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EXIT Podcast Episode 05: Amazon Book Sales
435 Plays3 years ago
Exit member Robert B is a prolific side hustler who has cleared $1200-$2500 a month reselling books on Amazon for a few hours on the weekends. We take the first 20 minutes to dream about the future, then get down the the brass tacks of the retail arbitrage business. We discuss:
- stability in mobility, freedom through diverse income streams
- colonizing Detroit, nomadic pastoralism
- is a "holy city" a contradiction in terms?
- why used books are ideal for retail arbitrage
- finding paydirt up & down the value chain
- bringing your brain to "lowbrow" businesses
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Robert B. and His Side Hustles
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to the exit podcast.
00:00:15
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett joined here by Robert B, a exit member.
00:00:19
Speaker
He's a white collar professional who's done a lot of side hustles.
00:00:23
Speaker
I want to talk to him about one that he's been particularly successful at and brought some innovation to, which is third-party book sales, Amazon book sales.
00:00:31
Speaker
Welcome Robert.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hi, yeah, it's fun to be here.
00:00:34
Speaker
And I've listened to all the episodes so far.
00:00:36
Speaker
They've all been really good.
00:00:38
Speaker
Actually, I listened to the one with Indian Bronson last night, and I was thinking like, oh, no, now I, this guy, he goes up there and he talks about like finding inspiration from Sanskrit texts and
00:00:56
Speaker
you know, Hindu mythology.
00:00:57
Speaker
And I'm going to now tell you about taking textbooks out of dumpsters and selling them.
The Quest for Financial Independence
00:01:04
Speaker
Well, I am, I am similarly in awe of guys like that.
00:01:08
Speaker
I am, I am shockingly what's the opposite of well-read.
00:01:16
Speaker
I don't, I don't have those, that great corpus of books that I can point to.
00:01:21
Speaker
Um, but I wanted to talk to you about, you were one of our, our, uh, sort of founding members, earliest people to jump on, uh, which I, which I really appreciated.
00:01:30
Speaker
And I wanted to know sort of what your dream for exit is like, what's, uh, if you could structure your exit from the corporate world, any way that you wanted to and end up anywhere you wanted to, what would you do?
00:01:46
Speaker
And I, I don't have,
00:01:49
Speaker
I'm pretty easy
Building a Family Business Legacy
00:01:50
Speaker
to please, I would say.
00:01:50
Speaker
I mean, for me, it really just comes down to like the sense of control of, you know, I want to make my own money in my own ways and make enough of it that I can live comfortably.
00:02:04
Speaker
I don't have to be super rich or anything.
00:02:07
Speaker
But I've always found personally that I feel more satisfied, more fulfilled doing maybe even something mundane, but that as long as it's my thing.
00:02:21
Speaker
Not everyone is like that.
00:02:22
Speaker
Some people would rather work for the man, I guess, but doing something interesting.
00:02:27
Speaker
For the most part, I'd rather...
00:02:29
Speaker
not, you know, just, just want to avoid the man.
00:02:31
Speaker
And yeah, that's all, that's all it really is for me.
00:02:34
Speaker
I mean, I want to, yeah, I definitely want to have financial independence.
00:02:38
Speaker
I want to be able to create like a good upbringing for my kids and I want to do, you know, maybe businesses where kids can be involved or not to the extent that like they're capable or, or interested in
00:02:53
Speaker
Um, and then, you know, and leave, maybe leave things that are still operating for them.
00:02:57
Speaker
And that's, that's what it kind of comes down to for me.
00:03:00
Speaker
There's a lot of trade-offs I'm, I'd be happy to make to have that, just to have that sense of ownership and control.
00:03:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:08
Speaker
So are you thinking of finding, finding sort of one thing that you commit to, or it sounds like you're interested in like sort of a lot of different hustles.
00:03:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's a lot of things, I think.
00:03:18
Speaker
And that comes back, I think, to not caring too much about what it is.
Diversifying Income Sources
00:03:23
Speaker
I guess I'd rather have like five things that make some amount of money than one thing that makes all the money.
00:03:31
Speaker
Because in part, it's just, you know, it's always, they tell you to diversify.
00:03:35
Speaker
That's part of it, you know, have different things.
00:03:38
Speaker
So maybe macro conditions or in the economy,
00:03:42
Speaker
affect one of your five businesses, but not the other four, that sort of thing.
00:03:46
Speaker
Or, or maybe some of them, some of my businesses would be, some of them might not be canceled proof or whatever, but some, but the rest of them would be that sort of thing, just to have multiple, like, so you can kind of, kind of play different, different parts of it.
00:03:59
Speaker
And there's maybe some intellectual stimulation too, of just doing different things.
00:04:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:03
Speaker
And as far as like your, your family situation, would you want to be out in the country or,
00:04:11
Speaker
Are we trying to make this work in the suburbs or in the city?
Urban vs. Suburban Living
00:04:15
Speaker
I think for the near term, it's going to have to be suburb.
00:04:19
Speaker
My personal preference would be to be a little more remote.
00:04:24
Speaker
Maybe that'll happen someday, but right now I think it's going to have to be just given a certain family things, certain relative things.
00:04:31
Speaker
It's going to have to be suburban, I think.
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:33
Speaker
Just to be close to people.
Reimagining Community Living
00:04:35
Speaker
One of the things that I really,
00:04:37
Speaker
was fascinated by from, from the interview with, with Indian Bronson is his vision of, of this is not like a compound in the woods at all, which has never been what I felt like is, is what it has to be.
00:04:50
Speaker
But he's got this very like urban vision of exit and, and sort of hiding in plain sight and being pseudonymous and getting paid in crypto and, and, um,
00:05:01
Speaker
And being free because if they change the laws in a way you don't like, you can just hop a plane.
00:05:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:10
Speaker
And I don't know if that works necessarily for us because we're trying to build these extended kin groups and communities.
00:05:18
Speaker
And it's hard to see how that functions.
00:05:20
Speaker
But I also think about like in the church, we already sort of do that where like the institution exists everywhere you go and it's the same institution and you just plug into it.
00:05:31
Speaker
which enables us to have this sort of stability in mobility, which I don't know.
00:05:36
Speaker
I don't know of any other, any other group that has that where it's that easy to,
00:05:42
Speaker
that level of uh yeah like and and i think as well they used to um i mean we we won't talk too much about like church stuff but um church leaders used to talk more a little more about contributing in your local ward or you know congregation yeah um i haven't noticed it as much recently but it felt like in like the 70s or something you read these old talks and they were talking a lot about contributing locally and they would warn about you know like rvs like you're gonna get an rv and just disappear every weekend like ah yeah
00:06:12
Speaker
So, so that is something I think about too, though.
00:06:14
Speaker
It's like really important to like have a long stand, ideally a long standing congregation that you're going to for a long time, which is actually one of my, one of my sort of suburban issues right now is that like, I'm, I'm pretty flexible, but my family's pretty, pretty happy with the ward.
00:06:30
Speaker
So with the congregation, they want to stay there and they want to keep going and seeing those people and,
00:06:35
Speaker
So, so that's one of those things though.
00:06:37
Speaker
So, well, and that seems like it doesn't have like a technological solution.
00:06:40
Speaker
He's all about these technological solutions, which is like, you know, he's a genius and the stuff that he comes up with is brilliant.
00:06:45
Speaker
But like, I'm thinking about how do you, I don't know that there's like a fix to the problem of other than, other than like everybody goes together.
Intentional Gentrification and Community Building
00:06:55
Speaker
Like, and that's, if you've talked to Jesse Lucas about this, he has this vision of sort of returning to tribal relationships.
00:07:03
Speaker
pastoralism almost where we're big sort of gypsy camps that move around, which, you know, is a little fanciful, but it's a fun idea.
00:07:13
Speaker
Well, that's actually, that's, that's kind of a side interest of my, this concept I've had for a long time, which I can't be, you know, like the person who thought of this first or whatever, but you see like these gentrification cycles, you know, and maybe a bad part of a city or even a small town or something.
00:07:27
Speaker
If you had a small amount of people who were committed, it would only take a handful of families, but it would probably have to be families.
00:07:36
Speaker
Go choose a spot and just say, we're going to get really cheap real estate in this area and we're going to be good neighbors.
00:07:42
Speaker
We're not going to come in and be like some cult that is really bad to our host.
00:07:48
Speaker
But you could very quickly improve a bunch of cheap property and make the place hip and cool or whatever.
00:07:55
Speaker
normally gentrification happens in a very different way like you know artists and less maybe less wholesome people yeah move in and start gentrifying but I think I think you could do some intentional gentrification like with groups but that's a sort of a side thing that's something I've thought about quite a bit yeah the fellas have have often coveted
00:08:17
Speaker
those like $10,000 houses in Detroit where it's like, we could go by like several blocks of that with our not really remarkable middle-class incomes.
00:08:29
Speaker
We could go by an enormous amount of, of land out there.
00:08:34
Speaker
And of course you'd have to, you'd have to, you know, replace all the copper pipes that have been stripped and, and, and basically bulldoze those houses.
00:08:42
Speaker
I mean, it'd be,
00:08:44
Speaker
They'd be uninhabitable, but, and then you get into sort of like, well, you're dealing with the local politics and how much would that be a problem?
00:08:53
Speaker
But I, I'm fascinated by that idea of sort of, we all go together and then how do you coordinate that?
00:09:00
Speaker
Like, you know,
00:09:01
Speaker
when does the group decide that it's time to leave and, and boy, it'd just be logistically.
00:09:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:07
Speaker
It'd be tough.
00:09:08
Speaker
It'd be prohibitively.
00:09:10
Speaker
So at least in right now, in my case, but someone, some group of people who have the right mix of personalities is going to, is going to do this, I think.
00:09:18
Speaker
And they're going to, it's going to be, and a big component of it is that they'll make it look very cool.
00:09:23
Speaker
And, and that will very rapidly increase like property values.
00:09:28
Speaker
And then they'll all sell out and leave once, once everyone else comes.
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah.
Technology’s Role in Community Organization
00:09:33
Speaker
And I want to talk about this, too, because like going back to the church, I've never got the sense from the brethren that they're like Luddites or reactionaries.
00:09:45
Speaker
Like as much as we get accused of sort of being 1950s throwbacks, every time they're talking about technology, they're talking about what a miracle it is.
00:09:55
Speaker
and how exciting it is.
00:09:59
Speaker
And part of that is I'm sure just their perspective of, because they were all born in like the 1920s, 1930s.
00:10:04
Speaker
That's less true today.
00:10:07
Speaker
But the Gordon B Hinckley generation sort of was, they got to see refrigeration and air conditioning and popularized flight and computers and all this stuff.
00:10:22
Speaker
And, you know, they, they, they, you know, they were, they were open-eyed about the challenges of that, especially with like pornography and media and, and, and, uh, sort of technology addiction, but they always framed it as like, this is something that you need to embrace and find the right way to use.
00:10:42
Speaker
Yeah, we all joke about return.
00:10:45
Speaker
And it's, yeah, it's not going to... I don't think we're going to get to return.
00:10:51
Speaker
We're going to get to make, but not return.
00:10:55
Speaker
And yeah, these tools are...
00:10:58
Speaker
Yeah, we joke around a lot about the bad side of technology, but they do allow you to organize information so quick.
00:11:04
Speaker
And if you have good intentions and good people doing that organizing, that's a really powerful thing.
00:11:10
Speaker
Now, of course, yeah, we see that it's a lot of really bad people are also using those tools.
00:11:16
Speaker
But yeah, we can use them too and we can build awesome things.
00:11:22
Speaker
I mean, just in terms of this group, like I imagine what it would be like to
00:11:26
Speaker
if we were in a similar state of sort of cultural and national decline and my social group was restricted to the people that I work with, that would be unbelievably isolating.
00:11:40
Speaker
And so the fact that I get to find like-minded people all over the country and network with them and, you know, find, you know, they, they find me jobs.
00:11:51
Speaker
I find them jobs.
00:11:52
Speaker
We sort of move around.
00:11:53
Speaker
the mobility of our time is, is a, is a gift as well as a challenge.
00:12:00
Speaker
And like, you know, the missionaries right now, I don't, I don't even know how it works at this point, but it seems like it's mostly like Facebook and Instagram and like their sort of social media.
00:12:14
Speaker
They're not knocking doors, which is probably a good thing, but like, it doesn't seem like we found the, the,
00:12:21
Speaker
the right application of that technology yet, but like, they're clearly trying.
00:12:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:26
Speaker
Every, um, you know, I do have some of those like legacy social media accounts and sometimes I get, uh, yeah.
00:12:34
Speaker
Followed by, by missionaries.
00:12:35
Speaker
And, uh, and then that's even before I realized they're in my actual local congregation and I'm like, who is this?
00:12:42
Speaker
I'm like, why am I being followed?
00:12:43
Speaker
Why did four, uh, 20 year old girls just follow me at the same time?
00:12:47
Speaker
This is weird.
00:12:49
Speaker
Which is funny because that would be, I would be either missionaries or like a Slovakian porn site or something.
00:12:55
Speaker
So yeah, it's a, yeah, I guess that's a, I mean, yeah, I guess that's how they have to do it right now.
00:13:03
Speaker
But, but yeah, I mean, I, I,
00:13:06
Speaker
In general, I mean, I'm not a, what would the term be, technophobe or whatever.
00:13:11
Speaker
I'm a tech optimist or whatever.
00:13:13
Speaker
I used to actually work around some like tech investing.
00:13:18
Speaker
And I was really pretty into that.
00:13:20
Speaker
And I'm pretty positive about it.
00:13:22
Speaker
I mean, I saw a lot in real time, I was seeing a lot of things I didn't like or seeing the writing on the wall.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:29
Speaker
that certain products I was, you know, reviewing for investment would maybe not make it or not, not that they wouldn't make it, that they wouldn't, they wouldn't be a good thing for society.
00:13:38
Speaker
And then some of them have gone on to not be a good thing for society, but, but yeah, in, in total, I'm actually a tech optimist.
Economic Challenges and Technological Solutions
00:13:45
Speaker
I like to use tech to meet cool people and to organize aspects of my own life or to, you know, automate some things, not that we should automate away every day,
00:13:57
Speaker
mundane thing we have to do, but I do use it to my advantage.
00:14:00
Speaker
The brethren seem to like celebrate labor saving in a big way.
00:14:04
Speaker
And more time for prayer.
00:14:08
Speaker
I mean, that sounds like a joke, but it's like, if you're doing the big challenge, I think economically and personally for so many people is that we've had these things that have made it so we could free up our time.
00:14:22
Speaker
We just didn't do better things with that time.
00:14:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:25
Speaker
And just one more point on this sort of larger topic.
00:14:29
Speaker
I was reading Elder Holland's address about BYU.
00:14:32
Speaker
He talks about the idea of a celestial college town and sort of the school being integral to the holy city.
00:14:41
Speaker
And that got me thinking about
00:14:43
Speaker
just the idea of a holy city period is so hard for us to understand, like in our context, because the cities are just so ideologically like tagged as hostile, tagged as enemy territory.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:59
Speaker
And like, what would that even look like?
00:15:01
Speaker
What would a holy city even be?
00:15:03
Speaker
And, you know, I think Bronson's general ideas like Singapore, but Singapore definitely is not,
00:15:12
Speaker
It's a very secular, very sort of brass tacks place.
Vision of a Holy City
00:15:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:16
Speaker
Productivity fetish sort of thing.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:20
Speaker
But, but it got me thinking, yeah, what would a holy city look like to you?
00:15:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting.
00:15:25
Speaker
And I'm actually racking my brain for like, have I been to a place that's like city scale that had a holiness about it?
00:15:32
Speaker
And I mean, I don't know.
00:15:34
Speaker
I mean, you're going to see a lot of people talking online about the architecture and that's important.
00:15:39
Speaker
I would think a holy city would have beautiful architecture.
00:15:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:43
Speaker
But that would be, that's obviously secondary to the actual like hearts and minds of the people.
00:15:48
Speaker
This may be a little cheesy, but there are,
00:15:51
Speaker
There were at least there were, it's been a while since I've actually spent meaningful time in, in Salt Lake.
00:15:56
Speaker
There were times when you could be around like the temple square area and it was like extremely clean.
00:16:03
Speaker
Uh, people were, um, like very, you know, polite, uh, and there was some of that vibe back then, but there's been a long time since I really like lived there.
00:16:15
Speaker
You know, I imagine living in an apartment building,
00:16:18
Speaker
in some city and having, cause like an apartment building, if you think about it, it's probably roughly like ward scale, roughly like Dunbar number, number of people in it.
00:16:31
Speaker
And I guess to me, the vision of, of like a holy city would be a place where, you know, you're not going to make many more connections than that, just because of the limitations of time and your brain to hold that many people in it.
00:16:45
Speaker
And so you are going to be surrounded by strangers, but you're also going to have your community within that sort of mass of humanity.
00:16:57
Speaker
And I guess that the difference would be the depth of connection with that local community and then sort of how much threat there is or how much uncertainty there is about the mass of humanity that surrounds that community.
00:17:11
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:17:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be interesting to be in a place where you could reasonably anticipate that most everyone you would interact with has not just the same values, because I mean, I think you can kind of do that now, but the same like high level values, like kind of a more at a more holy level, I guess.
00:17:34
Speaker
But yeah, being confident that
00:17:37
Speaker
that all your interactions are going to be sort of on that plane that I don't, I'm unfamiliar with this really.
00:17:42
Speaker
I mean, you know, there's small gatherings where I can anticipate that, but, but I, I, I don't know.
00:17:49
Speaker
I'm having a hard time even conceptualizing a really big place where that would be the case.
00:17:54
Speaker
And the closest, I mean, actually the closest analog that I can think of is that word structure where I go to, I go to any number of words.
00:18:02
Speaker
Like if you're, if you're traveling or you're, you're on assignment or something,
00:18:06
Speaker
you go to any number of words and you sort of know what you're getting.
00:18:09
Speaker
That would be the closest thing of like, you know, no, I'm not friends with these people, but I know that we're, we have the same orientation.
00:18:18
Speaker
For me, psychologically at this point, I'm capable of conceiving of like a holy village, but like, yeah.
00:18:25
Speaker
Um, but the, but to think of it at a big enough scale, maybe I, maybe I lack vision, but that's, or just the psychological capacity, but that's sort of where I'm at.
00:18:33
Speaker
Like I could see that, you know, you know, some of the people we're hanging out with online, I could imagine that, um, yeah, smaller scale, but.
00:18:41
Speaker
And even that, you know, the people we hang out with online are so schismatic that maybe that's hard to picture.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:49
Speaker
It's, it's a, it's a strange dream.
00:18:52
Speaker
Anyway, so I want to talk about the book sales and how that went for you, to what scale you built that business and why you didn't go further with it, what you would sort of counsel someone who was contemplating the same
The Book Flipping Business
00:19:08
Speaker
thing.
00:19:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:09
Speaker
So yeah, we'll come down from the heavenly and talk about something that's very, very pedestrian.
00:19:15
Speaker
So yeah, I was doing grad school.
00:19:20
Speaker
So I was on a university campus and I just wanted some sort of like side hustle or something because like school was not that demanding.
00:19:29
Speaker
So I needed something else to kind of like do for fun and it's nice to make money.
00:19:34
Speaker
So I don't know where I initially got the idea, but I started just flipping old books.
00:19:40
Speaker
And I just realized on Amazon, it was very easy to just look up a book and see if it sells for enough money that it's worth listing.
00:19:51
Speaker
And so I just started checking every book I had.
00:19:53
Speaker
Anything I wanted to get rid of, I would just see, okay, maybe I can sell this.
00:19:56
Speaker
And there's a lot.
00:19:57
Speaker
Most of them don't have any value, but a lot of them do.
00:20:00
Speaker
And then the thing about being on a campus was there's books everywhere.
00:20:04
Speaker
And so I was like, people would give me their books.
00:20:08
Speaker
They're like, they're like, I'm not going to go to the hassle of going to the library and sending in a line and returning these for cash.
00:20:15
Speaker
Cause there was those places that would do that.
00:20:16
Speaker
But a lot of people aren't even going to do that or people just leave on places or I'd go to like the dorms on the day where everyone gets like evicted or whatever.
00:20:25
Speaker
I mean, not evicted, but move out day.
00:20:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:27
Speaker
And there would just be like furniture and books all over the place.
00:20:32
Speaker
So I just take them and sell them.
00:20:34
Speaker
And these are textbooks.
00:20:34
Speaker
So they're pretty valuable.
00:20:36
Speaker
It's I mean, if you are going to get into to book selling, you know, textbooks are like the Holy Grail and you're not going to find a lot of textbooks unless you're just getting lucky or like or you're on a campus.
00:20:45
Speaker
But yeah.
00:20:46
Speaker
Furniture.
00:20:47
Speaker
So there's like textbooks and furniture.
00:20:48
Speaker
I wasn't doing furniture because I didn't have like a big van or a truck or anything.
00:20:52
Speaker
But furniture is a great category to flip as well.
00:20:55
Speaker
Like you can often get furniture free and then sell it for 75 bucks or something like that.
00:21:00
Speaker
Like it's not huge money, but it's pretty easy money.
00:21:05
Speaker
Or you can buy something for, you know, 50 bucks and easily sell for 150.
00:21:09
Speaker
That's really common.
00:21:10
Speaker
If you go on YouTube, you'll find a lot of like couch flippers and stuff like that.
00:21:13
Speaker
And it is pretty easy.
00:21:15
Speaker
I've done a little bit of it.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:17
Speaker
And I guess the limiting factor on that is just how much can you fit in the back of a truck and drive around?
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:22
Speaker
It's like your space.
00:21:23
Speaker
And so it becomes a logistics business and a storage business pretty fast, but it's just, I guess, kind of the broader point, and I'll hit on this a few times, I think, is just like always be looking out for that stuff if you need money and if you have the time and if you... But it's probably like the easiest way to convert...
00:21:41
Speaker
free time without a lot of like skill or investment into some money.
00:21:46
Speaker
Yeah, totally.
00:21:48
Speaker
So then with books, after I was done with school, I would, I would then, you know, there's a lot of people who go to like these big book sales and you can find them all over.
00:21:57
Speaker
There's like websites devoted to knowing where they are.
00:22:01
Speaker
And when they're going to be, I mean, the pandemic stuff has probably messed that up, but there's these big book sales and you go.
00:22:07
Speaker
And if you've ever been to one, you know what I'm talking about?
00:22:09
Speaker
You see a bunch of people and I will call them weirdos.
00:22:13
Speaker
They have these like barcode scanners and they're scanning every single book in this place.
00:22:17
Speaker
And they're trying to find the valuable ones and they're going to buy them and take them.
00:22:20
Speaker
And these people are,
00:22:21
Speaker
They tend to be very rude and they're very awful.
00:22:24
Speaker
Like as a, as a veteran of the book selling industry, I don't think these people should even be allowed inside of these book sales.
00:22:31
Speaker
Picture this is sort of like scavenger, like Java type people.
00:22:35
Speaker
It's exactly that.
00:22:36
Speaker
And like,
00:22:37
Speaker
You can probably hear the contempt I have.
00:22:40
Speaker
These are some of the most annoying people.
00:22:42
Speaker
I've seen them knock over children and take books out of people's hands.
00:22:46
Speaker
They're just very annoying.
00:22:48
Speaker
And so you don't want to be them for two reasons, because they're bad people and also because what they're doing is pretty low return on their time.
00:22:57
Speaker
Some of them do make a ton of money, but yeah, it's a real big grind what they're doing.
00:23:03
Speaker
So what I decided to do instead is like, and I would also go to like thrift stores and thrift stores are okay.
00:23:08
Speaker
But the big problem with thrift stores for finding books that have value is that most thrift stores, especially at the big chains like Goodwill, they have an in-house team that goes through the books first and puts them online.
00:23:23
Speaker
So they take all the good ones out.
00:23:25
Speaker
and sell them on Amazon.
00:23:26
Speaker
If you go on Amazon right now and find Google any book that you are interested in buying, look at the used listings, you're going to see like Goodwill of Michigan or Goodwill of Arizona, Goodwill of Southeastern US.
00:23:39
Speaker
They will be selling that book because yeah, they took it out of circulation.
00:23:42
Speaker
So when you donate like to Goodwill,
00:23:45
Speaker
you think, oh, I'm going to be donating this thing so someone can get it for cheap.
00:23:48
Speaker
It's like, that's not the case.
00:23:49
Speaker
They're going to take the good stuff first and they're going to sell it at market value to just some normal consumer.
00:23:55
Speaker
That's not like, I mean, you're helping Goodwill raise money and I don't know if they do good things with that money, but you're not necessarily helping the poor.
00:24:01
Speaker
So what I figured is, okay, well, Goodwill is my competitor.
00:24:07
Speaker
Like these other, these people with their scanners, they are not my competitor because
00:24:13
Speaker
I don't want to do what they're doing.
00:24:14
Speaker
Goodwill has all the books.
00:24:15
Speaker
So I, so where are the good books?
00:24:17
Speaker
Like they're in, they're on the, they're on the shelves of like old people's houses or at your house, like you have good books.
00:24:24
Speaker
So what I started doing is like going Craigslist maybe and find people who are like off like an estate sale or something and offer to buy like the whole library, you know, for like 10 cents a book, 20 cents a book, something like that.
00:24:37
Speaker
And then you go through them.
00:24:37
Speaker
Most of them are junk.
00:24:39
Speaker
If you're operating at a big enough scale, which I was not, but if you are, you can start to get deals with like paper recyclers.
00:24:45
Speaker
They'll buy your old junk books or something from you.
00:24:49
Speaker
So like, it's kind of like every part of the Buffalo thing.
00:24:52
Speaker
Like there's like, always look for that, whatever you're doing, like any sort of business you're doing.
00:24:58
Speaker
Like I know electricians who don't, you don't save like copper wiring.
00:25:02
Speaker
And that to me is like very funny.
00:25:03
Speaker
It's like you, the stuff that,
00:25:06
Speaker
goes up in value all the time, they'll cut off like pounds and pounds of a day.
00:25:11
Speaker
They don't save it.
00:25:12
Speaker
They throw it away.
00:25:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:13
Speaker
People will break into buildings to steal that.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:17
Speaker
And so, so just think about that.
00:25:19
Speaker
Like, you know, if you're, I don't know if this is the case, but I was thinking about like that landscaping episode you did.
00:25:25
Speaker
And I've been watching like some landscaping YouTube videos just because I watch a lot of YouTube videos.
00:25:32
Speaker
And like some of the guys were complaining about disposal fees, like they have to pay to dump their grass somewhere or whatever.
00:25:38
Speaker
Right now, I don't know that much about landscaping.
00:25:41
Speaker
So like if it's possible,
00:25:44
Speaker
Find someone who needs it so you can dump it for free or find someone who might even buy it or something.
00:25:50
Speaker
I don't know if glass clippings have any value to anyone.
00:25:52
Speaker
Well, yeah, that's, I mean, yeah, because I mean, that was one of the reasons why I was sort of contemplating the yard waste.
00:26:00
Speaker
side of that business because one of the biggest problems is that a dump run is like a hundred, 150 bucks in some places, but I have 10 acres of land and I could dump basically as many leaves as I can gather.
00:26:15
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:26:16
Speaker
Like they're not going to, not going to make a problem.
00:26:18
Speaker
So yeah.
00:26:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:20
Speaker
That's kind of like, that's part of my thing is like, just always be looking for that, that other way to like, to improve your operation.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:29
Speaker
Now, I totally get that a lot of people are just like, I don't want to be doing, I want to be financially free, but I don't want to be doing some dumb business.
00:26:36
Speaker
And that's fine.
00:26:36
Speaker
But personally, I find that when I'm like bringing my brain to it, I'm like, actually, like it can be the dumbest thing ever.
00:26:44
Speaker
Like it could be, you know, maybe you're like doing like sanitation, you're picking up porta potties or something, but finding just ways to do it differently and better that like your competitors aren't doing or something.
00:26:54
Speaker
There's like a lot of satisfaction, at least for me in doing that.
00:26:57
Speaker
Back to the book stuff, though, you want to think of Goodwill as your competitor.
00:27:01
Speaker
So you want to get those books from old people who have a big library before they die and it just gets donated to Goodwill.
00:27:11
Speaker
In sort of general terms, if there's some big institution that is sort of aggregating the treasure pile for you to look through,
00:27:22
Speaker
they've probably already picked it through.
00:27:23
Speaker
I mean, that's true of like Amazon and, you know, all of these third parties.
00:27:28
Speaker
So the farther up that process, you can go to sort of the raw like pay dirt,
00:27:36
Speaker
it's got to be the better you do.
00:27:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:38
Speaker
Like a personal library that's never been, that no one's ever looked through.
00:27:42
Speaker
And it was really bad of me, but I would notice when I'd go to other people's houses, I'd just like start eyeing their bookshelves and stuff.
00:27:48
Speaker
Cause I had a really good sense for what was valuable.
00:27:51
Speaker
And I would just sit there and be like, Oh my goodness, they have, there's gotta be like,
00:27:55
Speaker
thousand dollars of books on that shelf.
00:27:57
Speaker
Like there's so many books.
00:27:58
Speaker
There's some of them are so good.
00:28:00
Speaker
I know those ones would sell, but you get to know, I mean, that's another thing too, is you, anything you, you get to know your industry.
00:28:07
Speaker
And I think if you're, if you're doing your own thing and it's for you and it's for your family, you just, you get into it, I think in a different way.
00:28:14
Speaker
At least I do.
00:28:15
Speaker
And fine.
00:28:16
Speaker
There's like a lot more,
00:28:18
Speaker
to it than you ever maybe thought possible.
00:28:21
Speaker
So yeah, so I started going on Craigslist, getting people's collections.
00:28:25
Speaker
Now here's where I got off the boat.
00:28:28
Speaker
I was running into storage space in my
Business Decisions and Exiting the Book Market
00:28:30
Speaker
own home.
00:28:30
Speaker
And it was like that crossroads where I'm like, do I want to keep growing this?
00:28:35
Speaker
Or I could maintain and just stay how I'm doing, but I want to make more money.
00:28:39
Speaker
Or I could get commercial space and grow.
00:28:41
Speaker
And I decided against that.
00:28:43
Speaker
And actually, it's kind of a...
00:28:45
Speaker
kind of a funny story, but where I, where I really knew it was kind of over was where I realized it was time to end.
00:28:52
Speaker
I'd found this, this real treasure trove on Craigslist.
00:28:55
Speaker
Someone, someone, I think had died.
00:28:57
Speaker
I wasn't sure, but I think someone had died and there was like 5,000 books in their house.
00:29:02
Speaker
And I was, they posted a bunch of pictures and you can just go through the pictures and like read titles.
00:29:07
Speaker
And if you, once, you know, you kind of like know what's good.
00:29:11
Speaker
And a lot of this stuff was like old history texts.
00:29:14
Speaker
Um,
00:29:15
Speaker
There was a ton of like religious, particularly like Jewish esoterica.
00:29:20
Speaker
Like I just knew this stuff.
00:29:22
Speaker
There was easily, there was numerous like 100, 200, $500 books in there.
00:29:27
Speaker
And there was 5,000 of them.
00:29:29
Speaker
So I'm like, this is at least, this is at least like 20 grand worth of books or something.
00:29:34
Speaker
Like the average value of these books is going to be a couple bucks each because they're just, they're all so good.
00:29:39
Speaker
And there's a few real high ticket ones in there.
00:29:42
Speaker
And so I'm like, okay.
00:29:44
Speaker
And that's when I decided I'm like, all right, I'm going to scale up because I'm going to go get all 5,000 of these books and I'm going to need a storage locker and I'm going to need to rent a van to pick them up.
00:29:54
Speaker
So I go and rent the van and I contact the guy who's getting rid of them.
00:29:57
Speaker
Who's just like, I think he was a real estate guy or something.
00:30:00
Speaker
Cause it's like, he was trying to sell off this house where someone had died.
00:30:03
Speaker
And he's like, yeah, man, you can come get the books.
00:30:08
Speaker
And then I get there and he's like, oh, sorry, I gave them away.
00:30:12
Speaker
Someone else came.
00:30:14
Speaker
And I was just like, what are you talking about?
00:30:17
Speaker
Like, I talked to him like three times, like talked to him the day before I talked to him that morning.
00:30:20
Speaker
And then I confirmed him my way over.
00:30:22
Speaker
And then like in the 30th, I got there, some other guy came and got him.
00:30:28
Speaker
So that's a challenge with like vision, right?
00:30:33
Speaker
Is if they don't see the value of what they have, which is a good thing in a certain sense.
00:30:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:39
Speaker
Uh, then they also don't get that.
00:30:41
Speaker
It's fricking important that you don't just hand it off to somebody else.
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:46
Speaker
So that's, that's where I'm like, okay, it's like probably time to like, so, and then I wanted to reclaim the space in my house and stuff.
00:30:52
Speaker
I'm like, all right, that's, that's, that's it.
00:30:54
Speaker
I'll, I'll, I'll exit the business for now.
00:30:57
Speaker
That'd be brutally demoralizing.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yeah, I'm like a very, I guess to use like a modern term, I'm very chill, but that was like super, super mad.
00:31:09
Speaker
I don't get that mad very often.
00:31:12
Speaker
But the, so that's when I got out of it, but I guess the broader point for anyone who's like curious about this stuff is that I was doing like easily less than 10 hours a week.
00:31:21
Speaker
Probably, I mean, probably more like four, probably like four hours a week.
00:31:24
Speaker
I would like stop at certain thrift stores that I knew that I knew weren't filtering first.
00:31:29
Speaker
They were like kind of lower, lower end thrift stores.
00:31:31
Speaker
They weren't big chains.
00:31:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:33
Speaker
they just put whatever they had on the shelf.
00:31:35
Speaker
And, and I even, you know, this is one of those things where you just, you be scrappy and you, you know, you talk to the manager, you tell them, you can sometimes tell them what you're doing and they don't really care.
00:31:45
Speaker
And they'll like be like, Oh, fine.
00:31:46
Speaker
Just, you can go in the back room.
00:31:47
Speaker
You can look at the stuff before anyone sees it.
00:31:49
Speaker
But like, if you're going to come in here every, every Tuesday and buy like a hundred books, we don't, we don't, we're happy to let you, you know, go in the back room sort of thing.
00:31:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:59
Speaker
So I would stop at this like thrift, a couple of different thrift stores after work.
00:32:03
Speaker
And I can't, when I was driving places and that was pretty much all I was doing.
00:32:07
Speaker
And I was probably making a bad month, like 1200 bucks and on a good month, like 2,500 bucks.
00:32:14
Speaker
Four hours a week.
00:32:15
Speaker
That's not bad.
00:32:16
Speaker
Yeah, it was really good.
00:32:17
Speaker
I knew, and then I just knew, like I had the model scale or like fine tuned enough.
Understanding the E-commerce Value Chain
00:32:22
Speaker
I knew that if I just started scaling up, it would keep returning at a similar rate.
00:32:26
Speaker
Maybe the rate of return would go down a little, but I knew it would still be good.
00:32:31
Speaker
But then, I mean, I had a real job.
00:32:33
Speaker
I was trying to do a good job at that job and I was trying to focus on that and stuff.
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:38
Speaker
Well, so tell me a little bit about like, because if it's four hours a week, but you're making these trips,
00:32:44
Speaker
you're picking up these books.
00:32:47
Speaker
So are you, are you at the thrift store, are you buying like big piles of books or are you just picking the winners?
00:32:55
Speaker
I'm picking winners and also making some guesses.
00:32:59
Speaker
So you can tell what the winners are.
00:33:00
Speaker
There's little, there's little tools you can get that are like, that are just like a Bluetooth peripherals for your smartphone.
00:33:07
Speaker
You can get like these little barcode scanners or something, the same ones that the weirdos at the book fair are using.
00:33:13
Speaker
you can get those and just like scan a book and you, and there's like third party software you can buy that will tell you that you can like set some limits and stay just like if a book meets the following criteria, just, just, just make the screen go green and I'll buy out and get it.
00:33:29
Speaker
And so I was doing that a bit at the thrift stores and stuff.
00:33:32
Speaker
And then the, you know, you just develop an eye for it.
00:33:34
Speaker
So there's stuff I would, some, some things that databases just don't have, they just don't know if it'll be valuable or not, but you get a sense for it and you get it anyway.
00:33:43
Speaker
And then you... So you take your big box home and then you...
00:33:49
Speaker
You list them on Amazon?
00:33:50
Speaker
Yeah, you got to list them.
00:33:51
Speaker
That's a somewhat manual process.
00:33:53
Speaker
There's like software and tools you can get to automate it.
00:33:58
Speaker
Some people that I know of in like the third party book world, they'll get like some housewife, find someone who will do it for them and they'll pay them, you know, like 10 cents a book or five cents a book or something like that.
00:34:10
Speaker
And I think that's pretty easy to do to find someone to help you do it.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yeah, the way I was doing it, I was doing it by myself.
00:34:15
Speaker
But yeah, I was just on the verge of outsourcing.
00:34:20
Speaker
And I mean, at that level of return, being able to do it by yourself and still pulling that kind of return with that kind of time investment is pretty impressive.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's the only reason it was that good.
00:34:33
Speaker
It's not that good if you just...
00:34:38
Speaker
go to like a book fair or Goodwill or whatever.
00:34:42
Speaker
The only reason it was that good is because I was going like upstream before books got into the system where like anyone could find them, which is like kind of my bigger point here, I think is like,
00:34:53
Speaker
Just understand your business and understand the value chain and then go play in the part of the value chain that really makes sense for what you're doing.
00:34:59
Speaker
Don't just like see how everyone else does it and do it the same way.
00:35:02
Speaker
There's some benefit in doing that sometimes because they've laid the path out.
00:35:06
Speaker
Maybe start that way, but then... And that is if you're hesitant or you're sort of risk averse or like you're worried if it's going to be worth the time.
00:35:17
Speaker
Maybe having that laid out for you.
00:35:20
Speaker
I'm the type of guy, I just, just in order to overcome my sort of innate laziness, I need to see a path so that I can do it.
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:30
Speaker
So that I can muster up the will to do it.
00:35:34
Speaker
And so, yeah, maybe you start there, but then, yeah, you got to quickly be thinking like all of the smart things to be done with this business can't have already been done.
00:35:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:44
Speaker
And even if they are, there's at least when I was doing books, it still felt like there was enough meat on the bone, like just in the whole, in the broader market.
00:35:53
Speaker
And disclaimer, I don't know how the pandemic stuff has altered that.
00:35:57
Speaker
I've heard, I have not done it like a deep dive.
00:36:00
Speaker
I've heard that books like used book values have gone up just like used cars have gone up because people,
00:36:07
Speaker
people are maybe reading more, they have more time, they're just sitting around, but then, but then maybe, I don't know if Amazon has changed any of their rules, but there's other marketplaces too, but Amazon's obviously the main one.
00:36:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:18
Speaker
But yeah, I don't know if, I don't know if conditions in the market have changed very much.
00:36:21
Speaker
I guess that's, that's all I'm saying.
00:36:22
Speaker
Well, and books, books are such an interesting commodity.
00:36:25
Speaker
And I mean, this is why Amazon got started as a bookseller, right?
00:36:28
Speaker
Is because they were each instance of a particular book is just so uniform and so regular.
00:36:34
Speaker
Like there's
00:36:36
Speaker
they have the quality sort of level of like, is it in bad shape?
00:36:39
Speaker
Is it in good shape?
00:36:40
Speaker
But like, you know, the exact weight, you know, the exact content, like it's, it's a very, it's a very uniform product.
00:36:50
Speaker
And so it's really amenable to like archiving in a database and, and providing to people because like, well, like if you're, if one of the biggest challenges with getting people to start doing e-commerce is,
00:37:03
Speaker
was like, I'm going to order this from a site that I don't necessarily trust.
00:37:08
Speaker
And they've got some third-party seller who I definitely don't trust.
00:37:12
Speaker
And they're going to send it to me.
00:37:14
Speaker
And then maybe I don't like it.
00:37:15
Speaker
Maybe I paid shipping.
00:37:16
Speaker
Maybe I got to send it back.
00:37:18
Speaker
And like, there's just all kinds of, there's a big trust problem there.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:22
Speaker
And books,
00:37:24
Speaker
were like, I don't really have to trust anybody.
00:37:27
Speaker
Like as long as they actually send it and don't send me like a box with a live Bobcat in it, like I will get what I'm asking for.
00:37:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:37
Speaker
And that sort of obviated that problem.
00:37:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:40
Speaker
And that's the other part of this is books are books are like the best, just, just like what Bezos himself realized books are like the best first product.
00:37:48
Speaker
And then you scale out into other things.
00:37:50
Speaker
So like if, if someone is trying to get, and I did, I did the fulfilled by Amazon program, FBA, you, you, you may come across that online.
00:37:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:59
Speaker
I shipped my own books and I did FBA.
00:38:00
Speaker
I did both.
00:38:01
Speaker
It just kind of depends on like the, the value profile of a given book, but.
00:38:06
Speaker
Which one makes sense to which value profile?
00:38:08
Speaker
Something that'll sell fast, you want to, it's probably good to send into Amazon because they have like storage fees and stuff.
00:38:17
Speaker
But if you have like a, if you're using your house, like I was in my storage fee, my own storage fee in a sense was zero.
00:38:22
Speaker
It's like, I guess I can keep long-term stuff in my house and stuff that'll sell quick.
00:38:27
Speaker
I'll send to them and they'll handle, they'll handle the transaction and stuff.
00:38:30
Speaker
And when you do the, some, some products as well, some books, um,
00:38:35
Speaker
It's very bizarre.
00:38:36
Speaker
And you figure these things out as you go along.
00:38:38
Speaker
But some books will sell for like $25 prime.
00:38:43
Speaker
Like there's a big prime premium.
00:38:44
Speaker
But a used copy from a seller, if the seller is in Indiana and they're going to send from their house in Indiana, people will only pay like $7.
00:38:52
Speaker
And it's not logical really because it's like the guy from Indiana is going to get it there almost as fast, maybe a couple days slower.
00:38:59
Speaker
But people just have a lot of faith in that prime premium.
00:39:02
Speaker
that prime load.
00:39:03
Speaker
Oh man.
00:39:04
Speaker
No, totally.
00:39:05
Speaker
And just, um, I've noticed it myself, just the impulse of like, I don't want to wait four days.
00:39:13
Speaker
I want to wait two days or maybe one day.
00:39:15
Speaker
And like, yeah, if he were to, if he were to put a dollar amount on that, if Bezos were to say like, well, you can get it for one day, but it's $3 more.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:24
Speaker
Uh, everyone would balk.
00:39:26
Speaker
But if he just says, this is the price and I'll give it to you for one, I'll give it to you in one day.
00:39:30
Speaker
It's in fact, I, from what I understand, there's been,
00:39:33
Speaker
some jurisdictions that have tried to ban free shipping because of the fact that it obscures the true cost of the service.
00:39:43
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't surprise
Consumer Behavior on Amazon
00:39:44
Speaker
me.
00:39:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:44
Speaker
So you figure out and you learn these weird things.
00:39:48
Speaker
I mean, like if it's a highly technical manual that sells for a lot of money or something, the kind of person who's going to buy it is probably a good consumer, too.
00:39:58
Speaker
And so they are going to notice because Amazon's a little tricky.
00:40:01
Speaker
They'll make it look like the only option is the prime option or something.
00:40:05
Speaker
But like a more savvy consumer, especially if they're spending a little more, they're going to like notice that there's used versions too.
00:40:12
Speaker
So like those, those sorts of things, if it's like a hundred dollar geology book from the sixties and there's you, you'd be amazed like the weird stuff that has staying power.
00:40:21
Speaker
But like if it's some, something like that, that I know it's going to take me probably a year to sell it, but when it sells, it'll be for a hundred bucks.
00:40:29
Speaker
So I'm not going to send it into Amazon.
00:40:30
Speaker
I'll just hold onto it.
00:40:31
Speaker
And the buyer, people who buy that, they have no qualms about buying from,
00:40:35
Speaker
the weird guy in Indiana.
00:40:38
Speaker
So, so you learn little things like that and that's, that's how you decide sort of what goes into FBA and what doesn't.
00:40:44
Speaker
And they have a lot of rules that you learn, especially when you get into other categories like electronics and stuff.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:49
Speaker
And that's why you start with books or something comparable, you know, maybe clothing or something where it's just pretty durable goods that aren't going to, that don't require special shipping or something.
00:40:58
Speaker
There's not a lot of dimensionality to it.
00:41:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:01
Speaker
What would you, if you were to do, if you were to expand into a different sort of third-party sales industry?
00:41:06
Speaker
I had done on Amazon.
00:41:08
Speaker
I had done a couple other things.
00:41:09
Speaker
Like I would just occasionally come across a certain thing that I knew would sell or that people had told me would sell.
00:41:16
Speaker
Oddly enough, like VCRs were really big for a while.
00:41:18
Speaker
Maybe they still are.
00:41:19
Speaker
Oh, really?
00:41:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:20
Speaker
I mean, like you go to, and that's one that like Goodwill doesn't have the expertise to like,
00:41:25
Speaker
They're not going to take those out of the system.
00:41:26
Speaker
So I'd go to Goodwill and I would find the right kind of VCRs and they'd be like 10 bucks and then to sell for 150 or 200.
00:41:32
Speaker
I don't know why there's like specific VCRs that like hobbyists like or something like that.
00:41:38
Speaker
Weird.
00:41:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:40
Speaker
I mean, yeah.
00:41:41
Speaker
It's not going to be like, it's not, it's like, it's not going to be like vinyl.
00:41:44
Speaker
Like these sound better.
00:41:45
Speaker
Like VHS was like a format.
00:41:48
Speaker
I don't know.
00:41:49
Speaker
I actually don't know, but I'm guessing they might disagree.
00:41:51
Speaker
They'd probably be like, no, you know, the 1997 Panasonic can't be beef.
00:41:57
Speaker
Like that might be their take.
00:41:58
Speaker
I don't remember.
00:41:59
Speaker
The fuzz is so charming.
00:42:00
Speaker
Maybe.
00:42:02
Speaker
So I got, I mean, I've done some electronics, a small amount.
00:42:06
Speaker
I never did.
00:42:06
Speaker
And I think some of your other group members have done this, but I never did like order things off of Alibaba and, you know, put my own brand on them or something.
00:42:16
Speaker
Stop shipping.
00:42:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:18
Speaker
Or even just, just, I guess like maybe they call it wholesaling or something like, you know, you buy like a thousand yoga mats and then get a bunch of fake reviews to say they're the best yoga mats ever.
00:42:27
Speaker
And then sell them for $19.
00:42:30
Speaker
Like that's a pretty, that's a popular business.
00:42:32
Speaker
Like, and it's like the same exact yoga mat that like 50 other people are selling.
00:42:36
Speaker
You just have to, uh,
00:42:38
Speaker
maybe have a better brand name and a more, a better writeup or something.
00:42:42
Speaker
And I wonder why the Chinese do that because it seems like they could, and maybe it's just like, is it literally just like, you're the, you're the white guy, you know, like they have, they have the white guy that sort of represents the company and he's just there to be like eye candy.
00:42:55
Speaker
Maybe that's you in that situation.
00:42:56
Speaker
I don't know.
00:42:57
Speaker
I'm not sure.
00:42:58
Speaker
Cause I mean, Amazon is so like anonymizing anyway, like a lot of people,
00:43:03
Speaker
even when they'd buy straight from me, like when it was obvious it'd be shipped from me, I think you can tell some people didn't realize it wouldn't be coming from Amazon.
00:43:12
Speaker
Some people, most people understand that, but, but Amazon does tend to be pretty anonymizing.
00:43:16
Speaker
I guess as long as the product description is written in like, in a nice English, they, maybe they think it's a better product or something, but.
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:26
Speaker
And that's, that's something I wanted to explore with, with some of our members is because we have guys that have writing skills.
00:43:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:33
Speaker
And it seems like there are a lot of industries, especially like, like real estate is a big one where I'll see a property that's being sold for $400,000.
00:43:48
Speaker
And the, you know, so the, the,
00:43:56
Speaker
The agent is getting like a five figure commission on this, on this sale.
00:44:00
Speaker
And it's literally incoherent.
00:44:02
Speaker
The description.
00:44:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:04
Speaker
It's like, it's like somebody you it's worse than if you paid like one of those mechanical Turk type sites to write it
Opportunities in E-commerce Writing
00:44:13
Speaker
up for you.
00:44:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:14
Speaker
Or an AI.
00:44:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:16
Speaker
And, and it's, that just seems,
00:44:19
Speaker
Well, real estate in general seems like it's got to be disrupted.
00:44:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:23
Speaker
This comes back to like a, maybe it's not a thesis, but an idea I keep having, which is that a lot of industries that are maybe dominated, maybe they don't qualify as blue collar, but they're kind of like a- Non-elite.
00:44:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:41
Speaker
I mean, they're not email jobs.
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:44
Speaker
You're not just sitting and emailing people.
00:44:46
Speaker
Things like maybe a real estate agent or a car salesman or even in some of the trades too, like general contractor stuff.
00:44:55
Speaker
My thesis is that there's like room for...
00:44:59
Speaker
There's room for like really smart people who don't, who would normally self-select out of that career, but there's like a lot of opportunity for
Non-Traditional Career Success
00:45:06
Speaker
those people.
00:45:06
Speaker
Someone, I mean, I would like for people to prove me right.
00:45:09
Speaker
I don't know one way or the other, but that's kind of what I'm thinking is that like, I've gone around shopping for cars lately and it's like, all the salesmen are really bad, like, but selling cars can be lucrative.
00:45:19
Speaker
So like, why aren't they trying?
00:45:21
Speaker
Like, isn't there someone who's good at this?
00:45:23
Speaker
Like,
00:45:24
Speaker
And could I do this?
00:45:25
Speaker
I mean, that sort of stuff.
00:45:26
Speaker
Like maybe it's, maybe it's, I think that like really bright conscientious people, maybe it's like a Dunning Kruger thing where they're, they're sort of afraid they won't be good enough.
00:45:37
Speaker
And so they like, because, because it's so variable, right?
00:45:40
Speaker
Any, any, any sales job, really the outcomes are technically really variable, but it's not really variable to you as an individual.
00:45:49
Speaker
Like if you're smart and handsome and charming, like,
00:45:54
Speaker
you're going to do well.
00:45:55
Speaker
And like, you can almost like, I know people that have effectively cashed out being just sort of tall and handsome into like huge amounts of money in pharma sales or real estate.
00:46:06
Speaker
And I think, I think some of these people and they have this sort of credentialist mindset or this, this, this, I can't even articulate exactly what it is, but it's like, because there's high variability in this industry and I don't like high variability, I'm not going to look into that.
00:46:23
Speaker
but you would almost certainly do well because you are not the typical or the median or the modal participant.
00:46:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:32
Speaker
Like, I mean, where I work, I think for a lot of grad guys, like particularly coming out of undergrad, I've like mentored a lot of these guys, they come into the company and I think, I think for them, it's like thought of as a pretty good job out of college, like a company that looks good on their resume and stuff.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:51
Speaker
And they, but they, but they struggle.
00:46:54
Speaker
And for many of the same reasons I struggle, like, cause they're just not into it.
00:46:58
Speaker
They just, they, once they get there, they're like, okay, it's nice to have the name on the resume, but this work is really dumb.
00:47:03
Speaker
It's really boring.
00:47:04
Speaker
And I don't even get what we do here and that sort of stuff.
00:47:06
Speaker
So it's like,
00:47:07
Speaker
And a lot of these guys, I'm like, you're very smart.
00:47:11
Speaker
You have good people skills.
00:47:13
Speaker
You took this job because you thought it was like what people like you do.
00:47:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:16
Speaker
But you'd make more money selling cars or you'd have more and you'd make more money and have more fun.
00:47:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:21
Speaker
Like, just go do that.
00:47:23
Speaker
And then, but they, I mean, obviously for the same, you know, psychological hangups, they can't allow themselves to do that because they think they're supposed to work in a company.
00:47:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:32
Speaker
We're going to have to just smash that whole mentality because they're so...
00:47:38
Speaker
So many just cognitive resources are just wildly misallocated.
00:47:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's my sense of it.
00:47:45
Speaker
There's so many people just sitting, just sitting.
00:47:48
Speaker
It's so brutal.
00:47:52
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's a fascinating business.
00:47:56
Speaker
Yeah, I have one quick final rant.
00:47:59
Speaker
I don't hesitate to say that if you're organized and motivated, the first onboarding phase is probably a decent time
Niche Market Strategies
00:48:12
Speaker
commitment.
00:48:12
Speaker
If you're organized and motivated, you put in the time up front, but then it becomes pretty passive.
00:48:17
Speaker
I don't have much doubt that...
00:48:20
Speaker
the kind of guys that we're talking to could easily be making like 10 grand a month or something, just selling books and they're working maybe 20 hours a month or something like 40 hours a month instead of 40 hours a week sort of thing.
00:48:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:33
Speaker
I haven't, I don't have many doubts about that.
00:48:34
Speaker
Like if you're willing to just operationalize and do it, it's pretty realistic.
00:48:38
Speaker
And if, and if that's not the right category for you, you know,
00:48:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, maybe you do furniture, maybe you do... One last thing that's kind of funny.
00:48:46
Speaker
There's this brand of baby stroller that has a lot of interchangeable parts.
00:48:50
Speaker
Maybe they're all like this, but this particular one I like.
00:48:53
Speaker
I think it's called City Select.
00:48:55
Speaker
And my wife was noticing tons for sale on the Facebook groups and Craigslist and stuff.
00:49:02
Speaker
for pretty cheap.
00:49:03
Speaker
I think they retail for like 600 bucks, but you can get one that's been used for like two years by one kid for like 50 bucks or a hundred bucks.
00:49:11
Speaker
And they're, the parts are like modular.
00:49:13
Speaker
So if you buy one for like 50 and it has one broken part, you just buy another one for 50 and then you have a perfect one.
00:49:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:19
Speaker
So we bought like,
00:49:21
Speaker
I think we bought like five or six of them over time, not a ton, but we've done this a couple of times where we just buy the ones we see or people even give them away for free.
00:49:29
Speaker
And then just put the parts together so you have one good one and then we'd go and sell it for like 250 or 300.
00:49:35
Speaker
And that's a bit of a hustle, right?
00:49:39
Speaker
And it's not like glamorous, but there's these little opportunities all over the place.
00:49:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:44
Speaker
Well, this, I, I feel like an indication of the success of, of sort of the conversation is that I now am like going to go do a trip to a thrift store like this weekend.
00:49:55
Speaker
I'm going to go, I'm going to go do that.
00:49:57
Speaker
Cause this, it seems like a really good, yeah.
00:49:59
Speaker
Like, you know, like the Sam Hyde still does his podcast thing.
00:50:03
Speaker
I don't, I only see it sometimes on YouTube because it's free and I don't know, whatever, but he was talking to his old, his like co co-writer, co-writer,
00:50:12
Speaker
actor guy, Nick, he does a antique store now.
00:50:16
Speaker
And his advice was just like, pick a category, just pick one.
00:50:19
Speaker
And he he's picked rugs.
00:50:20
Speaker
So if you follow him on like Instagram, you'll see he's always selling rugs.
00:50:24
Speaker
That's perfect.
00:50:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:25
Speaker
Pick one category and get to know it really well.
00:50:28
Speaker
And you become, you get, you develop a sixth sense for like what's valuable and like where the value is going to be and like how fast something will sell.
00:50:35
Speaker
Like it's, it's like, it's, it's very much a sixth sense.
00:50:37
Speaker
Like you just,
00:50:38
Speaker
I trust when he says like this rug will sell within five days for a thousand dollars.
00:50:43
Speaker
He's probably right within like 10% of that.
00:50:45
Speaker
Yeah, man.
00:50:45
Speaker
Well, this is, this is, uh, this is a great idea.
00:50:49
Speaker
I'm excited to go check it out.
00:50:51
Speaker
Thanks so much, Robert, for being on the show, talking about the business and check us out at patreon.com slash exit underscore org.
00:50:59
Speaker
If you're interested in getting involved with what we're doing, the mission again is to help people get out from under sort of the corporate boot.
00:51:07
Speaker
Thanks a lot.