He Started With $240 and His Mom’s Car | Tommy Marciano

Tommy Marciano started with $240 in his pocket and his mom's car.

He'd seen a Gary Vee video about flipping stuff from garage sales, spent $40 of that $240 on his first buy, went home and called himself an idiot. He was too intimidated by eBay shipping to ever learn it — so he started meeting strangers at QuikTrip to do $3 deals and accidentally built a local Facebook following instead. Today Tommy Trades runs 52 auctions a year, pickups every Saturday, junk removal, moving, and some weekends he buys fifteen storage units at once.

This one is the whole machine, out loud. How storage-unit auctions actually work and why they open at $10. Why he goes to garage sales for marketing, not inventory. The $2,250 buy from a couple of seventy-year-old bikers in Maplewood that turned into $15,000 inside a week. The hoarder house in

Sunset Hills. The human skull. The $50,000 in gold somebody says they pulled out of his dumpster — and why he genuinely does not care.

It's also the parts nobody puts on Instagram: operating scared the entire time, seven bulging discs and pressing furniture overhead anyway, standing outside his own warehouse at 4 a.m. getting a job application from the guy stealing from him. Why anime is a better model for manhood than American TV.

Why he thinks prioritizing money is the stupidest thing you can do in business. Japan alone for a month, skydiving in Moab behind an 80-year-old and an amputee, and Bob at Missouri Coin — who was given up for dead, hallucinated his way to the top of a mountain, and got kicked off it by Jesus.

If you've got $240 and no idea where to start, this one's for you.