Running A Million Dollar Pokemon Card Business Out of A Basement - PokeNE

Brian from PokeNE is back! 
In this episode he updates us on 

• How Pokémon card sales have been in the past year
• How he has navigated the scarcity from the lockdown craze, by tapping into the demand for Japanese and Korean cards
• His strategic approach led to $1.3 million in sales within a year, focusing on international markets to gain exclusive deals. 

Brian discusses building relationships with these international distributors, choosing the right products, and leveraging content creation.
He hints that exciting developments are on the horizon, and is looking forward to the challenges and developments in 2025.

The previous episode with Brian

Connect with Brian brian@pokene.com
His website
YouTube
Instagram

Transcript

0:00

After about a year doing Japanese and Korean stuff. The reason we did that was at the time during like the pandemic, you couldn't buy English cards in stores for a fair price. They're all getting scalped online. So we kind of saw an opening in the market, and then Japanese and Korean cards were available to fill that gap. So that's all we did for about a year, and we sold about 1.2 or $3 million worth of those. Meet Bryan from Pokey Knee. He started a seven figure Pokemon card company out of his basement in Omaha, Nebraska. And today, he's on track to sell even more. In this episode, you'll learn what tools he uses to run his business. What the future of the Pokemon card market looks like in 2025, where he gets his inventory from, and also his content strategies, and what they do to grow his business and bring in more buyers. Also, if you want to hear our first interview where we went over the origins of his company, you can go ahead and find that link in the show notes down below. Let's go to the interview. Bryan, welcome back to the business RPG. Thanks for having me. It's been a hot minutes. Good to be back. It's been a bit of time. There is a lot that's happened over the past couple of years, and I know there's a ton that's happened for you over the past couple of years. I know when we first connected, like it was mainly Japanese, and then also some Korean cards that you were pushing on on all other platforms. You had the store, you had Twitch. Are you still doing that right now or is that. Yeah. So Twitch that was like live streaming for for ripping ships. So a lot of people don't know what that is out of, like the context of the Pokemon world, but it's, basically people buy stuff from a secondary site with the intention of you like me as the creator, opening it on camera and going, oh my God, look at you, you got the charts. And then everyone cheers in the chat section. No, I haven't done that in a while. Once in a great while, we'll do like a special charity stream or something, but opening cards for eight hours per night. And then packing them and having having to be entertaining for that long. It's not. It's not conducive to long term business. It's fun, but at this point, running the the actual website and doing that, it's just impossible. Good times. What about I mean, I watch the streams, had a ton of fun. I don't think I actually ever bought anything, though, because I, I, I just didn't have the money at the time. Most people just watch. It's, good entertainment. What about now? Are you still moving the same cards and getting them from the same places now? And by places I mean as in Japan versus the US, or are you starting to gravitate towards a different market. Yeah. So we still actually have the same Japanese supplier, from years ago when me and you talked, which is great. He's he's always been great to me, but, since then. So after about a year doing Japanese and Korean stuff. The reason we did that was at the time during, like, the pandemic, you couldn't buy English cards in stores for a fair price. They're all getting scalped online. So we kind of saw an opening in the market, and then Japanese and Korean cards were available to fill that gap. So that's all we did for about a year, and we sold about 1.2 or $3 million worth of those. And at that point, I was able to get in contact with a, English distributor called Southern Hobby. They're one of the biggest, like, the nation's biggest official distributors of Pokemon cards. They don't work with, like, Walmart, target. But they're at that level where actual, like, retail stores get stuff. And usually they just work with brick and mortar stores. But we had like an impressive enough sales repertoire where they made an exception for me. So that got me into the English market. And then since then, I, I tried a bunch of other IPAs. Some of them caught, some of them not so much. One piece has been a great IP for us. The anime is super popular. The live action helped a lot getting it mainstream, but for the most part just Pokemon still. But since then I've with all the content a lot of other folks like from around the world have reached out. So I got a guy in Singapore that gives me like Chinese products because they're kind of next door neighbors. I got a guy, a couple new guys in Japan and Korea just also supply me. I've got a guy in Indonesia who gives me Indonesian cards, which they kind of suck because no one cares about the sealed product there. But they do have exclusive promo cards, so that's nice. I got a guy in Thailand kind of the same deal. They have exclusive pack art. So I got Thai cards, Indonesian, Korean, and then I've got a different guy. Or is he from. Oh, he's from, Taiwan. And so he gives me, like, simplified Chinese. So there's there's a lot there's a lot of languages. Now we cover Korean and Japanese. One piece to, it's we've expanded quite a bit. Yeah. I, just just side note, I don't think I've actually shared this on the YouTube channel or on the podcast yet, but one of the things we've branched out to in our reselling business was an antique books. And I have actually been keeping up with some of my eBay numbers with my antique booth. I've been blown away by what can be done, but behind the glass, I ended up getting some of the Korean Pokemon cards that you suggested. I start reselling and I put them on. Oh wow, throwback. They have been flying off the shelf. It's absolutely crazy. Now I bring that up because you have really been able to tap into the market of what people don't usually see. I know on the internet it's not very hard to come across Korean cards in person in the wild. It actually really is in East Texas to to find stuff like that. So what is it that you are looking for whenever you're looking to try a new product? Is it just the fact that it's a different language or is it an IP that you just have a gut feeling? Or is there some data that you actually pull from when it comes to deciding what is going to be the next product that Pokemon needs to put on its website? Low key. That is my favorite question anyone's ever asked me. It's it's such a good question. I never thought to even answer it. Like, I'll I'm going to try to make a YouTube video about this topic after this airs. So a lot goes into it now. At first, I just tried everything because the Japanese booster box thing was such a cuckoo idea at the time that I was like, okay, that cuckoo idea worked. I'm gonna try these other ones. And I just kind of threw stuff at Digimon UK. I just tried everything. Now I realize I have to be a little more like, precise with what I go for. So what I've learned over the year was different languages in IT of themselves don't add value to people. They don't see the value in it just because it's Indonesian. And it's interesting. What I do is I go to different countries for cards based on exclusives. So like in Thailand, simplified Chinese and Chinese, they have like exclusive pack art and box art design. Without boring your audience and Pokemon lore, these other countries got like the Pokemon card game years, years, years later than Americans and Japanese people. So they're basically like having to catch up. So they're they're combining a bunch of sets into like new sets and releasing them as their own thing. So there's like exclusive designs and art on the packaging itself, which people like to collect sealed product. So like if, if I can snag my if I get my hands on that, that's great. If it's a, if it's like a special promo card only available in a certain country, I'll snag that up. Like somewhere in Asia, there's a Lapras with a 7-Eleven emblem on it, like 7-Eleven, the gas station wildest looking thing. Google it. People at home because it's hilarious. So that'd be something I'd go for. And then as far as, like, analytics you kind of asked about, I've learned that you need you only only should get something if it replaces something else. Logically. So when English cards were hard to come by in America, Japanese was the next best thing. And people were like, oh, I'll just Japanese is fine, we'll do that. And then when Japanese cards got overhyped and they got super expensive Korean cards made sense because, oh, quirky, you know, they're a different language. So people think it's interesting, but they're also really, really cheap. So then that made sense. And then so at one piece the same way, you know, English one piece got a little too expensive for people. Japanese one piece filled the gap. But you can't go too far like Korean. One piece was a huge failure to us. So I'm still learning. But there there definitely is like strategy as far as getting the people exclusive stuff and like giving collectibles and then also like giving their wallets, a little bit of a break if a certain language gets too trendy, the Pokemon world's really weird. Let's dig into that a little bit deeper, maybe into the macro 2022 2023, around the time that we were doing those conversations on on the show. And I'll link our past episodes in the show notes below for anyone who wants to go back, instead of scrolling through the whole feed to find them up. At that time, there was the gouging you were talking about. It was hard to find English product in Target or Walmart or whatever, have you. Now I see plenty of it. Yeah. Where is the market now as far as availability and where you really find people are looking for for cards or value like like what is the most valuable thing to really pursue right now as a Pokemon seller? This podcast was timed quite well because even six months ago this wasn't really the case, but, product is available pretty much anywhere. That's that's a fact. You can you've never been able to buy, like, sealed booster boxes in stores. So that's like kind of an online only thing or like an LGS thing, but like Walmart and Target and GameStop, they don't sell like the booster boxes of 36 packs. So the booster box will always be like the quintessential, like, investment collectible sealed item. So those online stores still kind of have I don't want to use word exclusive, but, you know, air quotes exclusive on those, which is good. And the English sets as a whole, we're at a point now. We're kind of in a bull market where pretty much anything that drops it's hot. And for a long time when a new English set would drop, the mSRP on a booster box is $160 nowadays, but the market price when a new set would drop would be like 105 to 110 at the most. And that's at release. And of course, they appreciate it over time. But for typically that $110 price would stay consistent for a couple of years until the set went out of print. Now we're at a point where a new set comes out, might start at 110, but within 2 or 3 months it goes up quite a bit. Twilight masquerades one of the newer sets that came out a couple months ago, and we're looking at like $120 right now. Powder Evolved came out like a year and two months ago or so. That was 100 bucks on the market all day long. Now TCG players got it for $145 market price. And so a stellar crowd is the newest Pokemon set that came out just last month. And market price is already like one 2125. So we're seeing like kind of a bull market where these sets come out out the gate. They're already $1,015 higher than they would have been if they came out like six, seven, eight months ago. So we're in a really healthy market, actually. Nothing's getting gouged. If you hunt around the internet, you can still get them for a cheaper price. But the average, you know, good store with good reviews, they're making a lot more money than they used to. And ironically, Japanese cards are lower than they've ever been. The market is still very healthy. The market likes them, and TCG player, which is like the the website for single cards, like it's like the eBay of of single Pokemon cards. They have a section specifically for Japanese cards now, which has never been a thing. So the Japanese cards are getting a lot more mainstream. They're getting accepted more and more by like the general public, but ironically, booster boxes, they're where they used to come out the gate at like 75 to 80 USD. Now they're coming out the gate around like 55 to, 50 to $55 USD, upon release, minus a few exceptions. But we kind of flip flop. We've just been flip flopping the last 3 or 4 years as far as, like, English and Japanese and how overhyped they are. But we're we're probably in the healthiest market in my, like, three year career that that's beneficial for both me as a seller and then as the buyer if it stays like this forever, buyers and sellers will both be very happy, but something will change. Has it been difficult to get Ahold of English product and is that impacted the market at all? We're like, it's it's like the perfect mix. I mean, like I, I was telling my people this for the past year when things were fine, but not like fantastic. I was like, guys, if you're lucky enough to have a distributor, now is the time to kiss their butt and take every single thing they offer you because the distributors have like warehouses of basically good stuff that people actually want and then junk that for whatever reason wasn't very successful. And how it works is the distributors go, hey, if you want ten cases of this set, people like you can buy those for a good price. But you need to also take ten cases of this crap no one wants. So that's kind of how it works. And so I was telling people for the past year, I'm like, take the crap. No one wants to build rapport with your distributor. You kind of have to get brownie points, basically. And I did that for the past year, and now that everything's hot and when you buy a new set, you can sell it for $25 profit. Day one I have access to whatever I want. So if you if you did what I said and you kind of, you know, played the role with the distributors as it is a vendor like me, if you played the role for the past a year, then there's no problems at all obtaining inventory like the new set coming out, surging sparks. It's a very popular like people are really loving the the leaks and the reveals. So far, I'm able to get probably seven, 800 boxes of it upon release, where a lot of stores that weren't really, doing the brownie point dance for the past year, they're going to get maybe 100 boxes, 200 boxes at the most, depending on how big they are. So if you did it right, there's no inventory issue at all. You're not going to see an inventory issue in stores. Because like the the distributors that that handled Walmart, target, GameStop, like they're all huge already. But for for vendors like me, you know, you got me, Danny Phantom and, there's Eli. There's a couple big ones like they're doing, you know, 2 to 5 million a year. We have infinite products, basically. And we have we have enough where we can offer a good price but also still make good money. It's the perfect mix. One of the themes that comes around with a lot of your YouTube content. And I think you've you've made a significant amount of content on this across all your platforms. But the reoccurring topic of is now a good time to start a Pokemon card business. What that looks like for 2024 or 2325. Give me give me the maybe big picture or the short version of that, because I know you probably have days worth of content you could bring up to talk about that. Yeah, well, let's say I was someone who was wanting to start in 2025 or end of 2024. What would it take for me to get started in this business of selling Pokemon cards? I want to say wholesale or, because you don't you don't do a whole lot of singles. You primarily only sealed products. Yeah. Sealed product. What would it take for someone to get into being a sealed product? Pokemon card seller in Q4 2024? Yeah, I hate the answer, but it depends on what you want to do. So if you just want to, if you want to become like an official vendor, like with an official distributor, like Southern Hobby, for example, you you would need to do one of two things. And that's either open a brick and mortar location, which is extremely risky and extremely capital intensive. But at that point they work with brick and mortar, pretty much without debate. You can't just go, hey, southern hobby, I have a store. Now give me all the best product. Like you still have to work your way up the ranks to get access to whatever the hell you want, but they will work with you right away. These distributors do not work with online stores, basically. Ever. Unless you really can prove yourself that you know how to sell. And so if you're starting out today and you don't want to do a brick and mortar store, the only way to get access to an official distributor would be sales on your own. And so that comes in the flavors of you sell singles on TCG player or eBay, and you build an impressive enough sales record where they'll actually talk to you. For me, I sold about one point something million dollars of Japanese cards and set them like sell spreadsheet. What? Yo, southern hobby. I know how to make money work with me because they only want to work with serious people. If your goal is to start a business with a distributor, you have to do your own thing. And for a long time. And if your goal is to just do your own thing, period, any time is good. I mean, now would be a great time to do Japanese singles because TCG player.com has spots for that now, or it will sometime this month. If you want to do like Japanese, Korean and anything Asian you've got the benefit of, there's no like official distributor ship that's that's Asian that works with Americans. They they work with their own, their own citizens. So everyone's kind of on an even playing field, you know, you today could, could find my supplier on Instagram if you just and worked hard enough and you could email them and be like, yo, I want to buy some stuff. They'll give you a minimum order quantity for a fair price, and you can buy them for the same price I'm getting them for. There's no brownie points you need to achieve, it's just risk on your end. If you want to wire this random person money across the ocean. So that's what I would suggest to people is like, start with singles and start with maybe just flipping stuff. Start with Asian stuff where we're all in the same playing field. But if, if you're trying to get with an English distributor, you got to play the long game I did. I waited a year, and I got very lucky with how fast I was able to get one. But you got to start now because even the people that had English distributors a year ago, you know, they were I know people were avoiding buying certain product because, like, it wasn't like, oh, I'm not making that much money. Like the English distributor price on, what was hot back, Silver Tempest back in the day, it was like, you know, $88 and on TCG player, it was selling for like the market price was like 105. So people are like, I'm only making, you know, eight bucks after fees, like, it's not really worth it. And they just want an order and they're like, I'll wait for the market to get better. Well guess what? Bob Barker got better. But Southern Hobby is not going to give you product now because you didn't help them out. So then job is going to give the product to me who was buying pallets of the silver tempest when no one cared. So the answer is always you want to start ASAP? Because if you start during a good time, Pokemon's popular. You got to work a little harder, but you can make your way in with content. And if you start at a bad time like a bear market and you have the capital, then you can get your brownie points. Now establish yourself while the market's down, and by the time the market inevitably goes back up, you'll be set up. So now it's it's always the perfect time. It's just YouTube content. And keep making it. So let's let's dig into that side. Actually we we've talked about the back end I guess you could say the distribution side or the vendor side when it comes to the inventory and building that side of your business. Let's talk about the client side. Tell me a bit about your ideal client. Tell me what the typical Pokemon card buyer or new shield pack buyer, who they are, where you're finding them, what kind of content that they're consuming in order to find you. Like, what is it that if you were Sherlock Holmes looking at this through their eyes, what is it that they're seeing? And what is it that they're doing to connect with you? Yeah, I have a few different flavors of people, so I've got, just general collectors who probably don't even watch my YouTube channel. And our average sale price is bananas, but it's $267, which is correct. They have discretionary income that I don't have, apparently, but that's the average like purchase price. And a lot of those people are just collectors. They find my website through like Facebook and Instagram ads. Maybe they watch me on YouTube, but like not necessarily. And and that's the majority of my audience. I would say, now that I've got kind of a big following with like 24,000 subs, a good chunk of those people are other businesses that a lot of them just want to kind of learn from me. A good chunk of them, they're collectors and they want to buy from me, just as a collector. And then I really open the door for other businesses that want to use me as their supplier. You know, they don't have access to southern Hobby, but they know I'll give them a bulk deal if they buy, you know, several cases. So they're learning how to start a Pokemon business from me. And I'm also becoming their supplier. So it's kind of a win win. I get the money on both ends. So it's kind of those three flavors of people you got, like the business owners that like inventory, the people that just watch the content and give me a revenue and then collector slash invest sters. But, the I mean, the average person, it's like we have a strange I, I've said this a lot. We have a strange a strangely high amount of Spanish speaking customers. I don't understand like, why? Because I don't speak Spanish. But I looked into actually translating my YouTube channel into Spanish, and I'm actually working on some interesting stuff with that, because we have a ton of hay sources, Jose's whatever, and they're all in like Southern California and kind of, you know, on the border. So that's an interesting demographic. And then, 40% of our YouTube audience is European or Asian. And I know why that is, because I upload videos in the middle of the night, because I work in the middle of the night. So the people in Asia and Europe, they get that. They see the new upload in the middle of their day. So, it's probably not good that 40% of my audience is Asian and European, because I don't sell to Asians or European. I don't sell international. But it's an interesting demographic and it opens the door for like maybe future growth. If I want to expand a bit. A lot of flavors of people. Just about every time that we talk, there's something you've done content wise that is taking your business to the next level. I know starting with TikTok, Instagram was where I actually found you. YouTube has taken off for you. What does it take to make content and to be successful in this niche? Running your kind of business? Transparency for sure. You have to be real. People can really tell. Like, if you're faking it and, like, being real doesn't mean you have to be nice or even, like, positive. I have a lot of videos that are kind of a bit Debbie Downer vibes. I definitely go hard and on some people and some types of people, and I think people like that, you know, there's Pokemon card investing, for example, is kind of a hot button topic. There's, there's people that take it seriously, and then there's people that think they take it seriously. And I'm not afraid to poke fun at those people because honestly, someone needs to call them out because there's people that lose a lot of money thinking that they're going to be big ballers one day. And I think just that level of of honesty and transparency, it doesn't turn off as many people as you'd think. People actually, I think really like that, because you get a lot of YouTubers who are overly positive all the time. And like Leon Hart, for example, he's a very nice guy and his target demographic is children, so he should always be happy that be positive. Like that's his demo. But adults that watch him, they're sick of it. They don't want to hear it. And I'm like, well, you're not his demographic. So me being kind of more harsh and and you know, you curse sometimes you're a little more inappropriate. You're straight forward thinking. I feel the gap that people like Leon Hart leave open. And that's like the 20 to 50 year olds in the hobby, which is a huge portion of the hobby. So transparency, being yourself, not being too happy BS. Abby. That's important. And also providing actual value. You know, in 2021, you could open up, you could silently open up a booster pack. And if you got a charger, that's all you needed to be famous. Like, oh my god, now that doesn't work anymore. We've all seen first Edition Shahzad's, we've all seen Neon Genesis. We all, we all, we've all seen everything. At this point, they're showing prototype cards that existed before the card game, and that's old news. There's nothing exciting that you can show people on YouTube that's going to get you famous, or even even views at all. So we're through with that, that type of content. Now it's are you providing actual value? And the people that are killing it, like, I'm not huge, I have 24,000 subs, not huge. But I started with like 1500 this year and I got to there. I mean, we're getting like 1500 subs a month and I'm not the only one. There's Alex from Cell Dynamics. He started very small. The series got like 12 or 13,000. There's a guy named Rob Burns. There's oh, possum blood. There's, deep pocket monster. There's a bunch of people and they're there provide value. They don't just open packs or like, share fun facts or it's they actually help you. Like, if you type in something that you want to learn or you want to know or you want to feel, they provide that and they do it quickly and and they do it in a nice, concise way. They don't have like these 20 minute. I'm half exaggerating with these 20 minute intros like what's up guys? Welcome to the channel. Don't forget to like and hit that subscribe button before I give you any value at all. Also, I got a Patreon. I opened up and oh, that's like the I need to make a video on that. There are so many like Pokemon YouTubers who have like 47 subs, and I wonder why they're not growing and they actually do have good information, but you have to get through their stupid 92nd intro first, and no one's got time for that. You said before our interview that people don't have a lot of time anymore. It's like everyone's very busy. If you don't provide value from the punch, even if you're the smartest person in the world, no one's going to listen. So gotta be punchy. There's, creator. A lot of the people who are reading business books and whatnot have probably heard of this guy, but, Don Miller, writer a story brand. He's talked about conversations he's had with other podcasters, other, storytellers who who are building businesses around the storytelling side of sales and marketing. And it always goes to skip the whole five minute history of how they built their business and get to what it is that the audience is looking for. They're not looking to hear about how Mr. Miyagi became Mr. Miyagi. They're here to hear about how Mr. Miyagi can help them become the Karate Kid. And that has been huge when it comes to a lot of the projects I'm working on with getting people getting their attention, getting them to stay on the video or to stay on the podcast episode that they're listening to, but also the feedback that we get from those episodes is usually more engaging, too. And so I truly think that there's something to it with, providing value out of the gate. Yeah, I think it's a really important lesson. Like, I don't know that guy, actually, but, you'd like to like him a lot. Don Miller wrote a book called A Business Made. Simple, story branding, story marketing. He's also connected, I think, with the guy who runs Entrepreneurs on Fire. I do not like that podcast at all, but that guy has it down to a science with his interviews. Okay. It's I got him. I got him on my other, other tab now, so I'll look that up after the interview. You'll like him a lot. Yeah. You might not learn anything, but you will like him. You heard he's doing a lot of it. He's just having it on. In the background is you learn a teeny bit of something every time you listen to anything. So I always have stuff on in the background when I pack orders and straight up. So you've had a pretty good stint of making content, especially right now this year with YouTube. What are the what is the impact that doing that has had on your business? I know there's ad revenue, but that's that's not really what I'm wanting to talk about. What kind of opportunities have opened up for you as a result of the content you've been making with the YouTube channel? Lots. For the ad revenue, it's way better than I thought it was. But as far as, like actual, sales on the site, I'm also impressed because I wasn't really sure what to what to expect. So number one, Shopify and I don't use Shopify, but Wix recently copied Shopify, where they allow you to, sync your website and your YouTube channel together. It's kind of a beta feature on Wix. So I have if you watch a YouTube video, you see my products like on screen and so right there, I've got analytics of people buying stuff directly from my, from my channel. And that's a pretty significant amount, actually. So right there I have like actual like black and white numbers. Other than the black and white numbers, though, just, just, sometimes I do promo codes. So like in the video, I'll be like, yo, use promo code, whatever to save $5 on your next order. And I do that to build sales, I guess. But really, I do that. So a week later I can look at how many times the promo code was used and I can be like, oh wow, you know, 12 people use the promo code. That video only got 1500 views. That's pretty good. So I can track it with with Wix, with promo codes, just people like in the notes section on the orders. Like when you order something, you can like leave a note. A lot of folks just going, hey man, love your stuff. You're a huge inspiration, blah blah blah. Found you on YouTube. Whatever. I get a ton of emails like people analytics. Seems like something that's relatively hard to track or that you have to really work towards tracking, but it might be just kind of a, a trait, like a trait of the Pokemon card community as a whole. But people will absolutely tell you if you're doing a good job or a bad job, of course, you will get feedback directly without even asking for it. I mean, I get probably, probably like 100 emails a week saying something along the lines of saw your channel on YouTube, started my own business, you know, love what you're doing, blah blah blah. Like positive surprise. About a hundred a week, which is insane. If you look at my views, it's a large percentage, because I'm not like that big to get that many emails, but it's a huge percentage. I'm counting DMs on there, too, by the way. So it's just a lot of like, direct feedback. And that I just have to assume those people are translating into sales, too. It's a lot of kind of it's like putting a billboard up in your city. It's like the the ROI of the billboard. You can't really directly measure all the way, but you definitely have access to tools that I talked about just now where you can directly measure, and that's good. It's also been useful not just for sales, but for the collaborations. Like you and me. We already knew each other, but you found me on Instagram, so like, making content. Instagram got me connected with you, which is awesome. And then making content on YouTube. That's how I met my, Singapore guy that gives me English one piece and some, Chinese stuff. Like he found me on YouTube. He emailed me. That's how I met my Indonesian guy. That's how I met my guy from Thailand. I'd tell him about one of my Japanese suppliers. Out of the five I use, it's, how I was connected to, like me and Pat Flynn. Deep pocket monster. He found me on someone else's channel getting an interview, and so I've dmed him back and forth a few times. He helped me with some stuff. I have a contract now with drip, which is like, a competitor of of whatnot. They're a streaming platform, and they hit me up because of YouTube, and they offered me a contract and were we've got a thing going on for the next three months, and other YouTubers, shockwave, the that new Transformers movie that just came out like the animated one. One of the characters in the transformer is a shockwave. He's like a transformer. He DM me today. I'm like literally today. And he's like, hey, man, I'm in Transformers. Which is hilarious. And he's like, I also do nerd stuff. I've got this game I'm building. I want you to be part of it. You know, could you fly to LA for an I can't make it to LA? But it was an interesting invitation. And so that was like opportunities like that come all the time now. And it's only because I'm making YouTube videos like otherwise I'm just another website. So opportunities from suppliers, from customers, from Transformers, it's it's in you know it's open source. There's so many doors of open up man I think the and I'm not going to pretend that I have the biggest audience out there, especially after this podcast had to be shut down for a little while, just for some personal things that were going on. You don't have to have a massive audience, I think, to actually see that return on investment. I can resonate on, on a smaller scale to a lot of what you just said, but also I'm seeing smaller creators that I follow some that are the same size of you, some that are smaller than you, and they'll do a video on what it looked like to do a collaboration, what kind of business that brought in, what opportunity is have come their way, and they are nowhere near getting that silver play button. Yeah. Not not that's not to say that that's a reason they shouldn't keep striving for it. Shoot for the stars. But it already justifies all the work that they put into their channels. 100%. Yeah. You don't need to be, like, famous, especially in a niche industry like this. It's, I mean, there's I forget who said it. It's Gary Vee or somebody like Gary Vee, but you only need a thousand fans. Like, that's a if you have a thousand people that are really backing you, like, that's literally all you need. So more than that, like bonus. What does the future of the market look like? You know, I love to ask questions about the future, but what does 2025 look like for the Pokemon industry? Not to be like super like cliche, but 2025 would be a massive year. There is so much happening so it's probably going to be better than this year. And this year was really good for my business at least. So 2025, we're starting off with a set called, to Rust or something along the lines of, it's a set specializing in EV. So EV is one of the most popular Pokemon out there. Definitely top five and the set focuses on EV and all the evolution. So like they pour in on Jolteon, firing on all the other ones. So that's that's going to be massive. It's going to be like huge. And then we have a Team Rocket set that's basically going to emulate, like the Team Rocket set from, you know, the early 2000. So all the 90s kids are amped because it's going to be essentially a remake of Team Rocket Returns or something similar to that. There's going to be like a Gym Heroes esque set where it's like Misty Garrido, but now it'll be, you know, Marnie's more Peco, so that's going to be huge. They're doing a ton of throwback sets and just and that's just what we know now. So we can assume there's going to be more that we hear about down the line. There's a Pokemon like a Z a I think so Pokemon there's there's X and Y that came out probably a decade ago now because we're all old and it seems like time just doesn't exist. So like the sequel to like X and Y is coming out next year, that's going to be huge. Still, make a card, TCG set based on that game. There's so much happening in this, this year that it's going to be massive. I mean, I think we have the potential of of grossing 5 million in sales, and in one year in 2025, the, Pokemon released a an app called TCG pocket, which is like a dumbed down version of the Pokemon Trading Card game. They had an online TCG that a lot of people did enjoy quite a bit, but this is like kind of like Pokemon Go, where it takes something that is already huge and then it opens it up to even the even more masses. So and then there's like digital card packs you open, which is like obviously addicting to people. And that's going to probably gross 400,000,000 in 1 years is my prediction. 2025 is going to probably be the biggest year of my three year career. That'll be my fourth year. It'll definitely be the biggest, and then after that, I think it's only 1 or 2 years later, we'll be in the 30th anniversary, which I'm sure Pokemon has a ton planned for the 30th anniversary. Plus, will be in Gen ten, probably where they'll be, you know, 120 to 150 new Pokemon, which I think will line up with the 30th anniversary probably around that time. So it's, to answer your question in one sentence, it's going to be freaking massive, like Pokemon is going to be massive in 2025, and I'm sure they'll take advantage of the 2025. Like, because Pikachu is number 25 in the Pokedex and that's a big deal. So there'll be some Pikachu related thing. There's a ton of conventions there that are already planned for the year. I'm looking I'm very much looking forward to it. No doom and gloom for me. You talk about different packs in different editions or renditions or, what? What is the technical term that's not version, is it? Or season? Like like sets. So people say, there we go. You talk about new sets coming out. Is there a strategy that you have to come up with that's unique to each set when it comes to getting it out to the buyers, or is it literally oh, there's a new set. I'm going to get my stock images up. I'm going to make sure that there's enough links that are accurate and correct, going to the right part on the site. And then I'm going to make some pictures and posts about the fact that I have it. Is it that simple or do you have to do something entirely different for an EV box set versus a 30th anniversary box set? It's largely the same process. But if you want to do it really well, you know, there's you always want to kind of hype it up a little bit. So like pokey beachcombers is like my main news source. And they'll post either leaked images or, early images of Pokemon reveals officially of a new set. So, Surging Sparks comes out, in November, for example. And, you know, pokey com shared what the Pikachu is going to look like in that set. So just being aware of what's already leaked or what's been revealed and kind of posting that on social media and getting people excited. But you again, you do that with every set. So the most important thing is just keeping an eye on the market. You know, if something gets revealed, you make sure you put it out there. You make sure you're first and you're early, you know, put the little, the little heart rate thing on Instagram Stories, or people can judge how much they love it. And mostly people love it all the time. So if you're at my level, you just buy as many as you can because they all always sell out. I'm sure that won't always be the case. There's going to be a time where, you know, I'm not going to buy 700 of the same booster boxes. Release. Probably. They'll be like a slow time, I'm sure, at some point. Right now, as long as you're keeping up on the news, writing blog posts is something I'm really working hard on because the Google algorithm loves blogs and so if every time there's a new set, a new, reveal, a new couple cards that get revealed, writing a blog about that and then linking it to your site and the preorder of your site. That's important, but largely it's all the same. You just got to make sure you're on top of it. Well let's go ahead and start wrapping down. I know you've answered this question a number of times in the past, but it's so relevant because this is a completely different year from last time we had an interview there. What are some of the goals that you have for the next year with your business? The goals change like honestly every every quarter. So like it's it's you could ask this question next week and you might hear something different from a, I, I largely don't want to grow it much, to be honest. I'm kind of done like growing the business. Like at most, I want to hit 5 million in revenue in a year, and I don't want to get bigger than that, because at that point, then I need to get a bigger facility. And I'm in my basement now, which I love. And so bigger facility equals. Now I'm leasing a space. Now I'm driving to and from a place. Now I've got to have probably a full time employee or two in that place. Anything like 5 million is probably the space. It's a limit. So anything above that I don't want to deal with. So goals will be 5 million or under, I'd say between 3 and 5 million and sales would be a goal forever. I really want to build the content space. I want to get YouTube to a point where that's a full time income in and of itself, where if I don't sell a single Pokemon card for a whole year, I can still afford mortgage. So that's my main goal would be just getting YouTube fully functional. I want channel memberships. I want ad revenue that's consistent. I want to be able to post three times a week and maintain the income from the ad Rev. And, I want to try to travel a little bit more to conventions. I try I want to hit like 5 or 6 a year, kind of. The goal every other month would be good. That's about it, though. I mean, I'm not asking for $1 million. I just keep things about the same. I've gotten really good at managing my time. So even though, like, this year, we'll do maybe 3 million in sales, 3.5 million if we're lucky. Like, I'm convinced that by next year, even if we do an extra million, it won't be much more stressful. I'm just trying to kind of like, keep things chill, you know, watch more TV. If I can go on more walks, go to the gym. I'm doing really good going to the gym. That was kind of my goal for this year was like getting my weight back up so that goals achieved. So I guess the goal there would be just keeping it up because you can, you can fall to real quick if you, skip skip lifting there too much. So I will say a good deal, man. Well, tell the audience where they can find you if they want to keep up with what you're doing. Yeah. So, pokey and ecom pokey like Pokemon any short for Nebraska? That's our main website. YouTube channel. Pokey Oni underscore Pokemon. And then Iggy is, I think pokey Annie underscore TCG. Those are our main platforms. Email Brian at Pokey Entercom if you want to work together in some capacity. I love working with people. It's about it. I'm pretty much everywhere at once. Once you hook me up once, I'll, And I'll just completely dominate your algorithm and you'll get sick of my, deep voice and my loud hair. I appreciate it, Brian. Thank you so much again for coming on the show and for another great conversation. Dude, I loved it. Thank you again for having me. Number number two. We'll do this again in a couple of years. Yeah. If you would like to follow Brian or ask him some of your own questions, I have put those links to his socials down in the show notes below. Also, if you've gotten any value out of this podcast episode, be sure that you leave a like, leave a comment and subscribe so you never miss an episode. New episodes come out every other week, and until then, thanks for playing the business RPG.