Jon Armstrong never intended to create the booming live-commerce platform Stacked Golf. All he wanted was to join the local golf club, but his wife, Ashley, gave him an ultimatum: Yes, he could join, but only if he could find a way to pay for it himself.
His solution? Start a YouTube channel reviewing golf balls. The problem was that he didn’t even have the money to buy balls to review, so he scoured the woods at his Daytona Beach golf club for lost balls and started making videos comparing the Titleist Pro V1 balls he plays to whatever he found in the rough.
Zero budget. Zero business plan. Just a guy with a phone and a hunch that people might search for golf ball reviews.
That was in 2019. Within two months, his channel garnered enough traffic to monetize. Within six months, it became the Armstrong’s full-time income.
Today, the Stacked Golf YouTube channel has 325,000 subscribers, and earlier this year, the Armstrongs launched a multi-seller marketplace by the same name, which generates $150,000 in weekly sales and is approaching $3 million in total sales after just six months. With a community of 26,000 members and more than 1,000 active sellers, the Armstrongs have accidentally built a case study for the booming live shopping economy—a market projected to explode from $128 billion in 2024 to $2.5 trillion by 2033.
“We got super lucky,” Armstrong says. “With everything we were doing—filming the golf ball reviews and thrifting golf clubs—we were basically filming ourselves making money.”
American Pickers, but for golf
The channel’s real trajectory shift came when Armstrong’s wife, Ashley, added her passion and expertise in thrifting to the equation. What emerged, by their own description, was “American Pickers, but for golf clubs,” which entails them driving for hours through Central Florida hoping to find a $400 putter sitting in a Goodwill for $3.
The polished videos hide an unglamorous reality.
“For every one thrift store we show you in a video, we’ve probably been to like 15,” Armstrong admits. “There were a lot of days where we wore the same clothes back to back to try and figure out how to fill out one 10-minute video.”
They occasionally sold items on eBay and other platforms, but tired quickly of the tedious product-by-product selling process and fees that ate into profits. Mostly, they hoarded inventory, waiting for a better solution. Meanwhile, over the next three years, their community grew organically.
“We really wanted to create a platform where we make buying golf clubs online as exciting as it is in our videos,” Armstrong explains. “It’s kind of a soulless transaction when you’re buying from eBay. The thrill of the hunt didn’t really exist.”
A million-dollar tech shortcut
The technical breakthrough came through—of all things—a golf game. Armstrong played a round with Commonwealth Picker, another YouTuber who had built a marketplace on District, a platform that provides the infrastructure for custom shopping platforms with livestreaming and multi-seller marketplaces.
Armstrong, who previously ran an app development company, recognized the value of District immediately.
“The technology stack that they give you is millions of dollars,” he says. “So it was kind of a no-brainer. They handle support, they handle the whole tech side, and all we have to do is focus on growing the user base and selling as much as possible.”
Founded in 2022 by three former Snapchat product builders (and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Kindred Ventures, and Greylock Partners), the Los Angeles–based company has 12 employees, a lean operation compared to competitor and live-shopping giant Whatnot.
The Armstrongs’ timing couldn’t have been better. While Whatnot has reached an $11.5 billion valuation, proving massive investor appetite for the category, District is democratizing access. Where Whatnot built a centralized marketplace, District enables creators to build their own branded ecosystems.
By using District, Stacked Golf isn’t selling on someone else’s platform, such as eBay or Craigslist: It’s more like they’re building their own golf-focused, mini-eBay right on District. They control their own marketplace, set their own rules, and earn commission fees from their 1,000-plus sellers.
Stacked Golf’s Timed auctions
Here’s how it works: Sellers schedule livestreams that generally last anywhere from 45 minutes to four hours, or longer. They hold up a product—say, a Nike Method Core putter—give a brief pitch, and start the countdown timer, which is typically 10 seconds.
Last person to bid wins.
It’s simple, fast-paced, and wildly effective. Stacked Golf also features standard marketplace and buy-it-now listings, as well as seven-day auctions, but 98% of sales come from livestreams, with clubs selling from $5 to several hundred dollars. One seller recently hosted a marathon nine-and-a-half-hour livestream, which generated nearly $20,000 in sales, according to Armstrong. Some of the biggest sellers on Stacked Golf are golf stores, like Play It Again Sports which recently made $17,000 in two hours, more than that seller normally does in a week of non-livestream selling.
The format taps into why live commerce conversion rates run up to 10 times higher than conventional e-commerce: urgency, entertainment, and real-time interaction that traditional online shopping lacks.
But Armstrong’s secret weapon isn’t the format. It’s curation.
Community over commerce
Stacked Golf preapproves every seller, verifies product legitimacy, and rejects gambling gimmicks and NSFW content that plague some live-selling competitors.
“We really wanted to create an atmosphere where people want to buy and sell on our platform just because it’s the best place to do it,” Armstrong says.
The philosophy extends to seller selection. Armstrong prefers passionate collectors over spreadsheet arbitrageurs.
“The ones that have the most people in their chats are the ones that know what they’re selling because they like it,” he says, citing sellers who specialize in Nike golf clubs—discontinued since 2016 but beloved by collectors.
The strategy is working. Since launching earlier this year, the marketplace grew from zero to 15,000 members in just three months and has since reached 26,000 after six months. Multiple individual sellers have generated more than $150,000 in personal sales on the platform.
The business itself now employs three full-time staff and operates from a 2,500-square-foot Ocala, Florida, warehouse, which it has already outgrown. It has also attracted brand partnerships with golf apparel company Pins & Aces and hosts sellers who have relationships with Adidas North America, Titleist, and Mizuno, among others.
But Armstrong is cautious about diluting the community with corporate sellers.
“We wanted to create a marketplace that we would both want to buy and sell on and not feel ashamed of marketing it,” he says. “As soon as you start getting too corporate in terms of the sellers on there, you kind of kill the vibe.”
Right idea, right time
In the U.S., the live commerce market accounts for approximately 5% of e-commerce sales—far less than China’s 60%—suggesting an enormous runway for companies like Stacked Golf as American consumers embrace the format.
The U.S. market is expected to grow at 37.2% annually through 2033, fueled by platforms like TikTok Shop and stand-alone marketplaces like Whatnot. TikTok Shop—which blends livestream shopping with traditional product listings—hosted over eight million hours of live sessions in the U.S. in 2024. Whatnot, focused on collectibles and resale, recently surpassed $2 billion in annual livestream sales, while Amazon Live and eBay Live are expanding their live commerce offerings. The trend is driven by the urgency and entertainment that Armstrong has built into Stacked Golf’s model.
District’s infrastructure democratizes this opportunity. Where building live commerce tech might require millions in investment, creators can now launch sophisticated marketplaces overnight and focus on what, according to Armstrong, matters most: building authentic communities.
“It’s still kind of surreal,” he says. “Just thinking about how we started with finding golf balls in the woods, and now we’re here.”
The business he built with his wife—”the CEO of everything,” as he calls her—demonstrates something fundamental about modern commerce: Authentic community-building trumps traditional business planning. They didn’t start with a pitch deck. They started with a bet, a phone, and a genuine love for the hunt. And that authenticity might be the company’s most valuable asset.
“It just grew naturally, which I think people appreciated,” Armstrong says. “Even to this day, it’s kind of clear that it ain’t all about the money.”