My son Duke is twelve.

He came to me a few months ago and said he wanted to start a business.

I said okay, what do you got?

He pitched me on a bunch of ideas. Some were fine. Some were nonsense.

The kind of stuff a twelve-year-old thinks is a business because he saw a YouTube short about it.

I kept saying no. Not because the ideas were terrible (some were), but because none of them had the three things I care about: real demand, a product you don't have to invent, and something he actually understood.

Then he said sports cards.

Duke already collected. He knew the players, the sets, the inserts, the chase cards.

He understood the product because he was already the customer.

The sports card market is somewhere north of $10 billion. People have been buying and selling cardboard rectangles with grown men on them for over a century.

This is not a market you have to explain or create.

So we started looking at how people actually sell cards in 2026.

Turns out the old model (eBay listings, card shows, local shops) has a new layer on top of it: live selling platforms.

Whatnot is the biggest one. Think QVC but for sports cards, Pokemon, sneakers, whatever.

Sellers go live on camera, buyers watch in real time, and the whole thing runs through the app.

One of the most popular formats on Whatnot is called a "break."

A breaker (that's us) buys a sealed box of cards. Say a hobby box of 2025 Topps Chrome football.

Instead of opening it alone, you sell spots. Buyers pick a team.

When all the teams are sold, you rip the box open live on camera. Whatever cards come out for your team, those are yours.

It's gambling-adjacent without being gambling. Every buyer gets cards.

But nobody knows which cards until the pack rips. The energy of a live break is real.

People are in the chat, talking trash, sweating the next pack.

Duke loved it.

So we started there. Just breaks on Whatnot.

Football boxes, baseball boxes, basketball boxes. Buy a case, sell the teams, go live, rip packs, ship cards.

Then we started listing singles. Individual cards we'd pulled or bought, listed on Whatnot and eBay.

Then we said screw it, if we're going to do this, let's do it all the way.

We built a website.

We connected it to our eBay store so listings pull in automatically. We bought a scanner so the card images look professional instead of like we photographed them on a kitchen table (we did).

We set up inventory tracking, pricing systems, the whole thing.

Badass Breaks was born.

Here's what the business looks like today, one week after official launch:

We have our own shop at badassbreaks.shop.

We have an eBay store with live listings.

We have a Whatnot channel where we run live break shows and singles shows.

We sold 4 cards this week for about $50 in total sales.

I know. Retire early.

But here's what those four cards represent that $50 doesn't capture.

Duke knows what profit and loss means now…

We bought 3 boxes of cards for $300, sold teams for $410, and (after fees) he watched $75 in profit materialize on a Wednesday night.

He knows what inventory management means. Because we have hundreds of cards in top loaders and penny sleeves and if you can't find the Jayden Daniels rookie when someone buys it, you don't have a business, you have a mess.

He knows what systems mean. Because when a card sells on eBay, somebody has to pull it, package it, print the label, and ship it.

That somebody is Duke. He's learning that the sale is the fun part and the fulfillment is the work part.

…and he's learning about AI. Because none of this backend exists without Grok Bot.

Grok Bot is the AI system that runs the entire operational layer of Badass Breaks.

When cards come in, Grok Bot handles intake. It organizes them, filters them, names them properly (which matters more than you'd think when you're dealing with variations, parallels, and numbered cards).

It manages our Card Dealer Pro account, which is the software that connects our inventory to eBay and Whatnot. It makes sure cards are pushed to both platforms correctly.

It keeps the website updated.

It scans email for purchase notifications. It handles offers and counteroffers from buyers.

The computer work, the listing management, the platform syncing, the pricing updates. All of it runs through Grok Bot.

I do the setup and the configuration. Duke handles the physical side: sorting cards, putting them in top loaders, organizing inventory, packaging orders.

And when we go live on Whatnot, Duke is on camera doing the breaks.

Turns out the kid is a natural. Good presence, talks to people, works the chat, sells.

I did not see that coming. He's twelve and he's better on camera than most adults I know who've been doing content for years.

The moment it clicked for him was a break show we did with a Wu-Tang theme (which means we had Wu-Tang playing in the background and we discussed our favorite Wu-Tang songs during the break).

We cleared $200 in profit on one show.

I watched his face when he did the math. Two hundred dollars. One show.

Selling pieces of cardboard with pictures of football players on them.

His eyes opened. Not in a "I'm going to be rich" way. In a "this is real" way.

There's a mini business here. He could see it.

That's the thing you can't teach in a classroom. The moment a kid realizes that value creation is real, that you can build something from nothing, that profit isn't an abstract concept but a number that shows up when you do the work.

Here's the part that matters for you.

I would not have done any of this without AI.

I run a media company. I have a podcast, a newsletter, consulting clients, a book manuscript due in October.

I do not have spare hours lying around to build e-commerce infrastructure for a sports card side hustle.

But Grok Bot does.

The intake, the organizing, the naming, the listing, the syncing, the email monitoring, the offer management. All the stuff that would take me 15-20 hours a week to do manually.

Grok Bot handles it.

That means Duke and I get to spend our time on the parts that actually matter. The breaks. The camera time. The conversations about margin and inventory and why you don't price a card at $5 when comps say $12.

The father-son stuff.

The business exists because AI made the operational layer cheap enough that a twelve-year-old's side hustle is viable.

Five years ago, this doesn't happen. The overhead kills it before it starts.

You'd need to hire someone or burn your own nights and weekends on data entry and listing management.

Now you don't.

This is what I keep coming back to with AI.

Not the hype. Not the doom. Not the think pieces about whether ChatGPT is going to take your job.

The practical reality that AI lets you build things you couldn't build before. Side quests. Side hustles. Small businesses that live in the margins of your real life.

A twelve-year-old kid who likes sports cards now has a real business. With real revenue, real expenses, real systems, and real lessons about how commerce works.

Not because he's a prodigy. Not because I'm a business genius…

…because the tools exist now to make the operational barrier disappear.

Your hobby can be a business. Your kid's hobby can be a business. The thing you love doing on weekends can generate revenue without consuming your life.

AI makes that possible. Not in some theoretical future. Right now. This week.

Four cards, fifty bucks, and a twelve-year-old who understands profit and loss better than most college business majors (with time, hahaha…)

Side quests, side hustles, AI makes them possible.

Go build something with your kid.

…or by yourself.

Just go build something.

Check out what Duke and I are building at badassbreaks.shop.

This is the way.

Hanley

✅ Follow for tips on growth, marketing and AI (and insurance).

A PM can summarize research, draft a PRD, and mock up a prototype before lunch. The hard part starts when the team has to decide what actually gets built.

Jira Product Discovery gives product teams one place to capture insights, prioritize ideas with consistent frameworks, and build living roadmaps stakeholders can rally around.

And because it’s connected to Jira, the context behind every decision stays with the work—so developers and their agents know not just what to build, but why.

AI helps PMs move faster. Jira Product Discovery helps the whole team build with confidence.

Get Started for Free