This month we sat down with three of our most active collectors. I came away with pages of notes and a much better picture of what collecting actually looks like day to day, and each of them pointed at something we need to change:
- The app is a second screen. One collector runs GridCollector on the bottom half of his phone with a live auction on Whatnot on the top half, checking what he’s missing as each card comes up. He has seconds to decide, and the app was built for browsing big, beautiful photos at leisure, so we’re working on a compact view that shows a lot more at a glance.
- The spreadsheet still wins on volume. Another buys across several marketplaces, with an alarm at 10:30 every morning for one of them and another for when auctions are about to close, and once had 354 cards shipped from China in one go (“very affordable and very scary”). He still keeps an Excel sheet he says he can’t do without, because the app isn’t built for how he buys yet. Logging cards one at a time doesn’t work for a haul that size (he suggested photographing a whole binder page at once), and cards bought on streams can take a week to arrive, so they need somewhere to live in the meantime too.
- Discovery isn’t just for beginners. We had assumed browsing the catalogue mattered most for newer collectors finding their feet, but halfway through a demo, one of the most seasoned collectors we’ve spoken to found about 50 base cards he hadn’t realised he was missing. “This makes life very easy for the missing part,” he said. So discovery needs to work just as well for someone with thousands of cards as for someone with ten.
Each of these could be a feature on its own, but together they’re pointing at a bigger rethink of how the app is put together. We’ll tackle that next month.