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 i ...