Hey there Grinders! Regular scheduling of content resumes this week. For real this time lol. There will be a new Daily Grindstone each weekday, new short videos each weekday, 1 long video per week, and 1-2 streams per week (usually on whatnot).  This past week has been one of reorganizing and preparation. It was the first week of the school district’s Spring Break, which means everyone’s at home and schedules have been lax to say the least. But I’ve gotten a lot of things moved around in the office, better placed and organized to improve listing. Been making plans and brainstorming about future things.  This week going forward again will be better scheduled as far as content is concerned. Also planning it to be a week of a big blast of new listings. TCGplayer, Ebay, and the WooShop should all be receiving lots of new inventory. Pokemon, One Piece, magic, Flesh & Blood, various sports cards, and Lorcana all should be going up, with Weiss Schwarz to follow as well. I’ve been having some, let’s say mixed success, on whatnot. I’ve got a few shows under my belt now, so I can speak a bit from a position of experience. Not like an old hand or anything, but I have a frame of reference that I didn’t have 3 months ago. All in all, I like the live selling, that has been way less terrifying than I originally thought. I haven’t been able to get much traction when selling anything other than Magic or Pokemon. I feel sports cards are pretty saturated, and buyers aren’t looking for the lower end or what I like to call “bulk plus” stuff anyway. I also tried out selling Weiss Schwarz, because I have a big stack of $2+ WS cards that I thought I might be able to find a niche audience for, but only a couple sold in about an hour of trying, so I wouldn’t call that a big success.  When selling Magic or Pokemon though, it has seemed like I was always able find a few buyers who were interested in anything I had available, and even brought in others who were interested too. I’ve had over $500 in sales through whatnot in March alone so far, which I can’t argue with one bit.  My biggest issue with whatnot is the inventory management. By the nature of the platform, it’s a bit loose on this sort of thing. You’re able to toss up for auction whatever makes sense in the moment, and it isn’t easy to tell after the fact in a scalable way what cards you’ve sold, what their prices were, what their details are, &c. The info is there, but it’s not simple to get the details tied to the orders and then into a form easily addable to a spreadsheet, like it is from Ebay or (to a lesser extent) TCGplayer. It’s just a challenge, and one I haven’t really got a process for yet, so stay tuned for when that comes about. I may just need to be more disciplined than the platform requires, in order to keep it all straight in my own mind, not sure. Big ideas I’m interested in pursuing in the middle/long term – I’d like to refresh the Discord server some. Creating a free section that I can invite people in that don’t pay for a membership, but limited access for them. Still maintaining a place only for those paid members with the added features they should be getting. Since I’m liking some but not all the aspects of live selling, I’m wondering if there is some way I can integrate it directly into the website. There seem to be solutions that emulate some but not all of whatnot’s features in an embeddable way so that I could run live selling directly through a page on the site. This would be cool for private shows only for members, or maybe only for certain tiers of membership, and again could bring more people into the community and purchasing directly from the site, which is better for me and for the buyer. Super super long term idea – building a marketplace in the style of TCGplayer but for sports cards, similar to buysportscards, but maybe better implemented, with more of an eye towards reducing frictions in the marketplace, and with a better marketing arm. Just an idea, but let’s you know the kinds of things I’m thinking about. A reminder – if you order single cards from the WooShop, and your order is of a kind to be shipped in a Plain White Envelope, we do have free envelope tracking available in the style of Ebay Standard Envelope. Even if your order is just a $.25 card, you get the tracking service as a free bonus.  Cheers!