you know, you'll get like these boxes and it's like teacher's 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's a set and. And what isn't. So Chat GPT did that all for me.

Okay, so with those three categories, picture books, chapter books, curriculum, what kind of 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 mean like children's books, like ages like 2 to 6 or whatever? 2 to 8?

Yeah, from just elementary age, typically. Okay, 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 purchased these or were. They were handed down to them, which is super common within schools. 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 aware, but still, I mean, there's so much opportunity if you live in a market where you can sell on Facebook Marketplace and you can bundle these together. For me, that's living so rurally, people oddly don't really use Facebook Marketplace. So that's why I sold exclusively 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 this is 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 palette. You could hop on Facebook Marketplace right now and find endless listings of people trying to get rid of books. It's like the book arbitrage is so wild. Or you can go to a thrift store and. And buy a, you know, paperback book for 10 cents.

Yeah. It's not like you just found this random two pallet gold mine deal and like no one else can find anything that good. Again, like these deals totally everywhere. Not just on gov deals, but all over the place.

Right. You, if you have a phone, you 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 X I think is a big Amazon seller now. And I could be misspeaking there too. But anyway, he started in book resale and he just posted a flyer up, said we'll pick up free books. And he. That's how he like made his entrance as an entrepreneur.

Wow.

And I feel like that's.

Yeah.

Still very doable.

Yeah.

In 2025.

So 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 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.

Okay.

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 one picture book.

Yeah. Because one listing is 20 listings. Right. In one, basically.

Right.

It's easy.

And then the quantity too is, you know, sometimes I'll. I'll get a palette that has like I just. Since then we've bought more palettes, all for a dollar. I think I paid a dollar. We'll get into that for one. But you know, there's like 350 copies of hardback picture book Stella Luna, which is like super popular children's picture book. So. Yeah. That you can bundle and sell to somebody that's running a co op, somebody that's doing 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 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. Okay, so when it comes to selling like bundles of the picture books, we 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? And is it ebay, Facebook, marketplace or both?

Yeah. Okay, 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 dedicate to this. So, so what I did was I put the picture books and the chapter 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 Chat GPT 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. I had all of these different ways that I could mix and match. And then I had it create me a pick list. So then I have a PDF 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, and box number five, this, you know, and you just create the pick list. I rubber band it, 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 AI literally does everything else for me. Oh, 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 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. And I think that's important for people to know. So I would Take an hour during 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 throwing them up. And I just did that every week over and over and over again.

And then before you know it, you've got, you know, you wake up to three sales, then you wake up to four, then you get seven during the day. And it just compounds over time, Right?

Yeah, totally. And the ebay algorithm to it favors if you're, you know, consistently showing up and posting things.

Yeah.

And I saw that reflected significantly in how much I was selling. The velocity and how quickly things were moving depends on how frequently you're posting them. So I would do those batches, and then, you know, I'd throw three listings up, and then the next night I would do the next three. And so it was just kind of consistently adding to my storefront that way. Yeah. Again, most of this business has been the curriculum and the picture books. I did do one whatnot show trying to live sell them just to kind of like offload them to get more space, 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 best place 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 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.

Okay, so on ebay, when you're selling these bundles of picture books, roughly how many per bundle and what are you selling each bundle for?

There's a big spectrum, and it depends specifically on the curriculum. Like, there are 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 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. Oh, I have it right here. $45. There's a pretty broad range. I try not to list anything that's, like, under $15, because at that point, it's like you're paying for shipping and it's. You know, you're not really making. The margins aren't great on that. But then I have, you know, these other curriculum sets that are $350. 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 retails.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, my gosh. 99% off. Like, 98% off. So.

So crazy rough.

Roughly, you're selling these bundles for, like, 40 to $400, right?

Yeah.

Closer to 40 if they're picture books, closer to 400 if they're curriculum. Maybe 200 or 300. Yeah.

Yeah.

So of the two palettes, hundreds of books or thousands of books, Are we talking the first two palettes?

Definitely over a thousand.

Wow.

I think I had 600. 600 chapter books. Best guess is, like, 2,000 books were on those two pallets.

Okay, and how long once you actually started working on them? Because I 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. And then what would you say your revenue 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. That lot to the library. And my total revenue at that point was around $5,000.

Whoa. Okay, so in two. In two months, you turned $1 into $5,000. And 4,999 of that was gross profit. Like, you had, like, time 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 net is lower than that. However, the kicker to this is I was spending maybe three 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 kind of started to understand what that market was. The time investment was so small.

Let me guesstimate here.

Yeah.

Correct me if or when I'm wrong. So, three hours a week. Let's just say it's four, let's be conservative, nine weeks, right? So that's 36 hours, give or take of work. Let's say 40 hours. So it's like a full workweek worth of work. 40 hours of working. Let's say your platform fees are 15%, your shipping is 15%. So 30, so 70% net margin. Is that kind of accurate? Give or take.

Mine's about 60. About 60%, we'll say 60.

60, cool. Then that is, what's that $3,000 profit for 40 hours of work? Divide 3,000 by 40. $75 an hour, which is pretty dang good. If you were doing this as like a 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 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 to you. 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, you're selling books, it'll all be interesting to you. And I think the people listening to or watching this are interested in business. So 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 this interesting. I mean you could hire like a high school kid to come in in the afternoons, pay him 15 bucks an hour.

Oh, totally.

You're still making 60 bucks an hour not having to do the work.

And that's something I, I thought about. You know, there's some kids that are a little bit older. My oldest is 8. So like not quite there where he's going to take high quality photos of inventory. But I thought again, have like One of these 12 or 13 year olds come over and they're, you know, at, at, 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.

Get to that. Yeah.

Evolution of the story. But real quick, I wanted to tell you one more thing that I, that was, is 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, what's happening on there with books in other markets. There's a lot on there right now that's in Georgetown, Texas. 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 and I was in Texas, I would screenshot this listing photo. I would send it to ChatGPT or there's probably other AIs that may be better at this. I don't, I haven't dabbled much in that space but for me I'd send it to Chat GPT 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 email.

Why don't we do it right now?

Let's do it.

Let's do it right now. Yeah, send, send me the picture. I might buy this myself. I, I hate to cut you off. I'm just like so excited. I want you to finish that thought.

How can I send this to you? Email?

Yeah, yeah, email. And then I'll share my screen and I'll, I'll show everyone what Chat GPT spits out.

Okay, cool.

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Seen shipping on the books and I think just the weight of them probably would. It would be so significant. Wouldn't be worth it. So these are local pickup and that's what you would want to do on on Gov deals or like Public Surplus is another one that does school auctions. 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 one palette?

Yeah, it's not quite a full palette. It makes it more interesting because it's more reasonable for somebody that's brand new, you know?

Yeah.

Like you could fit this in the back of your minivan.

Yeah.

Or whatever.

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 idea what's inside, what level this is? Are they teaching resources or are these re. Are these reading books you're showing your hand a little bit then. Because 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 pallets are getting bid up. They're usually going for their opening bid, which is most of the time a dollar. This one's 10 bucks.

If someone were to only focus on gov Deals. It's so nice that you are 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 gotta go pick it up. And 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 in 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 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. With how schools are 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 what you can sell it for before you buy it. What's interesting about the curriculum space is when you go on ebay and you look up sold listings, oftentimes there either aren't any or they're so infrequent. And so if I didn't already know this from experience, that would make 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 particular, I think I'm one of three sellers on the entire platform that has it, and I sell it.

Wow.

Because I'm one of the only people that does.

Yeah.

So, you know, I think. I think it's important, obviously, to do your research before you're bidding on stuff. But 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 gotta be able to lift the boxes and stuff to load them, so that counts for something.

But it'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. 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 in phonics and units of. How does it get that from this picture? I can't see anything.

Isn't that wild? I've had many goodbyes for that reason. To my eye, I cannot see what it is, but ChatGPT somehow can.

Right. I love this business because this wasn't nearly as intriguing three years ago before Chad GPT. Like, this is a lot of tedious stuff.

Before Chatgpt oh, it would have. It would be such a slog. I. I would have donated everything that we didn't keep 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 has created a business for me. It is my $20 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. 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 25,000 in 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 top dollar for these because they're 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 for this 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 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, five, six 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 you've purchased so far?

I've bought probably 11. And that is truly like three months of time.

Yeah. That's incredible. A hundred dollars. Does this seem right? Like, these prices?

Let's see.

Might be hard to see.

They're very, very good. A hundred dollars for the three grade bundle? Yeah. So. So I popped a couple of these into the ebay research tool just to see if people had this listed. And 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 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 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, you know, like this top one that has the number two on it. You could probably sell that for 100 bucks. How many of those boxes are on this palette like in these photos? I can see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 from one angle. It's very interesting.

This could be a thousand dollar palette for $10.

Oh, 100%. I think you would easily make a thousand dollars off this palette. It said. Did it say Heinemann there?

On ChatGPT?

Yeah. When I identified it, I thought that does sound familiar.

Oh yeah, Lucy Calkins slash Heineman.

Yeah, I've sold quite a bit of Heineman. Not this specific one, but that author or publisher, whatever, I don't even know actually. So it's very interesting. And they just, like I said, they pop up frequently. I had, actually there's a school district that I've bought multiple times from that's in Washington. I won't say which one it is because I. 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 have 50 pallets of curriculum. It's going to the trash. You can take whatever you want. Do you want any of it?

Oh, that could be 50 grand.

It could be so many things. And you know, the. This particular one, I actually there was somebody that I connected with through Shannon Jean's mastermind. That is he has a over a million dollar book operation and whoa. I connected with 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 because he sells on Amazon and like is there any, you know, wholesale opportunity with this because 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.

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 not all going to be relevant but.

Yeah, but there's like, I mean if you see, if you ever see anything that says like classroom materials, learning materials, textbooks. There's, there's a couple textbook deals. Let's see where like there's one elementary teacher resources that's super interesting. Those are usually high ticket sellers and textbooks can be hit or miss but usually you can see a textbook on the palette or you could ask could submit a question on there. There's a pallet of Textbooks in Wentzville, Missouri for 10 bucks and it looks like it's a pre calculus 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 where you bundle them and ship them as a box.

Are you willing to share what your ebay name is?

Yeah, it's homeschooly. 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.

And 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. He's home for you know, it's stacking 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.

Okay. 100% positive feedback. That's awesome. Pictures look great. A lot of curriculum. Okay, 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. 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 had mentioned, like, what if we, you know, added onto this, like, could we add toys to this? What else could you sell under the homeschoolie brand on ebay? 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 auction. So 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. 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 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 for, you know, $800 and send it back.

Okay, so you bought a rental Runway listing.

Yeah, so they liquidate anything that has a slight blemish on it. And there were a couple pallets that came up on B stock. And so Rent the Runway is 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, $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. It's going to take. Take me the rest of my life to sell this. And so I. 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 whatnot.

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 for at all?

$6 an item.

Wow.

I'm nervous so much. Yeah. Yeah. So I think $5,400 was my total investment for, for $350,000 of merchandise.

So, like 98% off.

Again, just like the books, the margins are insane. And the thing with whatnot is people are looking for a deal. Have you been on there?

Yeah. Oh, 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 merchant merchandise. What do I sell it for? And ultimately I'm like, Well, I paid $6 for this, so let's find out. I don't know. You know, I'm brand new. I've done six shows. Like, I'm by no means, 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. I took, 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 numbers on this.

You're playing with house money still. Like, you spent everything you earned, but you started with a 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. 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, if I. What if I sold every one of These pieces for 29 Easy will clear $30,000 after fees. How long will that take me? I don't know, a couple months. And that's if I'm like consistently showing up and doing it. But I've done six one hour live streams on there. I've done $1200 in sales with zero following. And to me, I'm like, these are small numbers, right? In the long game, 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 because that's what I have. I'm a mom. I'm. I got four 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 whatnot.

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, of course, you paid six to ten dollars per item, but. Okay, sorry. $180 profit per hour so far with no following.

Yeah.

Before you continue that thought, I have to run to my closet and show you my whatnot regret that I bought. You're gonna laugh.

Always.

Okay. All right. So I have a good friend. His name's Jared. He sells a lot of stuff on 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 it, and 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. And he pulled out this shirt, and I 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, five to $10, and this one just started going crazy. And I was committed. I was going to buy this shirt no matter what. And I think I paid, like, $70 for it. And are you ready to see it?

Yeah. Let's see.

So here we go. And it's way too big, by the way. It does not fit me. So, yes, that's the front.

That's the epitome of what whatnot is right there in a T shirt. I'm sad you didn't wear that for this interview.

It's so good. 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 thrift store.

It's weird, isn't it? Like, when you. Because I've, you know, 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, you know, certain shows that I'm watching, whatever. And I did the same thing. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna bid on that.

Oh.

And it's so Fast.

It is, yeah. It's like your heart starts racing and 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 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 break it up by category. But there's a significant amount of dresses and yeah, I would say maybe like 50, 50 of like really formal dresses versus a more casual like cocktail type attire.

Oh, man. So you're so far you're glad you did it. I mean you've made like a fifth of your money back already. A fourth of it.

Yeah.

And are you going to buy more stuff or are you just going to like work through this until it's gone and then buy something else?

This is such a good question. I think the One WhatNot 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. I think like $250 million at the end of last month. So I think the platform is in 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 move through it. Some of the lower retail items might be more interesting and it 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 just so new now.

I picture like your traditional whatnot seller as being like super outgoing, like super high energy all over the place.

Yeah.

Is that you or is there hope for people that are not like that naturally?

Oh man, you have the full spectrum on whatnot. 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 the Chocolate Factory Willy Wonka outfit packing, you know, Reese's into. Into a flat rate shit box. I think truly. And I was, I'm A pretty extroverted person. I, you know, I feel pretty comfortable in just like having conversation with people, but I was nervous to get on there.

Yeah.

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 don't want to show your face. There are tons of shows where people are just setting up their camera 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 make a killing.

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 the books, I think you could make a more educated buying decision based on visual, like what you can see on a palette. 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. When it comes to live selling, my. My biggest piece of advice is figure out the shipping. No matter what you're selling, the whatnot back end of the shipping can be really confusing as a new seller. And if you don't have that dialed in right, you can make a big financial mistake with right out of the gate.

You can literally lose your shirts. You 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 if you're looking for something that is basically free, that has a low time investment, that 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? 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, get them for free stuff. Or if you have the space and you have a truck and you're willing to lift some boxes, pick up a gut deals auction, or go rent a.

Truck from Home Depot or a trailer.

Totally.

It's like 30 bucks. What are, like, some sure tells on these books? Like, like the condition or like the brand, the publisher? Like, we've talked about the curriculums or the moneymakers. 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. 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 palette of the same thing that you could take part of it and individually list it, and you could also sell complete sets. 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 palette. This just happened to be a palette 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 seven, eight bucks to ship.

That's amazing, Mindy. This was incredible. Even better than 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? Etc.

I think X is the best place. Okay.

We can link to you there. What's your name on there?

It's hey, Mindy, M I n D. I like igloo. Yeah, that's kind of the melting pot because, you know, these are two. This is kind of a wild combo. I'm a book seller and I sell high end designer clothes, so I'm marrying those two on X. I feel like it works there.

Yeah. I mean, you sell whatever people are buying. That's, that's, that's how it should be.

Yeah. The beautiful thing about this is I have this book business going almost in the 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 whatnot. My book money's 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.

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 a stay at home mom, you just had your fourth child. Like, you limited on time, limit 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 people how to do the same. So I applaud you for that.

Thank you so much. Thank you for this. I am absolutely flattered for the invitation to come here and chat with you. So cool, Chris.

You earned it.

What you've built is incredible. And I'm so excited to talk about this 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 gonna buy a big old pallet of books.

Yeah, I love it. All right, well, thank you, Mindy.

Thank you.

All right, what'd you think? Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.