This week’s guest was Josh from Hairy Tornado — the husband-and-wife reselling channel currently sitting at 443,000 subscribers. Ryan and I sat down expecting a normal reseller conversation: numbers, business, the realities of full-time YouTube. We got that. We also got something we weren’t expecting in the back half.

If you only watch one part of this episode, watch the part where Josh asks me a personal question. That’s the part the title is about.

What a 443K reseller channel actually costs

Josh is one of the few resellers I’ve talked to who’ll just open the books. He does not hedge. The numbers came up early and stayed up.

[19:30] $450 per video to his editor. Per video. The editor’s name is Riff, and Josh hired him to take the editing off his plate. The math Josh ran: the freed-up time plus the better edits plus the boost on Facebook reposts pushed the channel ahead of where it was when he was DIY’ing the whole pipeline. Even with the editor cost. “Hiring people is scary, you know — but it’s just like any other business.”

[21:00] 27 hours a week. That’s the work week. Not 27 hours of just listing, or just filming — 27 hours total, all in. He’s been deliberate about getting it there. The rental property covers some of the difference, the YouTube income covers more, and the Whatnot shows fill the rest. The point of running the numbers, Josh said, isn’t to brag — it’s that more resellers should know it’s possible to run a channel like this without burning yourself out, if you build it on purpose.

That last line is what he meant by “part of me wants to do something like that, and part of me is like — no, I’m content with how things are right now.”

The Whatnot debate (Ryan vs. Josh)

[28:00] This is the second time we’ve had the Whatnot debate on the podcast and it won’t be the last. Ryan is skeptical. Josh is a believer. The bit Josh anchored on this time: a DeWalt drill that sold on his Saturday-night Whatnot show for $140 — about what eBay would’ve paid him too. But because the drill came from a Whatnot show, the buyer also got the show experience, the live chat, the giveaways, the drama. Josh’s point: live selling isn’t pulling buyers from eBay; it’s pulling buyers who weren’t going to buy anything that night, period.

I’m not sold yet. Candice and I have talked about it on the I’m Gonna Pack It side too. I’m closer than I was. Probably.

$1,000 of rocks → $11,000

[1:01:00] The story that should be its own standalone podcast: Josh paid a flea-market vendor $1,000 for a bag of rocks the vendor didn’t think was worth that much. Sold $11,000 worth across three Whatnot shows. Then turned around and said the part I keep thinking about — paying up at sourcing has been a long-term net positive for him, because the same vendors keep coming back. “We deal with a lot of the same people over and over.” Negotiating someone down to ten cents has a different cost than the cost on the receipt.

(For what it’s worth, Josh also said he’d negotiate hard if he were just a reseller without a YouTube channel and a family depending on it. The “pay up” advice is situational.)

Pex plumbing and the rental upgrade

[42:00] Aside that turned into a tangent that turned into a side hustle: Josh re-plumbed his rental in Pex himself and saved $5,200 on the quote. Pex is forgiving — push fittings, no soldering, the wall doesn’t have to come out clean — and he came out the other side with a kitchen-sized credit on the renovation budget. Then there’s [47:00] a $17,000 Whatnot credit story tied to the same property that I will let Josh tell himself in the episode. Just listen.

”Lonnie, can I ask you a personal question?”

[1:08:17] “Lonnie, can I ask you a personal question?” / “Oh my goodness. Yes.”

Josh remembered something I’d mentioned in passing on a past episode — that I’d changed a lot of things in my life over the last year, including something about my spirituality — and he asked me to talk about it. Nobody had asked me that on the podcast yet.

I told them about the half-marathon Ryan and I ran together in Manchester last November, and a moment up there where I knew. I’m not going to repeat the whole thing here — it’s the kind of thing I’d rather you hear from me than read paraphrased, and I’m still figuring it out as I go. If you’ve followed the channel for a while and wondered what’s been different, that conversation is the closest I’ve come to putting it into words. Watch from the timestamp; it goes about ten minutes.

I appreciate Josh asking. I appreciate Ryan letting it land instead of changing the subject.

Closing

[1:18:00] Josh and Hailey have been good friends to the podcast — having him on bumps our numbers, and we’re aware of that and grateful. Go subscribe to Hairy Tornado if you don’t already. The 443K is earned.

Thanks for listening, y’all. Next week’s episode is going to be a different kind of conversation. We’ll see you there.