Acquired By Bending Spoons

**Justin Jackson** (0:11)
Welcome to The Panel, where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm.

**Brian Casel** (0:19)
And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods.

**Jordan Gal** (0:21)
And I'm Jordan Gal, founder at heyrosie.com. Great to see you guys.

**Justin Jackson** (0:26)
It's so nice. It's really nice to come back from a vacation. And it's just like, where do you find your mooring? Where do you find your bearings? I mean, the first place is in that Telegram chat that we have. It's like, okay, check in with Jordan and Brian. What's going on? What's the pulse of the universe? I've been unplugged.
And then we get back on the microphones. Everything is back as it should be.

**Brian Casel** (0:50)
That's right.

**Justin Jackson** (0:51)
The band is back together.

**Brian Casel** (0:53)
I do like this rhythm of, like, we had Henry on last week, and a bunch of us have different travel stuff going on, and then we kind of come back together for a catch up. I feel like today we're catching up.

**Justin Jackson** (1:03)
That's right. That's right. We got to catch up.
Lots to talk about. And I thought I would start this episode with a little story that I think might segue us into the first topic I have here. So, yes, I have four kids, and the two younger boys, although the other, the two older have also exhibited this, they are into flipping stuff on Facebook Marketplace. So I come home, there is a mysterious dresser in the front of my house. What is this? Oh, dad, don't worry about that. That's me. I'm selling that on Facebook Marketplace. And so they are like going out to thrift stores and flea markets and finding stuff on Facebook Marketplace. And they're trying to flip it and sell it.
And-

**Brian Casel** (1:56)
Are we doing volume here? What are we talking about?

**Justin Jackson** (1:58)
Well, you see, this is exactly the topic I wanted to kind of bring up, which is it's been so interesting to watch this, right? They're hustling.
And the amount of time they're willing to invest in this for the payoff, right? So they're investing hours and hours talking to people on Facebook marketplace riding their bikes or taking the car out around and seeing if anyone's throwing away any junk that they can like, Oh, okay. resell.

**Brian Casel** (2:30)
It's like not only that they're they're taking inventory too.

**Justin Jackson** (2:33)
That's right. There's two things that are interesting that have come up here.
One is it becomes very clear that the quality of a business really depends on your ability to produce inventory. That's the first thing, right? You have to have something to sell. And in that particular category, it's procurement, like how are you going to find the good stuff? And there must be some YouTube thing going on right now because they say there's like tons of kids doing this. And now that my eyes have been open to it, like when I'm walking around downtown, like yesterday, I saw two kids carrying a bunch of like old stereo equipment that they found somewhere, and I'm like, there's like a movement of kids flipping stuff.

**Jordan Gal** (3:19)
Everyone's finally listening to Gary Vee.

**Justin Jackson** (3:22)
The Gary Vee meme has reached its apex, and so they're all going to garage sales. They're all like scrounging in the ditches to find product to sell. And so that's a problem, right? You got to be able to procure the inventory.
But the second issue is distribution. It's like as soon as they start doing these businesses, I think they realize like, okay, I've got something. How am I going to sell this? How am I going to reach a customer? And scaling both of those is tricky.

**Brian Casel** (3:57)
I know where you're going with this, but isn't the Facebook marketplace the distribution?

**Justin Jackson** (4:01)
Facebook marketplace is part of the distribution, yeah. But they're trying to sell it at pawn shops. They're trying to sell it. They're doing all sorts of stuff.

**Jordan Gal** (4:10)
Any value add in the middle? Like, I'll take this dresser and clean it up and paint it?

**Justin Jackson** (4:14)
Yeah, they're doing some value add, cleaning it up. Especially with game systems, they're trying to fix them if they're broken. And there's all sorts of stuff there.

**Jordan Gal** (4:24)
That's great.

**Justin Jackson** (4:25)
I love it. But it's been interesting to think about them, especially them seeing... Now they're in these algorithms where they're seeing people talk about businesses online.
Another one that my son saw was, there's this guy online, and he gets a bunch of businesses to advertise on a printed piece of card, and then he pays to distribute that to thousands of houses, and he makes a bunch of money that way.