We ditched our stable nine to five jobs to sell coins and bullion online and now both earn £50,000 a year. This is how to tell if you are (literally) sitting on a goldmine

When Oliver Mills, 25, received a text from his father as he gazed at the Eiffel Tower, he was curious about the latest money-making idea sent his way.

The software engineer and his then girlfriend – and now wife – Anna, also 25, were away on a weekend in Paris, and the couple, both 23 at the time, had been looking for suggestions on how to earn some extra money to help them get by.

Back in London, Anna was earning £24,000 as a nurse while Oliver was making £31,000 a year. But it wasn’t enough to live comfortably and save for the future.

Little did they know it then, but that text would spark the beginning of a hugely successful business venture that would see the couple quit their jobs and rake in more than £1million a month.

The text from Oliver’s father included a link to an online shopping platform, called Whatnot, where people buy and sell goods in live auctions, including anything from clothes and sports memorabilia to vintage toys.

Oliver downloaded the app and a man holding a gold coin popped up on the screen of his phone. He was selling dozens of coins and would hold them up to the camera one by one, explaining the history of each and offering flash sales.

In the top-right corner of the screen, they could see how much people were bidding on each coin and how much they sold for.

Viewers clicked on the link on the screen to bid on the item as it appeared and the highest bid won. In an hour, the man appeared to have sold around £10,000 worth of gold and silver coins. Oliver says: ‘I’d never seen anything like it. It is like teleshopping, but way cooler. We loved it and we spent the rest of the holiday watching Whatnot streams.’

Eager to try it out himself, he decided to buy his very first coins on Facebook Marketplace and eBay when he got home.

Just weeks later on November 30, 2024, Oliver hosted his first livestream auction under the profile @oliversbullion. In 45 minutes, he made £1,300 worth of sales and made a 25 pc profit (£325).

Oliver says: ‘That was a real lightbulb moment for me. When you see £1,300 come into your bank account in one go and that’s nearly your entire month’s salary and you earned those sales from 45 minutes of streaming, it’s a bit of a wow moment.

‘After my first stream, I went off and spent thousands of pounds on any ounce of silver I could find.’

He started buying old coins in bulk by the kilo, through Facebook groups and eBay. He says: ‘It was quite unpredictable to start with.’ He adds: ‘I’d meet people from Facebook Marketplace and hand over £4,000 in cash that I had withdrawn from a petrol station ATM. I’d bring the coins home and I’d sell them. It all escalated from there and we started doing it on a weekly basis.’

Oliver says he knew nothing about coins at the time, including whether they were real or not and didn’t know how much any of the ones he had bought would fetch. ‘I did a lot of research to compare prices and work out how much I could try to sell them for.’

At the beginning, Oliver would look at what others were selling similar coins for online to get a sense of pricing.

Oliver watched a livestream on Whatnot – a live shopping marketplace where sellers can auction products – in which one user sold around £10,000-worth of gold and silver

The couple have been exposed to movements in underlying gold and silver prices and can be forced to sell stock at a loss, joking, ‘We are at the mercy of Donald Trump’s Twitter account’

Once bought, he would create an individual listing on Whatnot for each coin and he’d then sell them during his online livestreams. He would include details on the condition and year, which helped determine their value. He says: ‘I’d sit down and I would literally break out every single individual coin into its own listing and sell the coins one by one.’

It was only by trying to sell them online that Oliver started to learn how much he could get for different types of coins. Now, having handled thousands, he is familiar with all the different types and can tell how much they are worth. Oliver also began putting stock purchases on a credit card and regularly asked his dad to lend him £1,000 to help fund purchases. Sales grew rapidly – Oliver and Anna made £3,500 in sales in their second live stream, then £5,500 and £6,000 in successive weeks.

A leap of faith

In January 2025, Oliver and Anna, who met in their hometown Weymouth, Dorset, and who have been together since 2020, created an official business called Oliver’s Bullion. It quickly grew far beyond the couple’s original plan to make a little extra money.

So successful was it that in August 2025, Anna quit her job to focus on the business full-time.

She took a £34,000-a-year salary to start with, as it was enough to cover the bills and monthly outgoings, while leaving spare cash to reinvest into the business.

‘It all kind of happened by accident,’ she says. ‘Leaving my job was absolutely terrifying. I wanted to be a nurse because I wanted a very stable job. So it was very overwhelming initially.’

Four months later in December 2025, Oliver quit his engineering job too and also started to take a salary of £34,000 from the business. The couple owned a two-bed flat in west London through a shared ownership scheme. If you can’t afford to pay for a deposit or mortgage payments, this scheme allows you to buy a share of a property (usually between 10 pc and 75 pc) and pay rent on the remaining share to a housing association or landlord.

Their monthly mortgage, rent and service charge added up to £2,000 a month. So their new salaries from the business provided enough to cover these costs. He says: ‘I was very anxious about leaving a secure job, but we did it.’

The couple split their tasks. Anna packages up all the coins to post to buyers. Oliver jokes: ‘She wakes up, makes a cup of tea, packs, sits down, has lunch, packs, sits down, has dinner, packs, goes to bed.’

A multi-million-pound business

Just over a year later, the couple – who are now married – have turned these risky career decisions into a huge success.

They are making up to £1million a month in revenue with their biggest individual livestream generating around £320,000 in sales. They say their profit can vary depending on what they buy and the market but overall the business has been profitable since the beginning and has grown over time to be able to support their salaries. However, for commercial reasons they wouldn’t divulge how much they make a month.

They have increased the amount of income they each draw from the business to £50,000 a year and have hired Oliver’s sister. They currently buy between 1,000 to 2,000 items a week, spending between £100,000 and £350,000.

Oliver says their home is ‘less a flat now and more a warehouse’.

Their highest calendar month was February, when they made sales worth £780,000.

The couple photograph their stock and list the item, before selling it through a livestream on Whatnot. (Pictured: One-ounce silver Britannia coin)

Oliver and Anna say the sheer volume of coin stock means their flat now resembles ‘a warehouse’, as the business has expanded well behind what they originally imagined

Over the past 12 months, they have counted £6.5million in revenue. They say they work 70 to 80 hours a week and once even held a 24-hour livestream. That stream generated around £320,000 in sales, with 3,017 individual items sold and a peak of 1,351 viewers.

On a typical stream, they get 250 to 500 viewers and have over 54,000 followers on social media. Their customers are usually UK-based and are varied. Oliver says: ‘We have people buying to diversify their investment portfolio alongside their savings and Isas, wholesale buyers and also coin enthusiasts – it’s a real mix.’

He says a large part of their success is down to building strong relationships with suppliers that allows them to receive stock on 24-hour payment terms.

This means they can receive a delivery without paying, sell the goods on a livestream that day and pay the supplier the following day. In order to build up this level of trust, the pair had to do millions of pounds’ worth of business with suppliers first.

They receive deliveries roughly three times a week from distributors, wholesalers, manufacturers, mints and other suppliers in the UK and overseas. The stock is photographed and listed, then sold through their livestreams.

Oliver and Anna have hired an accountant to handle their books and taxes, as there are particular tax rules for buying and selling coins, with some generous exemptions. The amount of tax you pay will depend on the type of coin and whether you make any profit.

Official legal tender coins from the Royal Mint, such as Britannias and Sovereigns are exempt from Capital Gains Tax and VAT for businesses. Foreign coins and bars may be taxed on profits over the annual allowance.

Cashing in on flash sales

The couple schedule livestreams up to 20 weeks in advance, running them on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evenings, as well as Tuesday and Thursday lunchtimes.

The process is ‘simple’, says Oliver. ‘I go on to Whatnot on my computer, go live and pick up an item and talk about it until it sells.’

Oliver takes requests for specific items and also runs flash sales.

On Black Friday last November, Oliver ran a flash sale on 1oz silver Britannia coins and sold 150 in six seconds, he says. The Britannia is the official silver bullion coin of the Royal Mint in the UK.

The couple’s stock ranges from mainstream bullion to collectable coins, including silver Britannias, Mexican Libertads, gold sovereigns and proof coins.

A proof coin is the highest quality of coin a mint produces and tends to sell for much more than the value of the metal itself as they are often commemorative coins. They also sell special edition ‘privy’ coins, which have a small additional mark or design and can command higher prices than standard versions. These tend to sell for a lot more than standard coins. For example, Oliver says he sold a 5oz gold privy coin for around £18,000.

In one big windfall, they sold a full ‘monster box’ of 500 1oz 2026 Krugerrands for £39,000. These are South African gold bullion coins. Oliver says that, at the time, individual coins were selling for around £85 to £90, while the bulk deal worked out at around £78 per ounce.

On the rocks

The price of gold has soared over the past year amid stock market volatility, geopolitical uncertainty and rising inflation.

Over the past 12 months, the price of the precious metal has jumped 32 pc to £3,254 per ounce, and over five years it has risen 149 pc. However, it has been a bumpy ride for investors, with large price falls in some months.

At the beginning of March prices hit a peak of £4,152 per ounce before tumbling to £3,194 per ounce within three weeks.

At this point, Oliver and Anna’s business hit a rough patch, losing up to £15,000 a month. This is because market movements can create a large difference between turnover and profit. Although the pair may generate hundreds of thousands of pounds in sales, movements in the underlying gold and silver prices can mean they are forced to sell stock at a loss.

The couple had made a bulk purchase of coins at around £92 a piece, which they later sold for around £70 each. Oliver says: ‘We were losing £10 to £20 quid on every coin we sold. We still had to host the livestream and sell them because the price wasn’t going back up any time soon.’

He adds: ‘The markets can be incredibly volatile. We are completely at the mercy of the stock market, and Donald Trump’s Twitter account, which can influence the price of precious metals. At one point, we lost about £30,000 overnight on market losses and then from then about £10,000 to 15,000 a month.’

One tip Oliver would give to others who plan to buy or sell coins, is if the price of the metal falls, don’t panic. He says: ‘We notice that people often will sell their collections when spot price goes down significantly as they worry it will continue to go down.

‘On the flip side, we’ve also seen that people tend to buy more when the spot price goes up quickly, as they worry prices will continue to rise and they’ll miss out on cheaper opportunities.’

Buy what you can when you can, there is no rush when it comes to buying precious metals, Oliver says. ‘It is something to buy over time and to hold on to. Buy precious metals from those who have good reputations. Read online reviews and compare prices.’

Thankfully, the couple says the stronger trading period they had before the downturn helped absorb those losses and prices have since recovered.

The lack of stability has been a struggle at times for Anna, who says she misses being around colleagues and patients at the NHS, while Oliver says he did enjoy the simplicity of employment.

‘I miss the fact that you can just sort of rock up, get paid a salary and go home again,’ he says.

But both say they aren’t going back any time soon. They hope to sell their London flat and move back to Dorset, where they can be closer to family and have more space to expand their business.