Hey everyone, I’m Brandon Khoo. I’m a Product Manager in SF Bay Area by trade, but I’m also a builder obsessed with creating multiple income streams. The goal is simple: stack streams until they spin on their own and give us freedom.

Every Sunday I will share either 💡 one idea, 📖 one story, or 🛠 one tactical playbook to help you get your flywheel moving. Sometimes it will be digital. Sometimes real estate. Sometimes investing. And sometimes a little weird, but that is the point. Freedom comes from stacking.

This week we start with something fun: 🎮 Pokémon vending machines.

In late 2024 I traveled to Tokyo with my family. We spent a few days exploring Ikebukuro and Akihabara, visiting stores like Hareruya 2 in Akihabara, Card Secret in Ikebukuro, and Dragon Star also in Ikebukuro. We also made sure to drop by Pokémon Center MEGA TOKYO in Sunshine City to see what a flagship store experience felt like.

One day I was walking through Akihabara and saw Hareruya 2’s wide windows filled with sealed boxes, rare promos, and neat display cases. Card Secret impressed me because their selection of older Japanese sets and graded promos was wider than many shops I see online. At Dragon Star we poked around slower moving stock. At Pokémon Center MEGA TOKYO the atmosphere was different, with more tourists and more flair, yet there were still lines for sealed packs.

But what really caught my eye were the vending machines. In many of these stores you could find smaller machines tucked near the registers or in corners, filled with blind packs, singles, and occasional promos. Kids clustered at them, collectors whispered about rare pulls, and people dropped coins just for fun. Walking out of Card Secret one evening, I watched someone pull a rare card from a vending machine. That was the moment I thought: maybe this is more than nostalgia. Maybe there is real business here. Could I build a version of this in the United States?

The global trading card market is far larger than most people realize. In 2024 it was worth about $7.5B and analysts expect it to grow to nearly $12B by 2030. The U.S. alone accounted for $2.1B in 2023, with forecasts pushing it past $3B by 2032. This is not a small niche — it is a mainstream industry with real money flowing through it.

Pokémon dominates this space. In 2023, roughly 43% of all graded cards were Pokémon (vendinglocator.com), showing how strong the brand’s hold is on collectors and investors alike. Retailers can’t keep up — sealed booster packs at Walmart and Target routinely sell out within hours of hitting shelves.

The price action shows just how volatile and exciting this market can be. A Rainbow Rare Reshiram GX card jumped from about $20 to $120 in just a few weeks (TCGplayer). The rare Pikachu Illustrator card sold at auction for $5.2M (ejaw.net). And more recently, the so-called “Bubble Mew” from Paldean Fates spiked from $90 to nearly $700 in 2025 (wargamer).

When a single piece of glossy cardboard can swing by hundreds or even thousands of dollars, it creates both opportunity and risk. The bigger picture is clear: this isn’t fringe. It’s a multibillion-dollar market with global demand and passionate buyers.

So how do you take this energy and test it as a business in the U.S.? You don’t start with dozens of machines. You start with one.

A minimum viable product (MVP) could be as simple as a refurbished 4–6 bay vending unit purchased for around $2K–$5K. The machine doesn’t need to be flashy at first. What matters is what goes inside.

Stock it with a mix:

Pricing stays straightforward. Offer $1 random single pulls, $5 booster packs, and maybe a $20 tin for serious collectors. Place the machine somewhere with steady family traffic — malls, cinemas, grocery stores, or local hobby shops are all candidates.

The point of the MVP is not to get rich overnight. The point is to test. Which products sell fastest? How quickly does the machine empty? Do people come back week after week? These are the questions the first machine should answer.

Let’s run a conservative model.

If one machine sells 500 random card pulls a week at $1 each, that’s $500 in revenue. Add 80 booster packs at $5 each, and you have another $400. That totals $900/week, or $3.6K/month gross revenue.

After deducting inventory costs, commissions to store owners (~25–30%), and restocking, you might keep 30–40% margins. That means $1.1K–$1.4K net profit per month per machine.

At scale, the math becomes meaningful.

Run that for a full year, and you’re looking at a business capable of $100K+ net annually. Not bad for a model built on nostalgia and vending hardware.

Of course, the spreadsheet math is the easy part. The real challenge is inventory. If a machine is loaded with nothing but commons or unpopular sets, customers will not come back. If you seed too many rares, your margins collapse. Too few, and people lose trust. The balance has to be managed like a science, watching trends and adjusting constantly.

Sets rise and fall quickly. Paldean Fates and Scarlet & Violet 151 have been particularly hot sellers in 2025 (PokéBeach), but other sets stall almost immediately after launch. Authenticity is equally important. Counterfeit cards are a growing problem in both Japan and the U.S. (Polygon), and once trust is lost it is hard to win it back. That means sourcing directly from official distributors and making authenticity clear to buyers.

Scalpers present another challenge. In the United States, Pokémon vending machines rolled out by The Pokémon Company were emptied within hours by resellers who flipped packs online (PokéBeach). Some operators now limit purchases or even install security cameras to protect machines from abuse. Pokémon vending is not a passive income stream. It is a logistics business where supply, trust, and sourcing matter more than the hardware.

If the first machine works, scaling becomes the real play. Start with one machine in a high-traffic location and track every sale. Learn which sets move quickly, which sit too long, and whether people return for repeat pulls. Once you have real sales data, you can use it to negotiate with shopping centers, theaters, or retail chains. Landlords and property managers are more likely to say yes when you bring proof of demand rather than just a pitch (Small Business Trends).

Marketing also plays an important role. TikTok and Instagram have become hubs for Pokémon collectors, with hashtags like #pokemontcg drawing millions of views (Statista). Sharing clips of rare pulls, restocks, or “chase cards” can drive traffic to physical machines. This is how you turn a vending machine into more than just a box in the corner.

Finally, reinvestment is the lever. Use profits from one machine to purchase the next until you are operating a fleet. With five to ten machines producing consistent cashflow you are already at six figures a year. Beyond that, the flywheel effect takes over. Each new unit funds the next, reputation compounds, and what began as a quirky experiment becomes a scalable and reliable business.

Pokémon vending machines might sound like a niche or even a novelty, but the lesson runs deeper. The idea shows how small experiments can become real income streams when you treat them seriously. One refurbished machine in the corner of a mall can teach you about product mix, customer demand, and cashflow. With time, those lessons compound into a fleet that produces six figures a year.

This is the essence of the flywheel. Freedom does not come from one perfect idea. It comes from stacking streams until the momentum builds on its own. Some streams will be digital, others will be physical, and some will look a little strange at first glance. The point is not whether Pokémon cards are your thing. The point is that opportunity exists in unexpected places, and when you act on it you create options for yourself and your family.

That is why I started The Freedom Flywheel. Each week I will explore ideas like this, sometimes playful and sometimes serious, but always with the same goal: to show that financial independence comes from taking small bets, learning from them, and stacking the wins.