Business of Live Selling and Collector Events With Chad Collins

Chad Collins is the Founder and CEO of LiveBuys, a company that provides end-to-end live-selling solutions, including hosting, creative production, technology, fulfillment, and community engagement. Together with his team, he has produced 200+ sold-out events in 150+ cities, attracting 2.5 million fans and earning seven Guinness World Records. His event portfolio includes Brick Fest Live, Comic Con for Kids, and the Bucks County Card Show. Chad is also the creator of Coins, Cards & Chaos, a live-shopping and collectibles experience that connects collectors, creators, dealers, and brands.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [4:16] Chad Collins on LiveBuys’ origin after years of live-selling experience
• [8:25] How Coin Krewe built a thriving collectibles community through TikTok Live
• [10:04] The high-energy live-shopping elements that set Chaos Expo apart
• [16:11] Why entertainment comes before selling in successful live-commerce streams
• [20:28] Strategies for building engaged and loyal live-stream communities
• [24:18] Lessons from a failed beauty channel and the importance of product presentation
• [38:13] What makes the biggest personalities in the collectibles world stand out

In this episode…

What turns a niche collectibles business into a thriving community that people eagerly return to week after week? Is it the products themselves, or the way creators entertain, educate, and connect with their audience? And how can live commerce transform traditional events into experiences that keep collectors engaged long after the show ends?

According to Chad Collins, an award-winning entrepreneur and live commerce innovator, the key is to lead with entertainment before sales. He explains that audiences are far more likely to buy when they’re first engaged through compelling content, authentic personalities, and interactive experiences. Rather than treating live selling as a transaction, he emphasizes creating a show that people genuinely want to watch. That philosophy has shaped everything from viral livestreams to large-scale collectibles events that combine in-person experiences with digital engagement. Chad also shares how experimenting with different formats, learning from failed ventures, and empowering creators have helped build loyal communities that naturally drive commerce.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Chad Collins, Founder and CEO of LiveBuys, to discuss how live commerce is transforming the collectibles industry. They explore building entertainment-first livestreams, creating immersive events like Chaos Expo, and growing loyal collector communities through content. Chad also shares lessons from Brick Fest Live, influencer partnerships, and scaling engagement across digital and in-person experiences.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Chad Collins on LinkedIn
• LiveBuys
• Chaos
• Open World Events
• Brick Fest Live
• Minefaire
• Comic-Con
• Young Innovators
• Coin Krewe on TikTok
• eBay Live
• Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk
• VeeFriends
• Kit (Formerly ConverKit)
• Deep Pocket Monster
• The Ultimate Pez Pal Handbook: Prices, Pictures, and Variations by Jeff Rosenberg
• Card Party

Special mention(s):

• Valley Forge Casino Resort
• Gary Vaynerchuk on LinkedIn
• Pat Flynn on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• “Creating Family-Friendly Events with Chad Collins Co-Founder of Open World Events” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “P90X: Earning Food & Rent Money as a Mime to over $500 million in Sales- with Tony Horton [Business Inspiration]” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Atari & Chuck E. Cheese Founder Nolan Bushnell Opens up about Low times and Proud Moments” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Direct Response Series] From Maxwell Street to Infomercials with Ron Popeil” on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Our event stands out because of its amplified energy.”
• “Lead with entertainment, and sales will follow.”
• “Acknowledge every comment to keep people engaged.”
• “Live shopping is an art driven by creativity.”
• “The biggest brands grow by live streaming.”

Action steps:

1. Build loyal communities through authentic live engagement: Acknowledge viewers, encourage participation, and make every interaction feel personal.
2. Lead with entertainment before selling: High-energy, engaging content naturally drives trust, loyalty, and sales.
3. Continuously test and refine your live content: Experiment with formats, hosts, and presentation styles to discover what resonates most.
4. Use live streaming to expand your reach: Consistent live broadcasts help grow your audience and strengthen your brand presence.
5. Create interactive experiences that keep viewers engaged: Incorporate audience participation and dynamic elements to encourage repeat viewership.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

All right, here we are. Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. I have Chad Collins here. You can check him out at LiveBuys.com. You can check out ChaosExpo.com. Chad, it’s not frequent that I have guests that come back, right? Yeah. Encore Performance.

Chad Collins: 00:42

Part two.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:43

Only if they’re super special like you, and we’ll, we’ll talk about what’s next. But I do want to formally introduce you. Before I do, I like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Yeah. And there’s some- I mean, yours is obviously you have a past episode, which is “Creating Family-Friendly Events”, which I’ll kind of go more in depth in. So if people want to get your full background, I’ll give you a brief snippet of it in a minute. They can watch that interview as well. Some other fan favorites. We had the founder of P90X, Tony Horton on. And I like really stories that they come from humble beginnings, which is a lot of stories, even though they make, oh, we’ve sold like billions of dollars of DVDs or training programs.

But really, he drove cross-country, and the way he made his food and rent money was he was a street mime. And he put his hat on the street and do street miming. And so actually on the interview, I’m like, hey, do some street miming. And he actually did some street miming. So it’s just some fun things. Also, the founder of Atari & Chuck E. Cheese was on. He was Steve Jobs’s mentor. And it literally, if you look behind him in the interview, it looks like he’s a mad scientist, like he could build a spaceship of all the stuff that’s behind him. And that was a really cool one. There are many more people who can check it out. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25.

We help businesses connect to their dream relationships. We do that through an easy button for a company to launch or on a podcast, and also an easy button for a company’s strategic gifting. So you just give us all the addresses for your best clients, partners, prospects, maybe staff. And we do everything else behind the scenes. So you can go to Rise25. If you have questions, go to [email protected] and email us there.

So I want to formally introduce Chad. You know, he is the Co-founder of Open World Events, which they have sold, but they had one of the clearest taglines and one of the best ones I’ve seen out there, which is we produce massive family events, which kind of holds true for this as well, but it’s a little bit different type of event.

They launched Brick Fest Live, which was the number one touring Lego event in the world, bringing hands-on Lego attractions and exhibits. They had more. When I tell people this, Chad, they’re like, Holy cow, they had more than 20,000 people show up to their shows. They lost Mine Fair, which is an official Minecraft community event that, you know, brought together Minecraft players for an immersive experience. So he knows how to throw amazing events and big events as well. So this next one, if I were him, I’d just sit on a beach probably. But he’s not a beach type of person. So no, I’m not. A Chaos. Expo is really Coins, Cards, and Chaos. And we’ll talk about there’s a live shopping and collectibles experience. He also has LiveBuys.com. So Chad, we’ll go into what that is. But thanks for joining me.

Chad Collins: 03:58

Heck yeah. I’m excited. And thanks for having me back. I guess the first one was okay.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:03

Let’s it was great. Let’s talk about, I don’t know if you want to start it, LiveBuys and how that led into, you know, Chaos Expo. But where do you where should we start? I’m going to pull up my screen and share the screen.

Chad Collins: 04:16

Yeah, yeah. We can certainly start with LiveBuys. I mean, LiveBuys, you know, after we sold Open World, right? And essentially at the time it was Breakfast Live because after Covid and when we relaunched, we came back with just Breakfast Live, and we scaled that all the way up. So after we exited that in July of 23, which is exactly, almost exactly three years ago to the day. Took some time off. But during that time, my son was going live on TikTok selling sports cards, and my daughter and I, over Covid, were going live on Facebook. You know, unloading some of the inventory that we had here because we couldn’t have our shows anymore.

And we also did a virtual event called Breakfast Live at Home during Covid. So we had all this experience with live selling and live streaming, and we had a facility that, in my mind, was conducive to a large scale live streaming service, like a, you know, where we could have studios and different offices, we could have a shipping department, we could provide customer service, we could have many brands all doing live selling simultaneously from one physical location. And that was like the core concept of, you know, what do we call that thing? Well, let’s call it LiveBuys. So I see you have. Yeah. You have LiveBuys come up, and you have like our four pillars that you were just showing.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:05

You have studios. Academy gives an agency.

Chad Collins: 06:07

Exactly. So, you know, studios is, you know, the live selling studios and everything that goes behind it. Academy is like educational content that we put out there on social media; Gives is the philanthropic an agency is like, could we do it for other people? Right? Other folks have products that they want sold. They don’t have hosts; they don’t want to figure out the tech, etc. They would be able to come to us, and we could provide that for them. But like we started on YouTube many years ago for Breakfast Live really.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:40

I mean, the origin of the previous business was you were doing videos with your daughter on YouTube, right? Right. That was the original inception behind breakfast. Breakfast.

Chad Collins: 06:53

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we were putting these videos out there, and over the course of 18 months, we put up 500 videos and the channel kind of gained a lot of momentum. And we really wanted to go to a Lego event to show people you could be at an event with people just as enthusiastic as you are about this thing. And in this case, it was Lego. And being from the Philly market, we figured there’d be a local event to go to. There wasn’t one. So we created it. And that was the beginning of Brick Fest Live and Minefaire and Comic-Con for Kids and Young Innovators, fair and all of these things, right?

So similarly, now we’re going live in the collectibles space. And right now one of our main channels is called Coin Krewe, where it’s coins and currency and paper money and all that which is going strong. It was going strong on what not. We’ve recently transitioned over to TikTok. It’s kind of blowing up on TikTok where we’re building a community. And just like the thought way back over a decade ago of let’s bring the community together and create an event for the community, we thought, is there an event that’s high energy that brings coins and currency, sports cards and Pokémon and trading card games and sneakers and comics and pins and Funko Pops and action figures and artists all together under one roof.

And there’s not an event like that. You know, an event like that doesn’t exist today. And what do you call an event like that? And that’s where we landed on Coins, Cards, and Chaos, which in short, is Chaos. Are you coming to Chaos? I’ll see you at Chaos. I’m going to be at Chaos. And we were able to find an awesome venue where we’ve got, you know, the hotel rooms right there. The food is right there at the Valley Forge Casino Resort in King of Prussia, PA. They’re nice enough to have us come in and they got, you know, a 60,000ft² of space for us to have our inaugural show, which is going to be this November of 2026.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:20

This is Coin Krewe right here.

Chad Collins: 09:23

This is Coin Krewe. This is yeah, we’re almost at 15000 followers. So it’ll be fun to look back a year from now and see where we are. But yeah, we posted a ton of clips every day. We’re live about 14 hours a day. We’re live right now. We’re live right now on the channel.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:41

What do you want to make sure that you included in this event? Obviously, you’ve put on large scale events. You’ve also been to events. And I know over the as you’ve been doing with your son cards. You know, we were at the the show at Rosemont, Illinois, hanging out.

What did you want to make sure was in this event for the for Chaos?

Chad Collins: 10:04

You know, the number one thing that this event has to have that other events don’t have is amplified energy. It’s not a coin and currency show that you go to at the local fire hall. It’s not a card show in a dusty warehouse. It’s not a comic-con. This is meant for collectors of, you know, all hobbyists, all hobby collectors in those niches. And it’s also meant for folks that are interested in live shopping because we have a tremendous interest in live shopping. We see live shopping as being one of the core channels of revenue being driven on the internet, right? So that’s why we call it, you know, you see it right there, a live shopping and collectibles experience where there will be at the show, live streaming happening. You’ll be able to get educated on live streaming and what it means either on whatnot or TikTok or any other platform, eBay Live, etc.

And that’s another element that isn’t traditionally highlighted at a collectibles event. And you see in certain industries right now, like sports cards, is only as big as it is right now because of things like breaks and the live selling that’s happening in that industry. Coins and currency and silver and gold and precious metals and jewelry are only getting bigger because of live selling on whatnot and TikTok. And you can go to every single segment sub category in collectibles, whether it’s sneakers, action figures, video games, and they’re only getting bigger because the communities that are built on social media can gather so easily now virtually digitally online, where now if you bring an event for those people to come and meet in person for the first time now, now you’re really building community.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:35

But you say breaks. Chad. I know for people listening, it’s like we’re, if there’s like a pack of cards or something, they’re actually opening it live and like showing people and there’s anticipation. I’ve even seen it again. I’m not as familiar with you, but you could buy like, I’m going to buy the fifth card in that pack and they’re opening the pack and then they’re, you know, I, I watched, I mean, I, I’ll admit I’ve watched people do you know, there was 86 Fleer basketball set, the Michael Jordan rookie and they opened a box and people just bid on the packs. And also so like they bid on packs, they’d open it come up and open their packs or they people would buy a the seventh card in the pack and you’re like hoping that’s the Michael Jordan. So it’s a very it’s like, you know, it’s curiosity, it’s anticipation. Talk about live selling for a second. And when you say live selling, how does it work at the show?

Chad Collins: 13:33

You know, we have some things up our sleeve right now for the show that we’re going to be doing with Coin Krewe, where we will be live streaming from the event, we will be hosting one of our live shows. All right, there on the show floor at Chaos. There will be, you know, Pokémon sellers and sports card sellers that will have their cameras out the whole time. They’re going to be a creating content for social media. As you know, many people watch, you know, deals being happening. And the other thing about the show that’s important to note is we get asked this all the time, can I bring my stuff to sell? Right? I, I, I’m not, I don’t want to be a vendor, but I have this collection or I inherited something or my kids aren’t into it anymore. I need a place to sell it.

You bring it and all the dealers that are going to be there, all the vendors are going to be there. They want to talk with you. They they either want you to come and do business with them at their booth, or they want to see what you have so they can buy it and build on their inventory or trade or any combination thereof. And those things that are happening live at the show. In many cases are being recorded and will be clips for a lot of these folks on the internet. So there’s the live streaming component, there’s the content creation component. And again, that’s something that typically isn’t highlighted at collectibles events, but it’s something that, you know, we’ll have a focus on at Chaos.

[Continue to Page 2]