This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Greetings, welcome. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host at Sidusill School. Wanna welcome you here to our new feature, which I guess is not that new. We've been doing it a few months, but it's one of my favorite things to work on.
It's called your first $1,000. And as you might surmise from the title, it's all about how somebody made their first $1,000. We are looking at origin stories, how someone who might be quite successful now actually got to that point, or maybe not even a point of being very successful, making tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars. But how do they make their first $1,000? And I do this because once you begin to earn real money, the steps required to go to the next level, whether it is that $10,000 or something else, it's often easier than the first real payday.
Now today, this one is fun. This one is fun and different. I'm gonna introduce you to Max Hockley. He goes by the YouTube moniker Silver Picker. Silver Picker.
And Max, or Silver Picker, I should say, Mr. Picker buys and resells old coins. And he does it very well. He's actually built a pretty significant business around this whole thing. After I went through the transcript of his story here, the story you're gonna hear in just a moment, I ended up watching some of his videos, including how he bought Russian gold coins at a speed dating event.
So just as a trigger warning here, this guy has a lot of energy. There's no trigger warning for content, just for energy. Okay, so just be prepared, take a deep breath, and let's hear from Max. [Music]
Hello everybody, my name is Max, but I'm better known on YouTube, TikTok, and the internet at large as Silver Picker. Now Silver Picker is my platform in which I teach people all over the world about the business of buying and selling rare coins, investing in precious metals like gold and silver, and even a little bit about personal finance.
Now, I've been doing this for over 10 years, and I've amassed a pretty large following on YouTube, and hundreds of thousands of people tune in to watch my videos, which is absolutely bananas, because the idea that even 10 people would watch me talk about the business of rare coins is absolutely mind boggling. But in any case, long before I was Silver Picker, I was a regular college student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and I lived in an off-campus house with six other guys, and you can imagine all the shenanigans we had, but there was one particular roommate I had who led me to where I am today with Silver Picker. Now, his name was Josh, and he was an absolute character, to say the least. He was a large guy, and he was always scheming, wheeling, dealing, coming up with crazy crackpot business ideas, and on one particular Sunday, I was sitting with my other roommates, watching some TV, recovering from a classic college weekend, you could say, and we hear the door open, and our giant friend Josh comes barreling in in a huff, and he comes to the living room and throws a wad of $100 bills onto the table. Now, that is not a typical scene in a state university college off-campus house.
Now, the rest of my roommates had no patience for his shenanigans, they got up and left, but I, of course, I took the bait, and I go, Josh, what's going on? And in a 1940s New York deli counter type guy voice, he goes, silver baby, silver, and I go, Josh, and he goes, silver baby? And I go, come on, what's going on? We don't just come in with hundreds of dollars out of nowhere, and he explains to me that he has a friend in New York's Diamond District who told him that gold and silver had hit all-time highs and that you could go around to garage sales, thrift stores, estate sales, and buy up all the little bits of broken jewelry, a mismatched earring here, a broken bracelet there, and bring it to the Diamond District and sell it for scrap weight and make a killing, and that's just what he did. He went out for a few hours that Saturday and made several thousand dollars.
Now, of course, a hustler like myself, I was intrigued, and I begged him to teach me. Now, he said, it's not so simple, I can't just teach you, and I said, sushi dinner on me, and he goes, sold. So we go out for sushi dinner, and throughout the time he's telling me all about carrots and penny weights and purities and testing solution and how you gotta rub through the gold to make sure it's not gold-plated and all this other stuff. My head was spinning, but I was excited because I was seeing dollar signs. Now, what he decided to do is he said, listen, you get me lunch again next week, and I'll take you around over the weekend and show you how I do it.
So that weekend, that following weekend, we went out in his beat-up Audi A4 that he bought, of course, from some scheme he did. We start going from garage sale to garage sale to garage sale, and I couldn't believe it. I started seeing him buying little bits here and little bits there, and it was a slow day, and at the end of the day, he had profited $600. I couldn't believe it, and I was hooked. Well, needless to say, that following summer, instead of getting a normal job like pizza delivery or bartender like the rest of my roommates did, or getting an internship at some stuffy office, I decided to do this silver picking, as I called it, full-time.
Now, what did full-time mean? Full-time meant just on the weekends. So I had my full weeks to myself. I'd go out on the weekends, go to the garage sales, and each time, I got better and better and better, and learned more and more and more. Now, I was buying the little bits of jewelry here, a ring there, and I was making some good money.
But at one particular sale, a guy says to me, he goes, "Hey, you buy silver coins, too?" Well, at that point, I didn't know whether I did or didn't, but what did I say? I said, "Of course I do." He brings out a couple of boxes full of little coins that I didn't fully recognize, but I had collected a little bit when I was a kid with my dad, so I had a little idea of what was going on. Anyway, I simply asked him what he wanted for it. He said he wanted 100 bucks, and I said, "You know what? "I'll take a gamble." I gave him 100 bucks, and that was where it really started.
That particular box of coins was worth over $600 in and of itself. I got home, and I started doing my research. I checked out every coin there was, and at that point, I realized there was more money to be made in rare coins than in just the gold and silver scrap, and that is when Silver Picker was born. I started going out and focusing on buying coins, buying collections, on Craigslist, on eBay, at garage sales, at estate sales, thrift stores, you name it, I was there, and within that first summer, as a college student, I profited over $10,000 just working weekends, and a college summer, which is about 10 weeks long, so 10,000 bucks, I was making $1,000 a week profit working just two days a week, and that was something that could be replicated by practically anyone, and that's why I'm here talking to you all now because there is still a lot of money to be made buying and selling old coins, jewelry, and all the stuff in between. Go out there, learn a little bit.
Of course, I'll give myself a shameless plug and say check out my YouTube channel to learn more, but I'll teach you all about how to do this business and get started on your own, and guess what? Having a couple hundred bucks is all you need in your pocket to get started, so I hope that you guys get out there, get some knowledge, learn about the business, and get out there and start making some purchases and make yourself some money on your own terms. [Music]
All right, thanks a lot to Max, aka Mr. Silverpicker, for bringing me energy and telling us about his first $1,000. I hope you found it interesting and encouraging.
As I said, I spent some time looking at his videos after I was working on this episode. I have no idea if this stuff really works. I don't actually know anything at all about the old coin business, the silver precious metals business, et cetera, but I do know that there are markets in everything, so if there are collectors, if there are buyers and sellers, then surely there is a way to make money. If you'd like to learn more, check out his popular YouTube channel, youtube.com/silverpicker, or visit his website, thesilverpicker.com. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions.
Thank you so much for tuning in today. I've got a new episode coming out every single day. I hope you'll subscribe or follow, come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
