Hobby Jobs: The Best Opportunities in the Hobby Don't Exist Yet

Foreign. What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another episode, Episode two of Hobby Jobs here on the Stacking Slabs Network. I am Brett. It is that time of the week where we dig into the industry side, building businesses, giving advice to those who are wanting to build businesses in the hobby, offering support for those working on the industry side, and a whole lot more. If you've been following this thing from the beginning, I just want to extend some gratitude and say thank you. Seriously. We are 12 editions into the newsletter now and if you're not already subscribed, what are you doing? Just kidding. Hobby Jobs Link in the show notes to get the new newsletter every Tuesday. We started these episodes putting this on the Stacking Slabs Network last week and when we started this, there was a very direct question. What does it actually look like to build a career in the sports card industry? The launch mattered to me because I wanted to create a dedicated place for operators, builders, owners, employees and aspiring professionals. Not just collectors talking about cards, but people talking about work, business systems and careers inside the hobby. And the reason I'm doubling down on Hobby Jobs is very simple. The signal is real. The latest edition of Hobbyjobs Edition 12 was centered on the idea that the best opportunities in this industry do not exist. Yet in fully named form, they show up as repeated friction, repeated questions, repeated weak systems, and repeated moments where collectors want something better than the current market is giving them. That is the exact territory I want Hobby Jobs to own. So before I get going, this is the part where I want to maybe share something and offer a little bit of social proof. Not because I want to validate. Well, maybe it is, maybe it is. I want to validate this idea because if this show is going to stand for anything, it should stand for real feedback from people who are getting value from this. And I I'm going to keep the username anonymous because I just. I'm not sure if they're comfortable sharing. But I think this is good. This note I got was one of the things I appreciate most is that I'm focus. You are focusing not only on the front end of the hobby, buying, selling, breaking, collecting, but also on the many career opportunities that exist behind the scenes for many collectors, myself included. It can be difficult to understand how to turn a passion for sports and collectibles into a professional career. Most people only see live stream sellers, breakers or ebay stores, when in reality there are so many different roles that help keep the industry moving. As someone who has been a lifelong sports fan and hobby enthusiast, the idea of building A career within the collectibles industry has always been appealing. The challenge has never been the interest level. It has been understanding where the opportunities exist and how people can connect with them. Your podcast and newsletter has helped shine a light on some of those paths, showing that there are many ways to contribute to the hobby beyond buying and selling cards. I simply want to express my appreciation for what you're building. There are people like me who are actively looking for ways to combine their professional skills with their passion for sports and collectibles. And content like yours provides encouragement and perspective that can be difficult to find elsewhere. Very kind note. As a career marketer, these signals, these pieces of feedback help me know that directionally what I'm doing is correct. And what I mean by correct is that it is helping others. And that is what I want Hobby Jobs to do. I want to be the support layer to help others in this industry, building a trust layer between hobby businesses and hobby talent. We are helping not only the people in the industry, but also companies attract qualified talent through trusted industry distribution and connections. So this feels very much like a startup mode. As a startup guy with Hobby Jobs, but just want to say thanks. Thanks for the notes, thanks for everything else. It is motivating and it gives me the energy to continue to contribute on this platform. The sports card industry has a lot of content for collectors. It has a lot less content explicitly for the people trying to build something durable inside the business of sports cars. And I think that gap is real and I think it's underserved and I think it's worth attacking every single week. What I want Hobby Jobs to become is really simple. I want it to become a place where the professional side of the hobby gets taken seriously, not performatively, not with broad nonsense. I want it to become the place where someone running a car company, building a marketplace, leading a content team, operating a breaking room, managing shipping, doing partnerships, working in production, or trying to get their first role in the category to be valuable. And I want them to say this was built for them. It's ambition. I'm an ambitious guy, but I'm ready to go. And if this sounds too narrow, then I think that's a good thing. Narrow is how you win. The thesis that I extended in the Hobby Jobs newsletter this week is the best opportunities in the sports card industry do not exist yet. And I want to push that even harder here on the audio platform, because I think this is where a lot of smart people waste years. They look for the obvious openings. They only look for job titles that already make sense. They only look for validated companies. They only look for permission. That is how you miss the real wave. The real wave forms underneath the obvious stuff. It forms where the demand is already there, but the systems are still crude. It forms where collectors are already spending money but still leave very frustrated. It forms where revenue is happening faster than infrastructure being built. And if you want proof, you do not need to guess. You can just look at the biggest what the biggest companies are doing and building right now. One of my favorite places to look is Card Ladder and Card Ladder's Industry tab. And it's been a very exciting year to talk about the industry tab and Card Ladder. In May of 2026, the industry sold $679.85 million online in trading cards. That is insane. It bested April's number which was used to be an all time high in 616 million. That in March 606 million. February was 481 million. So that gives you some sort of perspective on interest, engagement, marketplace growth. I mean just look at the eBay number nine or $493 million in trading cards sold through ebay just in May alone. That is a spectacular number. And when we just look at it from a cards dollars and cents perspective, that can be interesting, right? There's more volume than ever before. The, the record highs continue to come in. But underneath all of that there are things that are taking place or opportunities that exist for individuals in this space who are working at hobby businesses to go work on a new program or someone on outside to notice an opportunity and start building. Local card shops, national retailers, digital marketplaces and platform players are now sitting in the same liquidity layer. That means the opportunity is shifting. It is no longer just in finding cards. It is building the Rails around cards. Trust, Rails Data, Rails Fulfillment, Rails Customer experience, Rails Sales enablement, Rails Liquidity, Rails. And if you are the only looking for some perfectly named dream hobby job, you're probably probably already too late. I think the better question is where is the industry straining under its own growth? That is where the opportunity is. Just think about live selling, live commerce. A lot of people still talk about breaking and live selling like it is just entertainment. It's not. It's not anymore. It is a priority of a major marketplace like ebay. With the launch of ebay Live and it is one of the fastest growing formats, it's putting real money behind ebay live through programs that encourage people to come in and build. That is a platform saying out loud that this format matters for our future. And if you think live commerce is just someone opening wax on camera, I don't think you've been paying attention. You've got platforms like Fanatics Collect that spent April shipping product changes around breaker ratings, verified feedback tied to completed orders and performance work to help keep stream smooth high viewer rooms with thousands of concurrent viewers Ebay profile sports card live sellers who turn this into full time businesses expanding into shipping and sorting teams and built repeat audiences through transparency and community. Whatnot's own seller materials Talk about sports card singles and breaks as a major opportunity and layout, strict break rules and show formats that are clearly trying to professionalize trust. That is not hobby chaos anymore. That is an operating environment. And operating environments need real operators. They need people who understand inventory flow, customer support, moderation, post purchase experience, stream design, packaging, ratings, compliance and conversion. So again, the best opportunities are often not visible as headline companies. They are visible as pain points. The same thing is happening on the event side. Fanatics fest is the first show. Its first show in 2024 drew more than 70,000 attendees and attendance topped to 125,000 in 2025. For 2026 it is positioning itself as a four day collector and fan experience with 250 plus dealers. Live breaking Tops Trade Night a new card combine to teach the basics of buying, trading, grading and protecting cards plus athletes, podcast panels, brands all under one roof. The national says its 2026 show will be the largest in history with 500,000 square feet and 600 dealers. This tells me the hobby's biggest public environments are no longer just marketplaces. They're ecosystems. They're education platforms. They are media environments. They are recruiting grounds. They are customer acquisition machines. They are relationship accelerators. Which means the next valuable person in the sports card industry might not be someone who knows the difference between a gold vinyl and a gold wave. This is a topic I've been talking to a lot of industry professionals about. My question is always about when you are hiring, are you more interested in professional skills or hobby knowledge, insights and information? And it always seems like that is a great question because it triggers a lot of emotion and it triggers thoughts and it always ends up in this place where the individual saying in an ideal state it is a mix of both. Which is encouraging for anyone out there who is building your professional career and you have skill, unique skills and experience because it's needed in this space. And if you have hobby knowledge, you're a unicorn. And you are the type of unicorn that these businesses are looking to recruit. If you want to work in this industry and you know cards and you've got skills, it is a great time to start pursuing your next role or putting your hand up saying I am interested in this because hobby businesses that are scaling want want these types of people. It might be someone who knows how to run event operations or someone who can design an onboarding program, or maybe someone who can manage creator relationships or someone who can turn chaotic experiences into a repeatable one. That is exactly the point of what I want to talk about in this episode. The opportunity does not need to be named yet for it to be real. I also think the athlete visibility side of this the hobby matters because a lot of people talk about athlete involvement in the hobby like it's just a marketing gimmick or garnish. I'm not sure that is right. Tom Brady wrote publicly about Card Vault by Tom Brady as a passion project built around making the hobby more experiential and interactive for the next generation. Card Vault itself now positions the business across buy, sell, trade grade, live breaks, events, multiple streaming platforms. Fanatics Fest is leaning hard into athletes, collectors, dealers, brands and leagues together. PSA has done projects as we talked with Ryan Green about with Bobby Witt Jr. Corbin Carroll so when people say the hobby is changing, I want to be specific. It is becoming more cultural, more public, more event driven, more system driven, more trust sensitive, more professionally managed and more legible to outsiders. That is a gift if you know how to think like an operator. Because industries create their biggest opportunities in years when demand outruns professionalism. That is where sports cards are right now. And I want to bring one older Hobby Jobs thread back into this conversation because it matters. Hobby Jobs 11 it was about how many how how many meaningful opportunities in this hobby start as observations before they look like businesses. Addition four was about the skill gap in the hobby. Put those two ideas together and you can get something very important. Observation without capability stays stays a complaint. Capability without observation stays generic. But when someone sees a repeated hobby problem and has the skills to solve it, that is where businesses, roles and careers get created. So if you're listening to this and trying to find an angle, I would tell you to stop obsessing over where you fit inside today's titles. Start asking where the hobby is still weak? Where does trust break? Where does customer experience still feel like amateur hour? Where do people still lose time? Where does inventory still get trapped? Where does communication feel clumsy? Where do live shows still break under scale? Where do where does a buyer still feel nervous? Where does a seller still feel unsupported where does an owner still have too much in their head and not enough in a system? There are abstract questions, there are career questions, those are business questions, and those are hobby jobs questions. I want to move into the operator story this week. I want to use Ryan Green here, but not in the lazy way where we just say, look, he loved cards and now he works in cards. I think that's a little too shallow. Ryan Green is a good example of what happens when collector proximity collides with initiative and real execution. I had a conversation in 2025 with Ryan and he described a path that starts a way in a way a lot of people in this audience will recognize. He was chasing Shaq rookies riding his bike to local card shop, growing up inside the emotional part of the hobby. But the episode framing also makes a second point that is much more important for professionals. He changed his trajectory by reaching out directly to Nat Turner in a DM, navigating the messy reality of working through PSA's backlog era in social and then growing into an athlete and artist partnerships at one of the most important companies in this category. That is the story, not nostalgia turning into employment initiative turning into relevance. He decided, you know what, I'm going to shoot my shot and look at where I got him. That distinction matters because a lot of people say they want to work in the hobby, but what they actually want is the hobby to validate them first. They want someone to post the perfect opening. They want the path to be visible. They want the company to make the the role obvious. They want certainty. Ryan's story points in the other direction. He moved toward the industry. He created the signal. He made himself legible to people building it in that. That part I think is more relevant now than ever before. This is not some accidental back office function. This is the athlete and artists partnership. At psa, this means one of the most central trust institutions in the card world is treating culture, collaboration and public facing storytelling as serious work connected to the future of the category. PSA is the company that is grading, authenticating, vaulting, working with ebay, facilitating partner offers, managing pricing data, and increasingly shaping how collectors transact through a broader infra infrastructure stack. So when a company like that cares about an athlete and artist partnerships, I think we should all pay attention because athletes are not orbiting the hobby anymore, they are entering it more directly. Tom Brady is publicly involved Card Vault is publicly involved in card law and has written about why cards matter to him. There is so much happening with athletes, so much going on that is the attention layer of the next version of this hobby. And I think there's it's undeniable that the more athletes get involved talk about cards, the more people are going to enter. So what does this mean for an operator listening right now? It means there is real value in being able to translate between worlds, between athlete and collector, between brand and community, between platform and customer, between product and story, between hype and trust. The people who can do that are going to become valuable because the hobby is getting more visible, more commercial, and more culturally connected. And I think that is the deeper lesson in Ryan's story. He did not just stay a fan, he became useful. That is what aspiring professionals should hear. Passion matters. Of course it does. But passion by itself is not the edge. Usefulness is the edge. Can you create relationships? Can you create context? Can you execute? Can you move fast without being sloppy? Can you represent a brand without sounding corporate? Can you understand what collectors care about without sounding like a tourist? Those are professional skills and the hobby is going to need more of them, not less. So when I think about Ryan Green as the operator spotlight, that is the frame. Not cool he got in. But pay attention to what got him in and pay attention to what his role says about where the hobby is going. Digging into some hobby Jobs I want to put the spotlight on the senior category manager role for sports card trading at ebay. And I like this role because it cuts through a lot of hobby delusion. On the surface, people hear sports card sports trading cards and think product knowledge, but the actual signal behind this role is much bigger. The job listing itself described the need for someone to lead and grow the sports card business. Define category strategy, work with top sellers and partners and collaborate across product, marketing, finance, analytics, customer service and business development to drive meaningful business impact. That is not a collector role with a business title slopped on top. That's marketplace leadership. And it makes perfect sense when you look at what eBay has built. 134 million active buyers trading card buyers prioritize condition, value and trust a category specific seller stack. Authenticity guarantees, eBay live investment, integrated workflow and PSA vault infrastructure. Expansion of authenticity guarantee for trading cards into the UK in 2026 including qualifying eBay live purchases. That is real category business. It needs real operators. This is why I love the role and why I wanted to highlight it. It shows the hobby professional what the market is actually rewarding. Not just taste, not just tenure, not just whether you know the hottest release of the week. The market is rewarding people who can grow a category People who can manage partners. People who can understand seller behavior. People who can work across functions. People who can spot friction and turn it into a product policy or process improvement. People who know how to move a business, not just enjoy a category. And even if someone listening is not remotely qualified for that exact role today, the lesson still holds. You can reverse engineer the value signals. If eBay needs category leadership in sports cards, then what? Feeder skills matter. Marketplace operations, Seller success, Analytics Partner management. Customer experience. Trust and safety. Pricing Intelligence Content that converts live commerce mechanics. Those are all real card industry muscles right now. There's another reason I like this highlight. It sits on top of the thesis from this week's newsletter. The best opportunities don't exist yet. Well, here is the thing. Sometimes the named role is not the real opportunity. Sometimes the named role is just the visible tip of a larger shift. And I think that is what the ebay job represents. It is a public sign that one of the most important commerce companies in the category believes sports cards deserves strategic category leadership. That should make everybody listening think harder. If you run a card business, you are. Are you still hiring like a hobby shop or are you hiring like a category business? If you want to enter the industry, are you describing yourself like a collector or are you learning how to describe yourself like someone who can improve a category's economics, trust growth or experience? Those are very, very different things. And the people who understand the difference are going to move faster than the rest of the field. So I got a lot of energy. Let's. Let's bring this home. The core message today is not dream big. It is much more practical than that. Pay attention to where the hobby is still underbuilt because that is where the work is. That is where the companies will get created. That is where the best hires will come from. That is where the next competitive edges will be found. The market has already given us the clues. EBay PSAs are tightened. Trust and liquidity stack PSAs building faster Seller paths and broader partner networks. Fanatics is pouring into events, live commerce ratings, pricing, transparency. The national and fanatics fest are getting bigger and more layered, not smaller and simpler. That is what a maturing category looks like. And when a category matures, it gets less forgiving of sloppy operators. That is the part a lot of people don't want to hear. Passion alone stops being enough. Taste alone stops being enough. Hobby knowledge alone stops being enough. The people who become indispensable are the people who can build what the market is still missing. And this is why hobby jobs exist. It exists to help more people see the professional side of the sports card industry clearly. It exists to help operators sharpen how they think. It exists to help businesses find better talent. It exists to help talented people outside the hobby understand that they may already have something the hobby badly needs. So if this resonated, subscribe to Hobby Jobs, the newsletter. If you're building a business in this category, send me your open roles stackingslabsmail.com, dM me wherever you can find me. If you're an aspiring professional, do the hard work of identifying your transferable skills and skill set and the hobby problem it maps to. And if you know someone who keeps saying they want to work in the sports card industry someday, send them this episode and tell them to stop waiting for someday. The opportunity might not have a clean title yet, but that does not mean it's not already there. It probably means everyone else is too distracted to see it. And that is exactly why it is worth going after. I'm having a blast talking to businesses about Hobby Jobs and their involvement Potential involvement with Hobby Jobs if you are a business in this space, you are hiring. You need help. You have open roles. You're looking for talent. Get at me. Get at me. Send me a note. Let's have a conversation. But for now, there's Hobby Jobs. Hope you enjoyed it. Happy building. Take care. Talk to you soon. Sam.