Cardstock · B2C · sports card value scanner
Build the app you wanted for your own hobby when the App Store has none
Grew into ~$75K MRR over six years
Workedvalidationpositioning-niche
What they did
A lifelong card collector wanted to catalog and sort his cards and look them up away from the physical collection. He searched the App Store, found no app for it, and built one himself. He recommends keeping a notes doc of slow, repetitive tasks in your own life and building the most minimal solution.
What happened
Cardstock now ~15K active subscriptions and ~$75K MRR
- Stage
- Pre-launch (Idea)
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Cardstock
All 16 Cardstock tactics- Spend two weeks on keyword research, then put the best terms in your title#1 for 'baseball card scanner' for 2-3 years; ~$9-10K MRR with no marketing
- Film a valuable card, scan it with the app in hand, then reveal its priceFirst one hit 184K views; became the repeatable format behind the TikTok growth
- Pay creators about $1 per 1,000 views to post your slideshow template~7,600 posts in a month for $2,600, about $1 CPM; biggest recent growth driver
- Announce the launch in the same subreddit, linking your earlier idea post12 paid downloads (~$60) on launch day
- Make the app free to download and charge $5 a month instead of $4.99 onceBiggest revenue jump ever; growth took off from the 2021 switch
- Post your app idea in the hobby's subreddit before building it10-15 people said they'd use it; later drove launch downloads
More from this episode
- Cardstock: Give creators TikTok slideshow templates to post and pay them by viewsFounder calls it their biggest success; no numbers given
- Cardstock: Post on Reddit when the app is finishedFirst downloads came almost immediately; no numbers
- Scanémon: Rebuild your working app for a nearby hobby, built in a day with AI$17K MRR and 3,400 subscribers in a year; more new customers a month than the original
- Cardstock: Bring in friends for a three-way revenue split and teach them to codeTeam of three grew to five; revenue from a few hundred a month to ~$1.5M a year