Former Doorr founders’ new app has amassed four million users in four years, including new advisor Steve Aoki.
Having quit their jobs without a cent of savings, the founders of proptech startup Doorr learned pretty quickly that running a company and raising capital can be quite stressful.
To relieve the pressure that came with flirting with bankruptcy in the late 2010s, the team would go on weekly excursions to 401 Games on Toronto’s Yonge Street to purchase packs of Pokémon trading cards for fun.
On one such trip, the tiny but bustling store set the founders on a new course. Doorr co-founder Adam Hijleh opened a three dollar Pokémon trading card pack and found the hottest commodity of 2019: a Reshiram & Charizard GX Unbroken Bonds from Pokémon’s Sun & Moon collection.
“I remember the store going wild,” Hijleh recounted in an interview with BetaKit alongside fellow Doorr co-founder Muhammad Rashid. “We managed to pull it [after only buying] one pack. It was a very surreal moment.”
Rashid said the card was worth around $150 USD at the time, and is now worth around $600 USD on eBay.
“If you look at us from the outside, we look like degenerates just spending money on Pokémon and stuff like that. Just having fun.”
Muhammad Rashid
Collectr
The team’s card collections continued to grow while they secured seed funding for Doorr and eventually sold the mortgage platform to Finastra in 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there was a boom of interest in the card collecting hobby, especially for Pokémon cards, as people were homebound by lockdowns. A new genre of entertainment emerged in the form of YouTube and Twitch creators, like Logan Paul, opening booster packs of trading cards on livestreamed video. Even Hijleh had his own short-lived YouTube channel to share his collection.
“There was a love of ripping packs with people and [the] genuine reactions,” Hijleh said. “Then, the million-dollar question everybody goes to is ‘How much is this [card] worth?’”
Sick of using spreadsheets, in December 2021, Rashi and Hijleh made an app to track the value of their collection, similar to an investment portfolio but with trading cards instead of stocks. Hijleh said the founders were initially building for themselves, but after some encouragement from friends, decided to launch Collectr for the rest of the hobbying world.
Alongside fellow Doorr co-founder Abbas Ali and an old colleague from Flipp, Mark Hopson, the founding team made a series of posts about their “side gig” on hobby forums. Within 24 hours, they claim they added 5,000 users. Four years later, Collectr has more than four million users worldwide, eight figures of annual recurring revenue (ARR), and DJ Steve Aoki as an advisor to the team, all without spending a cent on advertising.
“If you look at us from the outside, we look like degenerates just spending money on Pokémon and stuff like that. Just having fun,” Rashid said.
The Reshiram & Charizard GX Unbroken Bonds card that Adam Hijleh opened at 401 Games in 2019. Image courtesy Collectr.
Collecting trading cards is an intricate hobby. Cards are introduced to the market through sealed booster packs, so collectors don’t know what they’re going to get when they open (or “rip”) a new pack. A run-of-the-mill Pikachu might be worth anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars, but special editions can feature holographic “foil” or limited edition art that can boost a card’s value considerably, like the one Collectr’s founders obtained.
Collectors often get their cards “graded,” or evaluated by a trusted third-party company for quality and authenticity. A card with a grading of 10 is in mint condition with no signs of wear. The world’s most valuable Pokémon card, a 10-grade holographic Pikachu Illustrator, was purchased by Logan Paul for $5.3 million USD in 2022.
Collectr’s app helps trading card hobbyists keep inventory of all those factors across multiple brands in their collection, including Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh. It also tracks other collectibles, like Funko Pops. Users can search for a trading card or use a camera to add items to their portfolio, as well as share posts about their loot through the app’s social tab. The app is currently tracking over 600 million products worth over $1.5 billion collectively.
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Each card’s value is tracked through integrated affiliate listings on popular online marketplaces like eBay and TCGplayer, which is how Collectr earned a five-figure ARR for most of its lifetime. Collectr runs the largest ad network specifically for collectibles, with over 550 million impressions delivered to its partners. While an app with four million users may seem like the perfect opportunity to launch a competing marketplace, the founders don’t see that as their lane.
“If you want to protect [both] buyer and seller, why not let the experts that have been doing this for so long and do it really well continue to do it?” Hijleh said.
Outside of the affiliate links and ads, Collectr didn’t really have a monetization strategy until eight months ago when it launched its Pro subscription, according to the founders. The $7.99-per-month subscription (in both USD and CAD) boosted the company from five-figure to eight-figure ARR within six months. The subscription gives the app’s power users unlimited card scans, analytics tools that help track profit and loss, access to historical pricing data, home screen widgets, and entries for exclusive giveaways.
“The growth that we’re achieving today is opening up doors far beyond our wildest expectations.”
Muhammad Rashid
The company has already given away $300,000 USD worth of products since launching the subscription, and is planning to give away three first-edition Pokémon trading card packs (worth roughly $6,000 USD each) to commemorate Pro’s one-year anniversary.
Holding up one such sealed foil packet in his hand, Hijleh said, “This is [one of] the first printed packs ever in Pokemon…it feels awesome to be able to give back some of the products that I’ve dreamt of holding, let alone owning.”
Hijleh remarked how Collectr’s organic growth has led to it already becoming a “household name” in the hobbyist space, often referenced in forums and by content creators. One “wild” moment was when the team learned that DJ and music producer Steve Aoki was an avid user, which led to a meeting at a convention and eventually his addition to the team as an advisor.
“He’s a wicked DJ, but I had no idea that the collection that he’s amassed is as large as it is,” Rashid said, recounting how Aoki wanted to log his entire collection of approximately 25,000 trading cards on the app. Rashid said Aoki has “his ear to the ground,” and provides Collectr with live feedback, relationships with card vendors, and opportunities to include other trading card games on the app.
Steve Aoki holding a valuable Pikachu Illustrator. Image courtesy Steve Aoki via X.
Rashid said Collectr has drawn interest from a number of venture capital (VC) firms, including Silicon Valley giant a16z, a “stark contrast” from the team’s fundraising struggles at Doorr. This time, however, the Collectr team isn’t interested in outside capital. The creators want to control their own destiny.
“It’s really nice to have these investors come to us, but I don’t know that they would necessarily add that we haven’t already accomplished,” Rashid said. “The growth that we’re achieving today is opening up doors far beyond our wildest expectations.”
Collectr has only raised a $500,000 friends-and-family round, and Rashid said that was mainly as a courtesy to those who missed out on investing in Doorr. The proceeds of that round still sit in the bank two-and-a-half years later, and now Collectr stands out as the largest app for collecting trading cards in the world. It’s also the only one that’s Canadian, Rashid said, adding that he’s especially proud to build in the country amidst the current political landscape.
Collectr’s founders feel much more “mature” than they were at Doorr, and expressed multiple times that they are fortunate to not need external capital as they build yet another business. Rashid acknowledged that artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how startup math is calculated and creating pressure to operate leaner businesses, but argued that Collectr is doing just fine with limited integration of AI tools.
”We’re an eight-figure ARR company that is doing this with five people and we’ve got four-million-plus users worldwide,” Rashid said. “To do all these things with a low head count is possible today, even if you’re not implementing AI.”
Feature image courtesy Collectr.