do not oh i was just saying i'm phones on do not disturb i don't it's been a while since i had my own podcast i don't think i'm forgetting anything besides do not disturb right yeah you're you're good we'll just get into it alright everybody excited to be back here we're doing a conversation and it was an inspiration from just seeing so many videos from today's guests in my feed and i've been enjoying the videos you've probably seen the videos today's guest is max you can find him at cards max on all of the platforms we're gonna be talking about kinda building a dealer business and building it in public leaning on content and there's a lot to get into max welcome man how are you i'm doing well it's eleven am here in florida on a nice wednesday april first april fools good good to be here brett thank you for having me good to see that i guess the videos are working the algorithm's working in my favor yes they are i i gotta maybe we'll start here what what do you view as your kind of primary platform in terms of where most people engage with your content because your stuff is showing up across all of the platforms for me so like how do you think about like your your platform strategy or where you put most of your energy on it's the unconventional answer it's twitter a place that had a little bit of a hobby community in the i'd say like maybe from like twenty twenty to twenty twenty four and now just isn't as present as much there's still a lot it's very collector centric and i've always figured that instagram is very talking about yourself or talking at maximum to your own audience or i guess to new audiences but twitter twitter is more about talking with others rather than talking about yourself and although from like a content adjustment standpoint it's not perfect the motivation i guess what spurred going to instagram not only is just trying to put more deliberate effort in hate the word content but like content growth but i tweet and i have a lot of sports car thoughts anyway and it's just been trying to re rewire the impetus to instead of just making a tweet to make a short video about whatever's running through my mind and i think about cars a lot so sometimes that needs a lot of videos yeah i can tell you're prolific at putting out videos of nearly everything you're doing and it's that documentation process that i think that i appreciate and maybe we'll start here just your as far as i know like you are full time just doing the doing dealing sports cards and you're in a lot of different places and i wanna talk about your process to document and how you're going about that but maybe like starting with like inspiration for you doing what you're doing like what's the story behind you going all in on dealing sports cards yeah no i definitely didn't grow up as you know in or go to college and tell my parents yeah i'm gonna not use my college degree and buy and sell trading cards full time but i'll i'll do the cliff notes i guess a little bit on my collecting story in that i started as a kid like everyone else you know ages six to ten whatever faded out of it a little naturally i'm from long island i'm from new york i would get like you know my dad would go to the gas station get me a hundred mets cards or a hundred yankees cards but not anything deeper i had a little bit of a middle school pay phase which is not normal for people i was getting into baseball i and this granted i'm twenty six so middle school for me was like mid twenty tens or middle high school is mid mid twenty tens i wanted to feel more connected to the game but i can't buy a mariano rivera signed baseball at age fourteen that's that was like two hundred bucks i can't buy any derek jeter memorabilia but i can in a little bit of a at the time you know emasculating way say tell them ask my parents hey can i get a five dollar pack of baseball cards at walgreens as a fourteen year old as you know designed for kids and i nerd it out i would scroll blow out forms every single day this was during the chris bryant hype this was during kyle schwarber hype it was eventful for me i got taken to a hobby store like two or three times i ripped open some bowman chasing schwarber who had was the best power hitter at the time not you know crazy chasing jose abreu all that all that stuff in the mid twenty tens for baseball and then i eventually got i nerd it but point being i nerd it out on all the info i wasn't didn't have a debit card i didn't have money so i didn't buy into stuff like an adult would but i was consuming content like an adult would when beckett was the one a grading company for modern psa vent psa for vintage and then i it became like twenty sixteen i'm like firmly in high school i'm like i can't have people finding out i'm doing cards like that's just it's just so uncool and even to see the progress the hobby is made from cards being so uncool to do as an adult to just being like five years ago an old stick like sneakers and now just mass adoption is crazy but then in twenty nineteen i am nineteen twenty years old i on a beach trip with some of my friends i wake up a little early and i'm like i i don't know what spurred the thought but i'm like yeah like i have the sophistication to buy some yankees autographs and knock it hose i can buy a luis severino auto for twenty bucks and a didi grigorios for eight dollars and i know how to not get you know scanned by steiner sports which i guess is now acquired by fanatics but all those companies but that started the rabbit hole as an adult as a young adult that started the rabbit hole as a consumer even though i told myself i'm not getting into cards too deeply i got into cards deeply the and i know that was a ramp about the a ramp about the collecting the dealer side of it came pretty shortly after where again i still have the knowledge base of me studying blowout or whatever as a adolescent i'm very cognizant to the grading game i have like maybe two thousand dollars in my savings at you know age twenty just from working uber eats as a courier during covid a little after and i'm like okay so if grading is eight dollars and i can buy my my jason dominguez first bowmans for five dollars and they're a hundred twenty dollars in a psa ten and it might take six months but if they're twenty dollars and a nine a hundred twenty eight dollars and ten i'm like i should be putting every single dollar i own into this which was much smaller at the time but that started into me grading a little bit more with the money i had that started me value boxing a little bit more finding out the powers of ebay which is way more relevant than it is now and i studied chemistry in college i was premed thinking that i was anticipating a career in hopefully going to med school because it's so competitive or something science and research oriented and i got i had a little bit of a stumble my senior spring academically i put off applying to grad school to put off applying to jobs and i very much for a year was like oh i'm looking for a job but i'm also very much doing cards to fill that time fill that void and then the gain the monetary gains from cards compounded fast forward i mean i graduated twenty twenty two it is twenty twenty six and it is i'm grateful for this i'm now at a point where it would be irrational for me to do a traditional career that i love the fly no i love the fly through and i love the fact that you ended where you ended because i think so many people who jump into it whatever avenue in the hobby don't realize that you can reach this point where you get to a point where you're making enough money and you're working for yourself and you're doing something that you love that you can say it doesn't make any sense for me to go apply for jobs because i'm in control of my own destiny was what was the was there a specific card or a specific moment or a specific revenue coming in for you where you all those things compounded where you you just realized like this is what i'm this is what i'm doing like this is the path that i'm i'm on i'm not on this path that is a traditional path that most people think that they have to do once they graduate from college part of it was that the selling volume steadily increased and it wasn't anything that particularly spurred that i think even recontextualing recontextualizing it myself so like even when i was i was still buying and selling singles in college i remember like not that it was a big card but at the time was like oh ronald acuna towel on head image variation short print that was like a two thousand dollar card and now that's a few hundred bucks that image variation short print so i was still buying and selling in college and i was even still i was in winston salem north carolina i went to wake forest and i was even ubering to shows for a few hundred bucks you know in charlotte if i i think one time i really went all the way to raleigh three hour drive and do and having the uber pay for itself and just from the stuff that i was buying from shows and ebaying it the old fashioned way selling to my community and clientele on twitter at the time in the twenty twenties this was really before discord was a thing to kind of streamline it even more but i was still very much doing that in college it progressed a little steadily during that time of college i'm like man if i can go to the national and i can have buy and sell and have it pay for my trip like that's pretty awesome because like we're not supposed to be making money in this right like this isn't a god given right to you know buy and sell sports buy and sell anything for a prop because fundamentally there's some missed market opportunity but it steadily got to the point where i guess we're talking about yeah it was so crazy you know presently it'd be irrational for me not to do a job it came to the point since i was a jobless recent grad living at home i would just okay well i have us for a weekend i can go fly to burbank or i can go fly to dallas or even fly to these smaller shows or you know not not that chantilly there's any it's that small i took when i was on long island i took the amtrak to go to the philly show and then bus no then i ubered from the train station so i was definitely cutting corners where it made sense a little bit but it made sense to fill in those voids those time voids with a job since i was a recent grad not having a job at that time and it compounded which was which was nice and well it was well the industry itself compounding as well i mean if the hobby war were was in twenty twenty one i don't know if i'd be here i would imagine that from me following you you're out on the road you're going to shows and i would imagine when you show up at one of these shows like people stop and they say hey i see your videos i've seen you and that's good right you're building awareness for your business yourself your brand and that is something that i think a lot of maybe old school dealers or sports card sellers haven't quite got around yet but you're very very active and you're not just active saying here are the cards i'm trying to sell here are my prices they're you're documenting kind of your moves your process your observations all the thoughts as you suggested like when was your moment where you realized like content is going to be a part of this strategy and i'm going to start sharing as much as possible like what was the mindset around your content strategy so i think in december twenty no may i think it was like october or so of twenty twenty five i think with how bulk buying and bulk selling has scaled a little bit partly because of repacks and the voracious need for people to have cards that has accelerated the buying and selling and i've always again maybe i'm again a little bit of like the chemistry mindset of like i view everything not everything but like in the context of business i view things a little bit in an equilibrium where you have a you know the product and the re or the reactant to the product and it's not just a simple okay it goes from x to y it's there's some external pressures that have one emphasizing the other and in order to alleviate that pressure the other one has to be balanced and i'm not trying to sound like a hippie but in the context of business it's i view it as as time and money and if i have too much if i have too much time then i need to sorry if i have too many too much money to spend that means i need to be more active buying and if i don't have that balanced then how am i gonna scale how do i keep growing how do i make sure that my money's working for me so at given how much more liquid cards were especially in twenty twenty four twenty twenty five like in these recent years i'm like okay how do i scale myself i'm going to shows weekends but i have a little bit more time i need to reinvent a little bit the way that i buy i need to make sure that we i am casting a wide as that as possible and i think just by nature of being in a very male dominated feel field we don't care too much about not to say all guys but our appearance our presentation there is people view the connotation i think of a social media career is still a little bit feminine and i think in pokemon that's a little bit saturated but in sports there's i don't even view myself as someone that's good at making content i think there's just such little content creation or rather like content creation that's a little bit polished that that needs to be attacked a little bit in like a strategic way but point being late twenty twenty five i started working with a youtube youtuber with like a million or so subscribers and like group coaching calls or whatever and he was a great guy but he ended up cutting his program short but that at least got the ball rolling in being in being a little bit more conscious about trying to maximize my reach and maximizing the reach not only is just the business side of more buyers and sellers more recognition whatever but it's friends and everything like that more relationships and even if it's okay sorry your camera froze i got worried for a second even if it's just like some sales by virtue buying and selling it just maybe be more conscious of okay i'm already having my revenue streams good how do i accelerate that i need to take my tweets and put them in front of camera and make sure that the stuff because again i live a unique lifestyle or unique enough in this context i wanna make sure i can share with that perspective if as much as possible because i guess some people find it valuable or unique or at the very least some people like rambling on the hearing the rambling thoughts the one thing that i've picked up on you from you is just you talk numbers you're very transparent about the moves you're making what you're buying what you're doing in a industry that maybe lacks transparency from people who are in a position who do what you do obviously we've got platforms like cardladder that provide data that help make it more transparent but a lot of times cards exchange hands in person and no one really knows the price of stuff maybe talk about like that transparency that you take to your content and your operation what has that maybe unlocked for you as you've been trying to grow and scale your business i think part of and again i'm not trying to like pat myself on the back i think part of that a little bit it's i don't say it's my personality to be like authentic because that just sounds like so fake but i think like when i'm talking into the camera for the most part like i don't script it too much so like saying the real answer or saying the truth or whatever is just kind of easiest the resistance i guess is a little i mean like i think there's a little bit of like not to say it's a bad way but like people like to quickly scold oh you made you made this much money on this card therefore you have this ego or therefore you think it's better than other people or whatever and i'm like i'm just trying to people people get weird when you talk numbers too much so i try to do it in a way that like without any sort of like try to just keep it as this is the number and you can do it too or anyone can do it because like no one at sports cards as long as you're not sell you know if people still want the card granted i think aspect of content creation and even like being a deal or whatever you know circle back a little bit what started the content creation i think there's value that you can provide with people that isn't just being the lowest price on the card and you know people like to deal with people that they like but so part of that is just it's just the easiest not too scripted and in terms of being authentic and being transparent i think there's a little bit too much of there's like a content fatigue of being too scripted and being too clickbaity and being too just trying to get people's attention and deliver on the nothingness so i wanna say like the transparency wasn't something i've actively thought oh i should keep this absent but it is a balance of making sure that it's not projected with some type of connotation or negative emotion or comparative aspect of it as well but like fundamentally like that's why i try to be like okay if i like even this week i bought a kawhi leonard black prism on fanatics for forty two hundred i sold it on ebay for sixty five that's that's public data like i'm not like trying to frame something into being disbelieving or saying oh i made fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars on this card whatever it was after fees because people think like oh that's like you know they don't wanna say the amount because people will think that like you're being braggadocious but i think the the inverse of that is that it's like i'm not special i literally put it on my ebay stage a ebay page that used to do higher volume and now doesn't it's like there's if the capital is possible or even then it's possible just as much as twenty dollars or a hundred dollars as well then there's no reason why anyone can't do it the you said something there that stood out to me where there is this perception with content in this space especially like real driven content where you've got this overproduction you've got lights you've got all the graphics and everything and it's all fancy it's all buttoned up but then the substance within the content itself a lot of times i find falls flat and maybe it is because i i ask myself maybe it's because okay on this maturation cycle as a collector i'm all the way at the end and or not all the way at the end but more towards the end as someone who wants to buy cards to build this collection as opposed to like this content might be for individuals who are trying to learn about the hobby and try to get people in but i think you you you are literally just like you know you'll you'll put some images in it but you're just like recording yourself it's very low fidelity it works it you come across as authentic i felt like before wechat and this is first time we're we chatted i knew a little bit about you and your personality because it comes through and the content i maybe like that dynamic it's it it feels to me that maybe some people are fearful of just doing what you're doing although you do it over a long period of time it compounds and you gain a following you gain customers and some people think about content they're like oh well i don't have the resources to go make this fancy content like what would you say to someone out there that's like trying to think through jumping into content for the first time based on your experience i think the authenticity what i would say to someone new i guess is the authenticity is important whether that's needing to be incredibly transparent or not you don't you don't have to fake yourself in order to try to be in front of the camera and i think if anything going on moderately packaged rambles is i think more favorable now than before and when i say package i just mean like cut out the oohs and ahs proof proofread the captions like once or twice you know try to have a little bit of an idea of what you're doing try to have a little bit of cognizance it's like no you're not a media shill for having a little bit of like a bare bones hook in your in your in your video it's like there's almost like a fear and partly again because at least from the dealer standpoint this is predominantly people that i wanna be careful with my words but aren't on traditional career paths or got into cards in out of cards being better than their career path or didn't have one entirely and covid has worked wonders and i'm blessed to be where i am and i think a lot of other people would consider some themselves as well but it's not like it being a little bit don't say corporate but being a little bit yeah so if you're just starting out in content creation i would say to not be afraid of the authenticity as if anything were an environment that favors that people are tired of content fatigue you don't wanna put the mister beastification on everything it's to put a little bit of effort into the packaging and to make sure that it presents itself a little bit well and that algorithm is a substitute for audience and you can blame the algorithm but the algorithm is really good at having people watch your video and not to be mean but if the algorithm doesn't like it there's some aspect of your video that's a little bit unwatchable and to try to cater to your audience a little bit while retaining the authenticity and trueness of yourself and making sure that what you present is i guess would also just have have views have something about you that is worth sharing and if you're just walking your run of a mill daily life i mean that'll be interesting but we are grateful that there are so many interesting aspects about cards that you can pick a lot of different niches and what you were saying on your podcast last week there's an element of sharing something about your collection to your community or sharing your dealer experience or whatever and part of it is just by virtue of you being you and having people follow you and that they're actively consciously wanting to see more and that you can expose things to a new audience just by virtue of what you're talking about being interesting i wanna spend a chunk talking about what life as a full time dealer is like but before we get off of the social media and the content side has there been one thing you what you said resonated like the algorithms don't like something that you're doing has there been anything you have done to change or modify how you think about structure of your content that when you started to do this thing you gain more chat traction like pivoting on something like is there any examples that you can share just so the audience if they're getting going to think about content they can contextualize something i think when i was starting those short videos in october and november i was even striving to just doing one per day and i made them in cap cut i made them way more structured in some cases i made them faceless just out of just showing the cards and i put more structure in the polishing and putting overlay into it and putting purposeful overlay into it audible overlay and those videos are not doing as well as the ones of me just talking into the microphone so yeah just as i'm practicing with reaching a little bit have noticed just the general less structured but still slightly structured videos have been doing better for me than just completely structured and i've emphasized more so on getting reps in that doesn't mean don't produce videos that are outright bad in your head but if a video flops no one's seeing it anyway the mhmm it's not gonna you know the instagram's not gonna push it so i think that encourages taking more risks making things personal to you trying to have a consciousness of okay if i'm talking about my psa order this is going to be a video that i'm going to make more widely accessible to people consuming cards or consuming content or even like i even know some videos of me just showing my black label pokemon charizard is way more accessible than me talking about the nuances of the twenty twenty four shohei ohtani homefield advantage psa ten being a pop nineteen rather than the twenty twenty five being in the pop one thirties so i try to understand which videos are for which how wide the net is for each video and try to cater it for that so some videos are just for specifically for the people that really want the stuff to niche down while their stuff is for the wide net in order to try to catch some people win and get them more and more down the the cards max rabbit hole very smart makes a lot of sense to me talk to us about what your week looks like as a full time dealer you have a ton going on like cards in cards out content shipping shows like what's what's a normal week look like for you yeah so it's a little bit i mean i i was crazier in twenty twenty five i think i had like thirty two travel shows and constituting travel show is a show i booked a hotel with in thirty eight weeks which was like insane and i've like looked i'm like am i exaggerating then i looked at my calendar i'm like oh this week i'm doing tampa collect from where i'm booking a hotel to this one this show i'm doing nebraska this show i'm doing a show in texas and i was even filling in pokemon shows in order to fill that void because i like i wanted to do more than just sports but i've settled down the motor a little bit in twenty twenty six so that that's a little bit alleviating but like in that like most possible structured week my monday is probably organize physically organizing onto sheets onto spreadsheets cards that some of my recurring buyers may want and i know that's usually slabs i try to make sure i have everything priced out i try to make sure i have all of my incoming mail accounted for and i guess by accounted for i mean like i have a master spreadsheet of every single card i purchase and for which price and for what i think the value is and i sometimes just double check to make sure that if i'm buying a bigger package it's coming in on a certain day so my mondays and tuesdays is mostly sending out those bulk lists finding out later in the afternoon if i send them in the morning or sometimes later in the day which cards of those people are interested in and i just buy and sell that way or at least i know which cards at least i definitely have to ship i rush myself to go to to package it get other extraneous random ebay sales it's like i i always you know granted if i'm cards full if i'm cards full time baby i try to make sure my shipping time is sharp like i had a sunday package i didn't ship till yesterday and i was like ashamed of that but at the same time i had a tuesday package at three o'clock i got out tuesday at ups by five i eventually tell myself four o'clock so that if i'm late if the truck leaves at five and i'm still covered so that's so i'm buying it i'm making sure everything's organized in the morning i'm looking sure what stuff buys and sells in the afternoon shipping it in the early afternoon after i ship i usually will try to get a lunch dinner at like at five o'clock four o'clock ish range try to make sure it's early enough so that i can let it digest so that i can go to the gym in two hours at like seven ish to eight o'clock workout for an hour my gym's twenty minutes away which isn't fun and then if i get back to the gym early enough then that like even at like eight thirty ish which is still kind of late relatively i try to go on ebay i brought buy raw to grade as much as possible especially at night and i just throw stuff into my bidsniper so that it's less emotional and more just okay i see what the comps are i see what the psa ten potential is or i try to look at pop report data when that is existent and i just i put my bid on the gixson so that there's no last minute bidding and it's a way to at least streamline it and go do as many bids as possible i try to do as many of those as i can get some online deals when i can as well film tiktoks in between and that's kind of mostly my monday tuesday my wednesdays are a little bit more free and i don't have to worry like i i can go to the gym whenever i want to which is which is nice it is awesome i don't have a figurative gun to my head to make sure my packages are out on time even if that is just my own pressure same or same or next day shipping and i guess wednesday it was and i guess i do have to do this today try to make sure all of my cards that i'm grading myself are overviewed and i'm using that word in terms of like making it used to be just i would overview microfiber everything make sure the corners are good myself and do that whole process of putting it as the new card saver everything like that and that would take a few hours especially if i have like a hundred and two hundred cards in my two row which is not those are rookie numbers i gotta boost those up now it's at least going to be and again part of that is just like the low if i wanna buy five dollar showhaze that are ninety dollar tens it takes the same amount takes kind of the same amount of time to overview as like the dollar card or the card of a higher dollar denomination but now at least you know by today's wednesday at least for my plan for the at least one of the big things on my doc for the rest of the day is go through all my incoming mail make sure i have everything as this is for grading this is for bulk selling and okay go through my grading stuff go through which cards that i'm gonna submit right now and including an incoming package that i have to me that is actually arriving tomorrow so that i can submit that psa myself of cards that are third party prepped and i'm using that term in terms of like making sure that like everything that can be ethically taken you know ethically prepared for psa submission can be prepared and then i have another so i have one i know i'm rambling a little bit but to try to keep this confined i have one person that i'm doing the higher end stuff for that maybe requires a little bit more attention and one other prepper that's like i'm sending them two hundred fifty dollar cards i just wanna make sure it's not creased but i don't wanna spend two hundred two hundred cards on my desk making sure it's not creased because that takes a lot of time so i'm gonna organize which pie who which cards are going to which pile and then if a week if it's a week that i'm traveling if it's a four day week if it's like dallas then i'm traveling wednesday night obviously dallas is once every eight weeks but i'm traveling wednesday night to make sure i'm there for thursday or on friday shows sometimes i'm traveling thursday night to get there for friday so that i'm there early ish friday if i'm going to a car show that week i'm trying not to put as much pressure on that myself right now but like the thursday is kinda just okay like i have to make sure all my docs are in line i have to make sure that the stuff is sitting is actively given my attention so that i can sell it because that stuff isn't really selling itself as much make sure stuff on ebay is uploaded because even if i go to bed even if i go to bed in the middle of the night people in asia people in china people overseas are still looking at ebay when i'm asleep so the that wednesday through friday or wednesday through thursday is a little bit tinkering out the stuff that needs to be individually sold and then the weekend if i'm going to a car show it is going to a car show itself that there's a lot there one thing i wanna say if i'm rambling too much no no it's perfect it's i i wanted the whole kit and caboodle you mentioned and i sense this from your the way you're communicating like you feel indebted to your customers to give them the cards that they have bought from you as quickly as possible and racing to the post office trying to get stuff packaged up this hobby is so transactional at times where it's like it's faceless it's nameless dealers are just i want your money here's your cards and you'll get them sometime like how how have you found that as an advantage where you're able to you know lean into maybe the customer service component and like use good communication update people like making that a part of like your business and program like how important has that been to the growth of what you're doing i think on like the individual and then the relationship weather level it's something that i've always kept in mind especially given that like for some of these recurring relationships i am one individual and i try to you know poke fun and say that i move a lot of weight but like i recognize that maybe it's just cards maybe it's just you know people with attitudes or whatever but like i kind of in a business sense keep in mind that that like i view myself as replaceable and that people can buy their cards again part of buying nicer cards is that making the argument that oh you can't just get one cheaper which is something that i try to keep when i'm buying more unique stuff but especially on like the relationship sense like i want to be as easy to work with as possible and not only from the aspect of like one negative referral hurts more than a hundred positive ones but i i also don't i know the feeling of like waiting on someone to ship i don't wanna extend that to anyone else i don't like the feeling of having the obligation to ship or like i've like i'm pay like you know if someone's buying me a card off instagram or off ebay it's like i'm paid like i have to ship their card it's like i'd like i have to granted it doesn't necessarily have to be within two hours like on the tracy jackson tracy jackson davis logo man i sold yesterday but and like i try to do it and keep it as actively as i can i think chunking is important in that aspect just in that like it's easier to do all your shipments for a day at once rather than doing it you know once it's out of mind it's like well i don't wanna have to ship once a day every single day i just wanna make sure i can do it when i can if i free time i can attack it when i can but again not to view it as sinisterly but like i and i there is so many people that do buy and sell cards and i don't view myself as such like intrinsically but like at least in the context of business i have to give a reason for people to want to work with me otherwise that reason doesn't exist really good perspective i wanna hit the show scene i have three kids and my going to shows is watching show activity through content from people like you i don't get you know the national sure i'll be there midwest monster here in india i'll be there but you know i don't i'm so oh you gotta go it's a tell you i haven't been the shipshewana or midwest monster yet okay me too so i'm gonna first of all shipshewana is still a gap for me it's always on holidays and it's just challenging but that's a great show that i always hear from midwest monster awesome show so it's you know it's not to the level of like a dallas but it's it's growing so you should check it out good car people you got indycar exchange supporting it too which is and great but maybe give us some perspective of like what what's happening in shows in twenty twenty five like what do you experience on the the buy sell trade side i caught a reel you put up or some video on your story and it was like this dead end pokemon negotiation and it was like you're like and you said something in context like this is what happens all the time like people like trying to leverage cards where there's a lot of copies and it's just like the perception i get it's like it's really hard to find the like good people to like move around and do deals with and if you know those people you've done business with them in the past like you're gonna be like a magnet to them when you go to shows but that's just my perception from looking at the show scene in twenty twenty five from afar but would love your perspective on like what you're experiencing what you're seeing kinda like the good bad and the ugly i try to put shows a little bit in a dichotomy of shows that are meant to be more buy sell trade oriented and shows that are meant to be more for the the family hobbyist and you know true true true not to put the old geeky mark but the the true collector the true obvious and i'm just the dirty grimy flipper yeah but i i was even talking with some older friends or you know older hobbyists or you know older than me rather hobbyists and they say oh and i've been told oh should i go to dallas and you know is this a show that i should go to i love my low end nineties interest and i'm like no don't go to dallas if you're a collector i don't wanna say that as as darkly but like dallas in my head just with how i didn't go to it during covid i really started traveling into shows in general in twenty twenty two dallas got its acclaim for being the first show to open during covid coincidentally and perfectly geographically in the middle of the country and that just became a beacon for people to buy and transact in and it stayed that way and it's continued that positive momentum but in my head i just view dallas as a little bit of a dealer con i view it as a b to b comp i internally view it as a b to b conflict and i'm like this is for me to show face i'm gonna make enough money to cover the weekend and i don't wanna say and then some but end a little more sometimes i'm gonna hit a play absolutely out of the park and sometimes that's your in general bigger shows from a car dealing standpoint there's stuff that you buy and sell with the direct comps that this that's just a margin play and some stuff that isn't margin play is more speculative sometimes i think by bias of being more knowledgeable in your collecting own collecting habits you know where that edge is mhmm a play that specifically comes to mind is i'll keep it short back in burbank in august not february burbank or august burbank lebron downtowns are just starting to go up in price i at that point made the very conscious decision to make a full lebron james pse ten downtown run which i still need the optic but for of all the real downtowns in my head it's completed and i think it's awesome but i knew the hardest one going in would be the twenty twenty one lebron james downtown from panini one i know this a little bit because i was grading panini one downtowns during that time they have the twenty twenty ones are like dunk on the back and although downtowns are relatively easier jim the twenty twenty ones are tougher i think that lebron is a pop fourteen the curry's like a pop eleven i've kind of knew that the that was going to be more valuable than the other lebron downtowns and i bought a psa ten for like forty five hundred because it hadn't sold in a bit and the last sale was forty one and the other downtowns for lebron were were about that and i think the last sale of the two sales since then are eleven thousand to nine thousand so again that's like something that i'm keeping in my collection for my full lebron run that was alleviating and knowing that cool i got one of the hardest to get ones and it a little bit fell on my lap in finding it at burbank but just an example of like i am massively up on that card which is awesome but it's that card didn't have comps and even during that same show i bought a pop one paul's keene's kaboom which is unfortunately or fortunately still in my collection it's a pop one i paid thirty seven hundred bucks the downtowns which are pop thirty for rookies paul skeens downtowns it's crazy number are in the four thousand so i'm like well the pop one kabooms and not to mention kabooms are little better are worth a little bit more than that so some of those plays are just out of knowing really whether that's which as basic as which quarterback is hot or which insert subset of exquisite is worth two x more than the others and although that edges in as often and i'm not a basketball head i know that's the type of styles that people do with the dealing and i've traditionally i tell people i'm like i want your weird baseball i love baseball when people when the market isn't greedy i love ohtani i love trout truthfully as a yankees fan which i guess is a little bit into my but i love trout's twenty ten's run run of greatness and he's gonna be my generation's griffey unfortunately with no rings but i tell people like bring me weird baseball without sales and i'll try to be fair and not cook people is is is is the if you're buying and like you've got cards and you've got examples in front of you what is more attractive to you is it more attractive to have the liquidity or of a like a kaboom or a downtown and your knowledge like especially of that panini one jim lebron like you you had the domain expertise to understand what you're buying and the opportunity or is it more attractive to you to buy the car that doesn't have the sales data but might be rare and scarce like the last sold of it is like twenty nineteen but you you have access to this and you know based on kind of your knowledge of cards and maybe the specific genre of what the card could be sold for like which which side do you lean more on when you're buying i'm a a different tangent i'm a kaboom and downtown hater for the super mass produced stuff and i think that's growing a little bit in some dealers because they're too common and they're almost for like a little bit of like a bad thousand dollar card because like i don't wanna pay like the whatever percent rate on them because i i know there's five of them in every showcase but going to your your main point i think it just depends on the card i i think like and again i'm trying to think of examples that aren't directly you know in you know where it's just like oh stuff that i want from my own collection because i'm all guilty of getting high on my own supply to it a little bit but like in a normal context or even like you know in june and july where ohtani stuff was not the biggest topic at hand for every single card or player it's like i'm like give me the ohtani that hasn't sold in two months or three months over the card that transacts every day other day but if it's a game of like quarterbacks i like try to stay away from that as much or it's like back in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three it was a game of oh wow this trevor lawrence gold mosaic hasn't you know i would buy i would buy trevor lawrence cards on ebay in january you know the numbered ones i would buy it in january grade it and not only a little bit with what i was saying back in twenty twenty not only would the psa ten cover everything but if i buy a rare enough t law or whoever also were the hot quarterbacks back then trevor lawrence davis mills those guys it's like mac jones yeah mac mac jones absolutely right justin fields justin fields was that hype year i'd be able to sell it for more than what my public january comp was which is which is awesome and now i think just because of the bulk buying and selling people have really gone more scared of those subjective values and i think justifiably so since that market isn't as voracious as it used to be then people give credit you have to recognize like that was a lower people were buying at like lower percentage then than what they are now partly because it's a little bit more streamlined but so tim to capstone on that it's the i want the we're i if it's the upper edge of the really cool stuff i want that otherwise it's just liquid stuff to go back to just at least like address the point you said earlier about the show stuff i think most of the traditional olds older shows philly i don't wanna say chantilly but chantilly is little bit more of a hobbyist show chicago's spectacular and even some of the new shows like i think fanatics has crushed it not just from buying and selling sample but in terms of making it a family experience i was not at the la la car show this past week but that looked awesome and i think for any attendee that was a very nice experience i think those shows are the ones that are should be looked at more by collectors rather than just like the dallases or even to an extent again burbank crushes i'm not saying ill on their show but there is a lot of dealer to dealer volume and i think the dealer to dealer volume not right or wrong but maybe more emphasized than having your having your show in the los angeles cup or stadium and having some theatrics and events associated with that so it's not just the most popular show wins in terms of which ones should be attended one of the topics i've never heard explored and you're bringing it up and because of the way you're communicating about how you run your business is this b to b versus b to c side when you think about your business and just indexing like where you spend your time like how do you break down the the amount of money of cards you're selling to other people who do similar adjacent work than you or the maybe end user or the perceived end user like how do you think about where your cards are distributed and where you're spending your time i think part of it relies on in terms of the allocation of funds part of it is like a little calculated part of it isn't part of it i think it's just what type of cards are acquirable a little bit of as as a personal experiment but back in january i bought a bunch of like one of ones from fanatics i think i spent like twenty thousand or so and in that little batch was like the aforementioned kawhi leonard black prism twenty twenty two that i made fifteen hundred dollars profit on which all things considered is a large margin and not the usual buy for nine fifty sell four thousand but it's quick i bought that i bought a kimi antonelli topsnow foil fracture and i don't know how deep i'm not that deep in f one but kimi antonelli is one of the youngest racers in f one and is right now leading f one and he part of it was his stuff is search part of it was i thought i got good value i bought a chris olave black finite rookie i bought some cheap carlos beltran and chris bryant logoman and by cheap i mean like five hundred to a thousand bucks and i want and i bought a corey kluber superfractor in that batch and i think that was most of it but point being i wanted to recognize i wanted to at least see how much of a caution i should have into setting the comp especially under the recognition that i'm going to be berated to sell under the last comp and be like no i was the comp i'm gonna for higher than the comp and if you are not my clientele that's okay like it's and i try to say like there are some times where i can be condescending about it jokingly but it's like not every card is for every person or not every card is for you it's fine if i if someone's being a little bit brash or sandalfish with me i tried to be a little colorful but the results of the experiment was pretty much every single card from that twenty thousand dollar purchase or lot that i did spent on one weekly everything was i sold for profit with the exception of the crystal lave black planet which i thought would be like oh tyler's shop is getting pumped or you know soaring so i thought okay how about his number one receiver and i i still am optimistic in the play a little bit but the proportion of funds allocated to it is more so what becomes available as well as can do i think there's like the legitimate market for this sale higher than the realized higher than the already realized price partly that just depends on how old this comp is partly that depends on if there are bulk buyers and i think that's a fun word to use rather than the the buzzword that people don't like whether bulk buyers are buying primarily on auction houses themselves and if one if a bulk buyer bought a card just to use it in their product mhmm and if that is a legitimate collector buying the card or if that's just for just to have a comp ethically exist but just to still exist not that that those comps are unethically exist but although that's a problem with so but in this context you know have a have a comp realized use for its product and then it's just back on the open market is there a collector paying higher than price maybe maybe not i i'm biased because i like baseball the most i think baseball is the strongest collecting market and that's outside of me liking it the most that's why i bought and sold it more is the obvious but even in the early twenty twenties like you could buy and sell trout for full no matter what just because like trout is the king but i it's probably the cards that are available and also how well i think i can frame the card and i think the framing of it is important when you're trying to because there is an aspect like i try to be very friendly i try to be very loquacious i'm relatively social but there is an aspect of like why should you buy from me and i have to defend why my values make sense otherwise it's not just oh this guy is known for overpricing its stuff doesn't sell so i mean if i'm not trying to be active and ethically convincing of why i think a card is worth more and the leverage is that i have on my end is like i don't have you can hit me for a lower price i don't have to sell it for that or you can hit me for three percent higher than my cost it's like yeah no it's fine i still believe in the card to be worth more how important to you as a dealer who's doing this full time is positioning like you obviously you started your story by talking about like the depths you'd go online to search for information about cards and you were geeking out over that and then you decided to turn that like hobby into your business and you through your discovery process i'm sure you're buying cards because you're seeing things whether it's the first stuff that ties back to a narrative a story that the broader market might not see other people when you're trying to sell it might not understand that but you're you have an understanding based on the reason why you bought the card in the first place so how important is that like positioning and doing it in a way that's helpful like to get people educated and understanding like what the card actually is or means now or could mean down the road like how important is that element to you selling cards and saying when someone comes in and say well the last comp says x and you you like that whole rigmarole like how important is like the storytelling component in your operation when you're selling and i think you bring up a good point with the storytelling because sometimes it's tough for me when people are framing cards to me i can even get this con concede at someone selling me a card i think your storytelling is fair on the value i just don't want you to have to buy into that value as well and plunge on that risk either like you know just because the card you know a card is up a ton like i am still and this is something that people don't i don't appreciate too much it's like i am still fully taking the financial risk on a card and for some stuff like much i don't want to just be costco where it's in and out and just because a viewpoint or extension is fair doesn't mean i want to fully risk like the amounts of money i wanna put into it or not adopt a certain cushion into a sort of how i project to frame the card that doesn't mean that it's unfair by me sometimes even say it's like i or even you know i was saying i'm a kaboom and downtown hater i sometimes i'm like hey i i can offer this and they're like no and i'm like hey like and if they need fifty dollars more or whatever percent more i'm like like it's okay like i don't i tried to say like i don't think you're crazy for wanting that extra cushion and i think someone will buy it at that price but this is the best i can offer now sometimes it's taken and sometimes it's not in terms of the storytelling itself it's crazy that we are entering this post panini era and so many especially football and basketball people they don't even realize baseball has print odds on the back print run odds on the back there are the odds of and that print runs can relatively be calculated and granted i have been collecting home field advantages for myself honestly just because it was a little bit of project i do believe in the fundamentals of the card that's why i've stuck to pse tens which are very very tough jack cards to gen but i i i i partly just needed some of the chase to scratch the itch a little bit but the aforementioned twenty twenty four ohtani that is a pop nineteen i paid on fanatics for one thousand one hundred thirty dollars and it had one sale directly after that but it's effectively hadn't sold since september until i think earlier last week in late march first sale in six months or three months and it went from eleven hundred to i believe four thousand two hundred and part of that is the byproduct of the low pop and you can't get high on your own supply i think funny of all people i saw logan paul make a statement of this saying i'm collecting more in silence i have to line up my bag before i try to sell it and it's like it's true because if i even recognize that sometimes even me talking about my own cards that i like has caused a subsequent sale where i'm like oh like i knew that one was sitting i didn't think that one was actually gonna get binned and i'm like maybe my maybe my real cause given that this happened twenty four hours after i posted it so part of it is just like people not even realizing that print runs for unnumbered cards are quantifiable part of it is that in this new era of case hits we don't realize how quickly things can accelerate my very again i'm sorry for yapping too much but like people don't like like true goals and true blue parallels fit out of fifty and a hundred fifty for tops people love them but people don't care about the waves the shimmers to an extent the sapphires the geometrics the five other parallels i'm forgetting and that people would rather have a new design rather than a parallel that's numbered and i think even if you dig back to like twenty eighteen tops update with like juan so to gatorade bath and acuna all star in the dugout and acuna walking out of dugout i know for the nami's we'll be that one overhead but like relative to those print runs those cards outsold cards of similar print runs i guess for flagship even though like the advanced stats out of fifty one fifty the vintage out of nine nine those are more boring cards but my point being is that by having a new card like alter egos or homefield advantage or these other case animes the case hit like cards like if you own a super if you own a red out of five it's like the base going up organically it's also going to accelerate that red parallel or that super factor so being educated both in like how quickly that stuff can happen how much more scarce some of these tops parallels are and know we're not just talking about how it's parallel this is just a pump page but recognizing where those discrepancies i'm using that as a vehicle to say that recognizing where those discrepancies happen or those where those understandings aren't present and in some like for low end saying mvp here is just oh you're trying to make a twenty dollar card or twenty five dollar card or a jersey number like jersey number is a spectrum no one cares about chris lavey's jersey number everyone cares about tom brady's as you get into the more mid to high end cards the things that make those things unique matter more and i think that's an element to the framing and the storytelling to where like some people can say it's it's meaningless but that doesn't take away from like the card having its own story and it's not just framing it for the sake of framing it's that it has to act it has to actually make sense in the storytelling but i think when we're getting into those more and more unique aspects what separates one card from another is pretty important and pretty telling tons of good information there and love the perspective we've covered a ton of ground in this conversation i've enjoyed it very much max before i let you get out of here you've been building your business for several years you're very public very online you're very active in market and online what's maybe the the biggest lesson you've learned or the most important lesson you've learned since you've been running your business and that you think about as you're kinda looking to scale forward from a buying and selling standpoint you have to recognize where your cards are moving to or at the very least where you plan on moving it that's been even when i've been digging through dollar boxes and i can see oh this is like a five dollar card lowest available is twenty bucks and this is relatively short printed i can buy this for three to five and list it for twenty it's recognizing where your clientele is even if that clientele doesn't exist or hoping that that clientele exists and that's relevant on that five to twenty dollar range or even on your five thousand ten thousand or fifty thousand to a hundred thousand range getting a sense of who or the very type what type of person who the type of who is is gonna be buying your card and i guess business in general try to pursue anything where you have an edge in and i don't wanna say like i have an edge in cards but like i mean i think everyone has an edge in their own thing i think you have an edge in peyton manning and wwe but part of being able to dive and consume information is out of passion i think watches are nice i have a nice milk house that i wear myself but i would never be able to buy and sell watches even if it's a industry with way more volume because i just don't care enough to want to learn it and i definitely don't have an organic passion to it and i think cards is where there's so many different passions and it can be so individualized and so many different niche aspects you can leverage that niche to building yourself something that people don't even know and i i guess to to nip that with a little example i have a real life buddy who's just getting into the hobby now he loves nascar and loves f one he's i've taught him a little bit how to ebay but now he's ripping nascar blasters ebaying half of the base and because there's no nascar base sellers at all he's able to immediately capture like twenty five to thirty percent of his blaster box or small hobby box just out of virtue of there not being many other competitors so my point isn't to use nascar as your your business model my point is that you're probably super passionate about something card related and you can leverage that you can leverage that passion to ethically make money because people say that or pocket washing people saying make money think being able to middleman stuff to collectors or products that eventually reach collectors is pretty awesome i completely agree you can file follow him at cards max on all the platforms especially twitter where he's spending a lot of time where no one else might be there but he's there and love that the video's conversation max thank you so much for coming on sharing your story appreciate it looking forward to doing it again down the road awesome thank you for having me brett