[00:00:00] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name is Jay Aigner. Today I am lucky enough to be joined by somebody I've been following for a while, Ted Mann. he is the CEO and co founder of CollX, which is a very cool, card collecting platform, I guess. Is that what you call it, Ted?
Ted: Yeah, I think I like it.
Jay: let's go with it.
Ted: Maybe we've graduated to the platform status.
Jay: It feels like a platform. and I was telling Ted, my son is a user of the platform. very, I mean, I can't believe this didn't exist or did this exist in other forms [00:01:00] before you guys?
Ted: Yeah. So it all started with my son, Charlie, who's, he's now 12, but, you know, similar age to your son.
And, you know, it started with his, obsession with Pokemon cards, which kind of grew out of the pandemic. you know, I guess there were a lot of kids, at home. you know, wondering what those cards are worth. he didn't take long before he found all my sports cards in the basement, you know, in a shoe box and started digging all of them up.
And, he had a problem that I think a lot of collectors that I certainly had when I was a kid, which is, it's really hard to figure out what your cards are worth. And when you start doing deals with your friends, You know, on the blacktop at school or, you know, we go down to the local card store and, you know, start trying to do deals with the guys there.
you can quickly feel like, you know, you're at an information disadvantage if you don't know the prices. And so to answer your question, was there anything you better believe I tried every app I could get my hands on every website, you know, I was. You know, with my son trying to find ways, I was like, you know, when I was [00:02:00] a kid, you'd get the Beckett guide, you know, printed guy.
Jay: That's what I was going to say. The book. I remember the book or the magazine. Yeah. Once it,
Ted: yeah. I mean, it still exists, right? It's now like literally like the phone book. it's like a notebook paper. I actually tried buying myself one of those and that didn't last very long.
Jay: No, he didn't like that.
No, it probably is printed on phone book paper since they don't really print those anymore. it's such a cool, concept, I think just because it's like, it's based around a fun thing. Right. Like so many, so many businesses are based around stuff. That's not fun. My wife's a nurse. I'm like, that's the least fun thing on earth is like being, you know, healthcare, like, no, thank you.
But you found something there.
Ted: I was a doctor. What is it about like, you know,
Jay: business,
Ted: medical practice pairing up with, us.
Jay: I think they just want to spend as much time away from us as possible. That's probably, at least in my case, that's not, actually we both work from home now. but it's something fun and it's like exciting and it's like, it's always something around the corner.
You got the new pack, you're opening up and you're doing the thing. talk to me a little bit about just the industry in general. I'm not asking you to be a, recap the history of sports [00:03:00] cards with us, but just, where are we on like the ups and downs of is it a big hobby still? Is it resurged?
Is it, did it go away? Did it come back? Like, what is the status of just collecting cards in general?
Ted: Yeah, no, it's as popular as ever. it definitely like, you know, golfing's kind of has these periods where it's, you know, not been a, like a linear straight lineup, but, it's, you know, more popular now than ever, it's big market.
you know, what, before I kind of like dove into starting a business here, You know, again, I was just helping my son try to figure out what his cards are worth. and you know, being the geek I am, I built him a thing. It was like initially a very crude kind of like air table spreadsheet that, but you know, it used some of the tech that I know really well, visual search to be able to take a picture of a card, get the value.
And, you know, he loved it. Right. And all his friends in town started like copying what he was doing. And, you know, before I kind of dove into building business, I had the same question as you like. Is this a big market? How big could, you know, could it be? and I [00:04:00] was surprised to learn in the secondary market for cards, just like, you know, doing what my son was doing that buying and selling, you know, the cards, you know, with friends and stores online on eBay.
pretty big, right? It's about 5 billion secondary market.but what got me really jazzed is when I did a little bit of market research to figure out just how many people collect cards, it, I realized it's a huge number, it's about 85 million American adults. That,consider themselves trading card collectors, it's, bigger than just about any other collectible market.
and, you know, I thought that was really interesting. And I thought it was also interesting that a very small percentage of those people that own cards have ever participated in the hobby in a meaningful way. Like ever. Bought or sold cards or graded them or done any of these other things that are now pretty integral to what it means to be a card collector in this day and age.
And so realized there was this kind of cool opportunity to not just kind of go [00:05:00] after that existing 5 billion market, but potentially expand the market quite a bit.
Jay: Did you, is there other competitors now have people copied you and jumped into the space or like, are you still kind of the name of the game?
Ted: So in terms of like what collects is doing, so the app, by the way, free app for iPhone, the Android,
Jay: trust me, but whenever you feel necessary, I fully endorse this one. I don't shy away from those.
Ted: Like the basic use case is so simple. It's what, how it started. Take a picture of your card, identify, get the value, you know, in a second.
and from there you can build your collection. you can share your collection with other users. And you can also, you know, browse through all the cards that other people have and buy and sell and do deals. so in terms of like the, you know, the CollX up, we do have a few competitors.
they all kind of do slightly different things. but the computer vision side of this, the match the card from a photo, you know, I'd like to think that we were the [00:06:00] only ones with that novel idea, but there were definitely a couple of other apps that came out more or less at the same time as us.
where folks were like, you know, trying to do something similar. so I'mat this point, I think we've established ourselves as the leader in the space.
Jay: Mm-Hmm. ,
Ted: we're quite a bit bigger than any of the other guys that have come along. And we've tried to build on where we started and build a whole bunch more functionality above and beyond that simple sort of like.
You know, what's it worth kind of scenario. all the way to the point of, like I said, you know, buying and selling on a marketplace.
Jay: Let's take it back. where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life? And was this your first business or did you, was there other stuff along the way?
I think I saw some things, but I'll let you run through your, elevator pitch background.
Ted: Sure. I grew up in North Jersey. I was a Mets fan growing up. I'd say cards probably were my first kind of like entrepreneurial, experience in a way. I didn't think about it that way back then, but it was the first money I ever made was flipping 86 Mets cards.
you [00:07:00] know, made about 200 bucks and then, put them all into Greg Jeffries, which was a huge mistake.but, you know, after that, you know, I Went to school in Philadelphia. Philadelphia has now become my home. and, after school, I worked for many years as a writer and editor.
that was my first career. and when I was working in the news industry, gradually started to work on more and more technology, efforts. built a few kind of,You know, startups within the larger news organizations, and that's kind of how I first scratched that edge and eventually,left, the companies at the time was Gannett, left Gannett to, to found my first startup, which was a mobile coupon app called SnipSnap.
and it's going to sound very familiar to CollX I mean, it's basically. The idea there was you could take a picture of any physical coupon and turn it into a mobile coupon. and so this is, you know, 12 years ago. So it was actually like, you know, mobile coupons weren't really a thing yet.
Jay: Right.
Ted: so in a way we kind of helped pioneer that,by digitizing these, you [00:08:00] know, you know, physical coupons into digital.
I guess that's a little bit of a common thread through my startups is using visual search
Jay: camera tech. Yeah. That's cool. that's a cool line through the middle. and so when did you start collect?
Ted: yes, I did. Well, I'll go back to SnipSnap.
Jay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ted: Oh, uh, um, yeah, we grew to about 6 million users. Had a really nice exit, after about three years. And after that I ran, two other companies. in the visual search space, I ran a company called Slyce, which was,a SAS business doing visual product search and then a party.
I'm after that. And then, ultimately decided to, hand the reins from party him over to, one of my colleagues. So I could work on this, side project for my son, which quickly became much more than that. and started CollX two years ago,
Jay: two years ago. I mean, that's a hell of a push, man.
Two years is like a lot of you guys are like, you're grinding. You guys see everywhere. You know, it's, and I think just from like my local perspective in the Philadelphia area, I mean, certainly the leader here, I would [00:09:00] have to assume it's late everywhere. So, I mean, how did you purposely build a brand?
Did you purposely just make a good product and then people kind of, you know, Built a community around it. Like, what was your approach or was it just kind of, how did you come to, be so, to have sort of brand centric company? I mean, that's when you see CollX, you know what it is and, it makes sense.
And you know, if you've heard of it, then you're like, yeah, I'll check it out.
Ted: Well, thanks. I appreciate the compliment on the branding. I, yeah, it's funny when you try to name these things, you know, I'm trying to remember what the original names we had back in the day were.
Jay: Oh, I would love to know. I would love to know the cutting room floor.
Ted: I like the tagline. What's it worth? So I remember once I caught, I want to just like abbreviate it to woo. Okay. All right. All right. You know, we called it CollX and not like the card app or whatever, because we wanted to have. Something that would ultimately, apply to all collectibles. and that is still very much my ambition.
we quickly learned that the trading card hobby alone is [00:10:00] massive and there are a lot of trading cards out there. We have about 20 million unique, you know, canonical records in our database. so there's a lot of. so eventually I hope that we can expand out into other categories like comics and, you know, stamps, coins, whatever.
but we kind of have our hands full with trading cards at the moment. but yeah, I, you know, in terms of like, did I, we were trying to build a brand. I mean, I think more importantly, we're trying to build a great, great app experience. Something that was really sticky that would attract all these collectors, that 85 million.
Adults that own cards in the United States. you know, it's a big audience, right? And so we have about 2 million of them now using CollX, and building their collections and, average users has about 200 cards in their collection. We get a million cards added to the app every day now. so it is a pretty big volume of getting added.
Jay: that's a lot of activity and a lot of clients to manage. And so do you guys have a, a big customer success team? Like, how do you deal with all these, you know, [00:11:00] millions of, I mean, B2C is a different world than I'm used to. I'm a B2B guy. So the B2C world is almost terrifying to me to think of having, you know, 2 million potential people to keep happy.
how do you guys do that?
Ted: Yeah, well, on the CollX app side,do we have a customer assessing? we have a customer support team, but it's pretty small. you know, we, one of the things that we did early, in figuring out a way to harness this community of really enthusiastic collectors is we started deputizing our best power users as ambassadors.
Okay. And some people talk about like ambassadors as like brand ambassadors, like people that are going to go out and like market your product on social media or like go run around college campuses, signing people up. We took a slightly different approach to the ambassador program. where we really tried to find users who could help coach other users into how to buy, how to sell, how to do deals on the platform.
and so we now have about 300 of them, I think. and so [00:12:00] in a way they're kind of like customer success, customer support. they're not, you know, employees, but they, you know, they, you know, we give them some perks, you know, and,they get really excited and jazzed about helping, you know, helping on board kind of like new sellers, new buyers and like, showing the ropes.
Jay: Wow.
Ted: Which is pretty cool.
Jay: That's a really. I mean, that definitely doesn't exist in the B2B world. At least the one that I'm aware of, like having your customers like onboard other customers in a sense. Right. I mean, that's pretty, it seems scalable too, right? Cause you can find more ambassadors that can kind of build this thing out.
That's a pretty.
Ted: It's a, it's been really cool. and I mean, I love our ambassador community kind of know someone very well. we've even reached a point now where we have what are called level two ambassadors, which are like, you know, the most successful productive ambassadors that have like, you know, said, I want to do more, I want to help out more.
And so we've, deputized them even further to take on other roles, whether it's, you know, helping respond to customer support, [00:13:00] emails and chats, and, you know, responding to app store reviews, things like that. so, it's been a cool way to, to grow and scale that with them.
You know, having to dramatically increase the headcount of the business.
Jay: Yeah. It's almost like the Reddit model, right? We have like their own little communities that they run themselves and they kind of help build the community. I like that. all right. Well, so who was your first customer? Who was the first, CollX collector?
Ted: Well, I mean, is it cheating to give you like a couple? Cause, we had, when we launched the app, we had so many people just sign up and start scanning. but I'll give you a few that kind of come to mind as folks like early adopter, early users that. I got to know and like learned a little bit more about, the hobby and about, so one of them was, it was actually an attorney from my previous company.
So I had no idea that he, like, I don't, I didn't reach out to him directly. He must've seen probably me. Tweeting or linked inning about CollX. And so, but I noticed this, like, you know, maybe within like the first week of launching, this [00:14:00] is one guy who scanned like 5, 000 cards in the app, which takes a fair bit of time, right?
Cause you're at the time you're scanning picture after picture. And, and so it turns out it was that attorney. Who, you know, I know bills at a very high hourly rates. And I'm like, my God, you have the, like your time's so valuable. but he, you know, he told me that he's just been a lifelong collector, super passionate.
And, you know, this is, you know, it's just a way for him to kind of re Kindle that experience that he's always loved, you know, started as a kid now. And,what I learned from him that I thought was so interesting. Is that, all he needed was a way to, scratch the what's it worth itch.
And it was possible to get somebody like him spending hours and hours. We have like our top 5 percent of users spend four hours a day on the app. Can you not like it's. Kind of incredible that, you know, but, you know, for people who have like, have this passion and have, you know, have an interest, like [00:15:00] this is a great way to kind of draw them.
that was one. I'm gonna give you a couple, if that's okay.
Jay: Yeah, please do.
Ted: So another one was a guy who, I didn't know, named Travis Kegar, from Virginia. Who was an early adopter of the app and, and just started reaching out to me and to many other users to do deals, to do trades.
and you know, he, he's really cool and kind and, you know, just wanted like kind of chatted me up a little bit, learned what I'm interested in. Learned what I collect and then just started sending me, Hey, would you be interested in this? Would you be interested in that? Yeah, that's a card I've always wanted to have in my collection.
So, and starting to negotiate these deals and Travis was like a great early example of somebody, you know, we, I think we had a notion that we were going to build a marketplace, early, but we hadn't started yet, but we started to look at users like him and just how many, deals they were doing, how many trades.
And purchases they were doing through the app. And we realized, wow, there's really something there. If [00:16:00] we built functionality for the Travis, like what would that look like? And so now we've got on the marketplace, we've got roughly, we now have a full like end to end, you can check out on the app, you can get shipping, labels, tracking, all that, you know, And, you know, for, for folks like Travis, who, was also kind of like a prototype for the ambassador kind of, you know, we've been delighted to see that we can effectively take some of these collectors who'd never bought and sold on eBay and we can bring them into the market.
So it was a really good kind of eye opening thing about like, you know, we can actually, bring net new folks into the secondary market. so I thought that was pretty neat.
Jay: No, I love that. no, really.
Ted: Customer's really fascinating.
Jay: Well, that's why I have this show. Right? I mean, it's, and it brings you back as an owner.
You're like, oh, this was how it started like forever ago. And all the stuff I'm dealing with today started, you know, many years ago. Sleepless nights ago. how do you guys monetize, by the way? How are you guys making money off of this?
Ted: So a few [00:17:00] different ways. I mentioned the marketplace. So we take a 10 percent commission on the card sales.
we need a lot of sales, a lot of volume for that to add up. So that's going to take time to kind of build. But in the meantime, we, we launched,a subscription option in the app, called CollX Pro. and. It's like our pro tier. And so it just brings a bunch of power user features,to the collector.
So, you know, everything from being able to dynamically reprice your cards to the market average, to, options to export, print checklists, things like that. So, so that's how we actually, that's what it makes up right now. 85 percent of our revenue is the subscription revenue.we also,built a kind of a prosumer version of CollX.
Specifically targeting card stores and dealers. so that's been really popular. I'm so we have about 2, 500 professional sellers. These are folks, this is like their jobs is all they do.
Jay: Right.
Ted: and our software is basically allowing them to rapidly scan inventory and list cards for sale on like eBay, as well as the CollX [00:18:00] marketplace.
so that's been another good source of revenue.
Jay: Is that a step? There's a separate app entirely.
Ted: Yeah, it's a desktop application.
Jay: Oh, wow.
Ted: And most of those folks are using high speed scanners too. To import the card. So it's a little different, you know, CollX is all mobile, like you're using your phone, taking a picture, the dealer software using these scanners.
Jay: Yeah. These are the big boys that are moving volume, right?
Ted: Tens of thousands of cards listed.
Jay: Yeah. That's crazy. all right, well, let's wrap it there. I have one more question. non business related. If you could do anything on earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?
Ted: well, I mentioned, I started as a writer and editor, I feel like, you know,when I hang up my, spurs as an entrepreneur, I feel like I'd like to get back to writing.
you know, I, I don't know if I've got any, like fiction books in me, but I'd love to write some nonfiction books, but I got some good stories to tell from.
Jay: I was going to say, you're going to have a story from this buddy. I'm sure you've already, it sounds like you're on your way. I like that answer.
Going back to the old passion. All right. If you want to find [00:19:00] you Ted to reach out specifically about stuff you heard today, where can they reach you?
Ted: Yeah, well definitely download the CollX app. You can follow me. I'm just at Ted on the CollX app. and on social media, I'm at Turkey monkey on Twitter and, a few other sites and, you know, if you go to the CollX website, C O L L X dot A P P.
you know, that's a good place to, to find the app and track me down.
Jay: Beautiful. Well, Ted, I thank you so much for your time today. I love to see people in the tri state area kicking ass. So keep kicking ass. and thank you so much for your time today. And we'll catch up again soon. All right.
Ted: Thanks for having me on, Jay.
Jay: Thanks, Ted. Appreciate it.