If you’re like me, you had a baseball card collection as a kid. Or your kids are now into collecting, selling, and trading.
Sure, you can find the value of these cards in various ways, but a trending app makes it so much easier.
CollX lets you scan the front and back of a card to reveal its value instantly.
It works with all kinds of cards: baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer and wrestling sports cards. It also scans Pokémon, Magic, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, too.
The app was started by a father and son who wanted to easily find the value of their baseball cards. I first told you about the app last year and now it’s a certified hit.
Recently, I met up with Ted Mann, creator of Collx, at Burbank Sportscards in, well, Burbank.
Mann was in town for a big baseball card convention in Ontario.
“[Users] are now all of a sudden using the app to not just catalog their collection but do deals and make money,” explained Mann, who has since quit his day job to focus on CollX full time.
The app uses visual recognition technology to scan the front and back of the card to match it against a database of twenty million cards. Mann says it has 95 percent accuracy.
The app reveals the value of the card based on the ten most recent transactions, mostly from eBay and some other sources.
“We’ve got about 600 thousand users who have scanned 100 million cards,” said Mann.
When the app first started, it was just a way to scan. Now, it’s a full-fledged buying, selling and trading platform.
Mann tells me that $50 million dollars in transactions have happened through the app in the past six months. You can listen to our entire interview here.
“Users started talking to other users, they started doing deals, they started basically finding ways to sell their cards, to make some money and also buy cards, like the cards that they’ve always wanted,” explained Mann.
Mann seemed to know everyone at Burbank Sportscards, including high profile collectors that walked in.
“It ties into everything… obviously I don’t think it’s going anywhere because sports is so big in this country,” said Sharon Chiong about card collecting. Chiong is a high-profile collector that specializes in autographed rookie cards.
“I love buying a card and watching the kids play and you know, it’s kind of like watching stocks go up and down,” said Chiong, who runs BLACKJADEDWOLF in the New York area.
Bottom line: if you had a collection as a kid or want to spark some new interest in collecting cards with your kids, CollX is well worth the free download.
“There are a huge number of people out there that own cards that just don’t know what they’re worth. We’re helping those people figure that out, and in the process, get back into the hobby,” concluded Mann.
