Mission Impossible

Is it possible to convince 100 people to go to a baseball game for free? Only catch: they show up 2 hours early and hand you the limited edition trading card they get at the gate.

That's what my friend, let’s call him “Colton” in this story, asked me on June 11.

Colton runs a collectible trading card company. He got wind that on July 2, the Dodgers were playing the San Diego Padres and a rare collectible One Piece trading card was being given away to the first 40k attendees (the stadium fits 56k).

"jared knows a lot of padres fans, and how to run events. i think he could help here." He asked if I thought I could find 100 people to come for free. The reward? $10,000.

"Wait really?" I asked dumbfounded on the phone.

"Really. And hotel and airfare," he said.

So i put this question out on instagram, twitter, and to some friends in L.A.

I got ~25 interested from ig and twitter. That's 25% of the way there in less than 24 hours. With 21 days to go. I had just gotten a job offer and wasn't going to start for a couple of weeks. This sounded absolutely ridiculous and incredibly hard. So why would I do it? For the story, and doing hard things is fun.

Let's run some numbers here. Tickets were ~$225/person for the worst seats in the stadium… at a group discount. By game week the cheapest seat on the open market was going for close to $400. That means he was willing to bet a minimum of $35k ($22.5k + $10k + expenses) that he could make a profit on these trading cards.

There was a huge risk here too. We couldn't just ask anyone on the internet to do this. There needed to be some level of trust to get people we'd bought hundreds of dollars of tickets for to show up to Dodger Stadium (LA traffic, same day as a world cup game), walk through security, and hand us the card on the other side.

How hard could it be?

"Send it" - Me

I followed up with all my San Diego contacts that said they were down. Of all the 25 people that said they were down, only four of them were still interested in going. great. They suddenly had July 4 plans, didn't read the post where it said the game was in LA, or didn't want to drive up from San Diego to be in LA by 5:10. Not a great start after telling my friend he's definitely fine dropping $35k on this.

I called up churches, nonprofits, and Boys & Girls Clubs. Not one would entertain me. I thought back to what I did when I was trying to get Plunge Party off the ground. I texted every single person I knew that lived in LA, or had any remote connection to LA.

The hook worked. I was getting friends of friends. Still a trust risk, but much better than dropping $35k and getting zero collectible trading cards.

The hard requirement was that they needed to show up at least two hours early, and then once they showed up (in time) we would transfer a ticket to them in person so they could get into the game. People started saying yes. Anytime I got asked "how many people can i bring" i'd say "as many as possible." Throughout all of this I kept thinking to myself these people think im crazy, or im scamming them. Only the first is true.

10 days before the game we were hovering at 60 people. I was nervous, but optimistic that we could hit 100 people. Then the dodgers bumped the giveaway from 40k cards to 52k for a 56k person stadium, and I got a new assignment from Colton that morning: "new goal: 200 cards."

That bump did hand us one gift. With more cards in play we could push the window back from 5:10 to 6:10. One hour early instead of two. Suddenly getting a yes was a whole lot easier.

The following four days I'd wake up and get a message from Colton asking "did you get more people?" I was getting nervous, because my answer was no.

The Monday of game week, we were sitting at 95 people. With the new 200-card goal, I was worried I wasn't going to get there. So I called up Colton and said, "what if we bought food and drinks for everyone who was willing to walk through the gates twice?"

That could save us. 30 people willing to walk through security 2-4 times, on 2-4 times the tickets, and we'd hit the target. Now we were levered up. A new risk: we buy all those extra tickets, then hope they show up in time and make it through enough times to collect. Those were the loopers.

With the last-minute additions asking to join 3-4 days out, we were set. We had the potential to hit 219 collectible cards. Seemed like enough room for error. Right?

Game-Day

Fast forward to game-day. I had to rent a car because everyone else was under 25. We're feeling really good about this, we are on target to get 219 collectible trading cards. Then we get sent this:

People are lining up outside the stadium 5 hours before the first pitch. That's nuts. But there are cards for 90% of attendees, as long as we are the first 90% of people to show up we should be fine… Still feeling confident, we show up to the dodgers game 2.5 hrs early to see lines that look like this:

Thousands of people lined up early to get these cards.

54,081 people would come through those gates that night. An MLB attendance record for the season.

It was at that moment i realized, this might still be hard. We were getting texts from people that they were going to be late. "LA traffic is crazy" "sorry bro i forgot the world cup was happening". Including the loopers.

At 5:10, the lines start moving. But no one has shown up yet. 10 minutes later people start trickling in. One family of 8, a large group of 12, some of the loopers.

As people showed up we assigned team leaders to chauffeur in the groups of 8-12 people. Once they got inside they were instructed to hand the card and hat over to the group leaders. Then either to exit with the group leaders outside the stadium to do another lap or go on into the stadium and enjoy the game. The group leaders would hand everything off to the "bag men," two guys stationed inside to receive it. They'd run the haul up to the remote nosebleeds of the section we purchased and guard it at all costs.

The first group walked in and it was chaos. Here are all the problems I had to deal with.

• Guys with 5 straw hats stacked on their heads were walking up to anyone they could, offering $800 for the trading cards and hats.

• Two of our guys ended up selling the cards and leaving the game.

• One girl realized she could've made money on this so refused to hand over the card and demanded we pay for parking, claiming we deceived her (we did not). Once we paid for her parking she kept the card, walked away and sold it to a scalper.

• 75 tickets that we bought couldn't be transferred through the TickPick app because it was too close to gametime. So we had to log into the account on a new phone so the group leader could burn the majority of the 75 throwaway tickets on the loopers' extra laps.

• There were people ready to walk in that we didn't have a group lead for, so I told my point of contact for that group I'd find them inside the stadium. While i prayed they didnt sell the ticket to a rando on the inside.

• Four people handed off the cards to the wrong guy on the inside.

• One looping group had kids under 6 in it. Some of them forgot to grab a card and hat on the way in.

• Some loopers on their 3rd lap entered a gate after that gate ran out of cards, another set of 5 tickets burned, just like that.

Most of the groups made it through and successfully completed the hand-off. Once the entrance chaos ended and everyone was inside, I had to chase down every single person I sent in, praying they didn't sell their card or that I'd forget to collect from them. There were two groups of people I completely forgot about and we had to meet up with them the next day.

We did have more slippage than we would have liked, but after accounting for all the issues we ran into we were pretty happy with the outcome. 170 collectible cards. 58 hats.

I signed an NDA, and truly don't know the final numbers but I do know the last time i checked straw hats were valued at $60 and the cards were estimated to be on average $1k or up to $3k (after PSA grading). That means we could have been carrying anywhere from $200k to half a million dollars of inventory on us, depending on how they graded. Which made us a target for getting mugged. Which is why we needed to ask for a police escort to the car.

The cards and hats spent the night at the Four Seasons. We slept at an Airbnb.

Once we got everything settled, we celebrated the only way that felt right… In-N-Out. I was up until 1am buzzing that I was able to orchestrate a team of 7 people under 25 to manage nearly 130 people going through the gates of dodgers stadium.

For the record, I'm not sharing this to tell you a story about "how I made $10k." I was given a nearly impossible task, hurdle after hurdle, and so many reasons to fail. But Colton believed that I had it in me to do something unreasonably hard, and I believed in myself that I could pull this off.

So next time you're staring down something unreasonably hard, skip the part where you decide if you're capable. Just do what makes the better story.

Rooting For You,

Jared

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Things Worth Clicking

A few gems I found on the internet this week - no digging required

• Nick Huber on how you can get un-addicted to your phone

• A field guide to jobs, cold emails, and making yourself legible to the right people - aka how to enter the side door. But

• Josh Pigford made a chrome extension that let's you dim (or hide) all the crap, mass-produced, and/or fake brands on Amazon

I Dig So You Don’t Have To

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