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DEEP DIVE
A five-person team makes eight figures a year valuing people’s Pokémon cards. Here are 11 other hobbies where no one has built the same app.
There is an app that does one thing: it tells you what the cards in your shoebox are worth.
You point your phone at a card. It recognises it, pulls the last few sale prices from eBay and TCGplayer, and adds it to your collection. Then it shows you the total, like a stock portfolio. Up 4% this week. Down 2% last month. Your best-performing card. Your worst.
That’s it. That’s the business.
It’s called Collectr, it’s run by five people out of Toronto, and it now does eight-figure annual recurring revenue.
Over four million people have used it. It tracks more than 600 million cards worth over $1.5 billion in total. And for the first three years, it made five figures a year.
So what changed? One subscription tier, $7.99 a month, launched in late 2024. Within six months revenue had gone up by three orders of magnitude.
They’ve never spent a dollar on advertising. Andreessen Horowitz called. They said no.
Now, your first reaction is probably mine: “That’s a Pokémon fad. The market will crash and so will they.”
Maybe. But look at the hobby underneath it. PSA, the biggest card-grading company, was grading about 15,000 cards a day in 2021. In 2025 it was grading 90,000 a day. Across all the graders, 26.8 million cards were graded last year, up 32% on the year before. On eBay alone, trading card singles did $2.62 billion in sales in 2025. (figures compiled by VoxBooster, with original sources)
These aren’t kids trading at school. These are adults who own thousands of cards, think of them as assets, and have no idea what the pile is worth on any given Tuesday.
That’s the actual product. Not card recognition. Not price data, which is public.
The product is turning a physical hobby into a number that goes up and down, and letting people check it the way they check a stock app.
And once you see it that way, cards are just the first category. People collect watches, whisky, vinyl, Lego, comics, coins, sneakers and vintage guitars with the same intensity, the same shoebox, and the same question. Most of those have nobody doing this properly.
We are going to cover:
How two founders went from selling a mortgage startup to opening $3 Pokémon packs on their lunch break, and why that pack is the whole origin story.
The four tests for a “collection portfolio” business. The fourth is what separates a $7.99 subscription from a free price-lookup tool.
Why they made five figures a year for three years, and the three revenue layers that eventually stacked on top of each other.
The distribution trick: 5,000 users in 24 hours from forum posts, and why collectors are the easiest audience on the internet to reach for free.
11 collectible categories where the same model is open right now, plus 5 where it isn’t.
Where this breaks, including the one dependency that could wipe out the price data overnight.