Rare Candy

When I joined, about two months after the founders kicked off their partnership, we didn't have much: no product, no users, just a small Discord community and a lightweight brand + concept kit (h/t @Late Checkout). In those early days, the question of where to start loomed large, so I dove deep with the founders, surveyed our community, and sat down with big names in the space.

Takeaways

• Collectors were hungry for a safe space to buy
• Their love for creators like Leonhart (a co-founder) ran deep
• Tools for tracking collections were a huge, huge opportunity

Buying in 2022 was incredibly tough, with shortages and counterfeits everywhere you looked. Our little team was heavy on Pokémon and e-comm smarts, so we started there, building an MVP marketplace with authenticated product available 24/7 and a live box-break and auction experience featuring creators like Leonhart, DeepPocketMonster, and PokeChloe.

I used this moment to convert our brand guide into a design token toolkit in Figma, giving myself and our engineers a polished, predictable catalog to work with as we pushed the delivery pedal to the floor for a fall launch.

By the end of that year we'd earned our first six figures in sales and a thousand MAUs.

We kicked off 2023 excited: we'd launched something we were proud of in an incredibly short period of time and the reception from our growing community was strong. So much so that sell-outs started to become a daily reality. Supply is the lifeblood of any marketplace and it was time for us to find more. I connected with brand new sellers drawn by TCG hype, local game store owners navigating the divide between brick-and-mortar and e-comm, and veteran dealers who'd been selling since the 90s to understand how we could bring them into the fold.

Takeaways

• Every seller has their own system
• Every seller has too little time
• Every seller wants lower fees

Online selling is not a new space. The incumbents have a multi-decade lead and our small team had no chance of beating their offering on day one. But our power as a marketplace comes from our unique focus on TCGs, and I knew owning our listing data would unlock card-centered experiences you just can't get elsewhere.

So, we focused on winning where we could: fees and ease. I designed a lightweight set of listing tools, with an emphasis on time savings: an ML-powered flow that could turn a photo of a card (or 20) into a complete listing in seconds, a CSV uploader allowing spreadsheet-first sellers to bring their data from anywhere. Plus all the basics: inventory management, scheduled drops, discounting, order fulfillment

It wasn't Shopify, but it was a start and it was enough. I onboarded our first handful of sellers within six weeks of launch: supply began to grow and MAUs tripled, driving marketplace GMV up 400% in the first year.

As our supply x demand story started to click in a big way, we turned our attention to a less inspiring metric: MAUs. Usage was growing, but not dramatically. Buying cool cards is fun, but it's only part of the collecting journey. I'd been dreaming up tools and experiences for the rest of the journey since day one, and it was finally time to dive in. By this point, I'd done rounds and rounds of collector surveys, interviews, and panels.

Takeaways

• Everyone wanted to know what their cards were worth
• No one had figured out how to make tracking cards easy, let alone fun
• Buying cards and connecting over cards online happened in totally different places

That last one was particularly resonant given the history of the hobby. Twenty years ago, you bought cards at the same place you traded them and competed in tournaments: a local game store. That third space for collectors was powerful, putting novices and experts in the same space with tons of different ways to connect over their shared passion. And while these stores still exist today, few are price-competitive and the community has largely moved online. A lot of the magic of the hobby has been lost along the way.

We wanted to change that, and that started with bringing collectors who aren't actively buying into the fold. I audited the competition, dove deep on card recognition tech and collection data models with our engineers, and designed a rich, end-to-end experience for our community of collectors. Given a three-month launch target, I sliced it down to its purest form: scan a card, see what it's worth, add it to your collection, and share it with the community.

We moved fast, ran a live beta at Card Party Orlando in June, and launched publicly in July. By the end of the year, marketplace GMV had tripled and MAUs were up 2500%.

Three years in, it somehow still feels like we're just getting started. There's so much more to build, so much more to explore, and so much room for the hobby to grow. But our north star is the same as it was from day one:

finding new ways to amplify the joy of collecting through technology.