Garage Plant Auctions

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Live plant auctions are shows where a grower holds houseplants up to a phone camera and collectors bid on each one. Buyers want the exact plant with the exact leaf pattern, not a stock photo.

Variegated plants, the ones with white or yellow streaks, are why this works. No two look alike.

That's the gap: buyers want to see the exact plant they're paying for, and a phone on a tripod can show them.

Root cuttings from plants you own and sell them live on Palmstreet, a plant app that handles bids and payment for a 6.9% selling fee plus card processing. One seller starts plants at $30, and her monsteras go for $115 or more.

The business makes money from auctions. But it grows from cuttings, because one mother plant keeps making new plants to sell.

►Leena Pettigrew, an IT analyst in suburban Houston, joined in June 2023 with about $1,000 of stock. Her first good stream sold 53 plants. Twelve months later her garage business had done nearly $148,600, around her full-time job.

One variegated mother plant sold for $26,000 in a single Palmstreet auction in October 2025.

🥢 The winners will be growers who treat a stream like a weekly show, because regulars come back to the same time slot. The cheapest plant to sell is one you cut from your own mother plant.

🍜 The risk is that this is live work with living inventory. Pettigrew now pays five contractors to keep up, and plants rot or freeze in transit. A rare plant stays expensive only until lots of growers have cuttings of it.

Most people who build software pick a buyer who loves software. A one-person program for printing classroom bingo cards shows why a buyer who hates the chore is better.

What they uncovered: Patrick McKenzie built Bingo Card Creator in 2006 as a side project while working a demanding office job. Elementary school teachers paid about $30 for it. In 2012 it brought in $64,791 and $38,598 in profit, during a year he mostly left it alone.

The usual mistake is building for other tech people, who compare tools all day and haggle over price. Teachers don't. They have a lesson on Friday, a topic like sight words or the solar system, and no time to make 30 different bingo cards by hand.

The idea came from an English teacher who asked McKenzie for help making bingo cards. He then made a web page for every classroom topic a teacher might search for, so the teacher typing in a topic landed on a finished answer. Search was his top source of customers, Google ads brought in about half his sales, and sales followed the school calendar.

He ran it part time for four years, working late nights at his day job, and it kept paying because the buyer's problem came back every week.

What they learned: Pick a buyer with a deadline and a small budget they control. A school office manager making the weekly newsletter, a youth coach writing practice plans and a church volunteer printing the bulletin all have a chore that repeats, a date it's due, and $30 they can spend without asking anyone.

The first buyers isn’t " a school." It's one third-grade teacher who needs bingo cards by Friday and would rather pay $30 than lose her Sunday making them.

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