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If you collect any kind of things, I want to pick your brain.

Short back story -- my wife and daughters are all collectors. I've financed the collection of thousands of things over the better part of the past 20 years. One of the issues that raises is keeping track of what they have. Since I'm a developer, it only made sense to build something.

That said I'm working on a new endeavor to allow them to keep track of what they have, share it, show it off, talk about it, and yes, buy/sell/trade too.

I know their pain points and how to categorize their collections, but I'd really love to talk to other people who collect other types of things. Find out if what I'm doing is flexible enough for their hobby/community/etc.

So if you don't mind to spare some time and share your collecting passion with me, I'm all ears. My DMs are open on Twitter -- @phpdreams. Thanks!

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    Collector of books here (first editions, signed copies, rare, etc). I built ShelfProud.com many years ago (I sold it later to a random guy online, ha). It was exactly what you describe for book collectors: show, learn, sell, etc.
    There are two problems:

    1. Loading all the collection when you sign up. No one wants to spend hours and there is no easy way at all. Real collectors have very rare stuff, nothing that you can get from a database. For book collectors you'd say "ISBN", well, ISBN doesn't say if it's a first printing (only first edition), if it's signed, remarked, etc.
    2. Collectors want to show it to everybody, not only other collectors. So they will be much better creating a Instagram account and sharing their stuff in there, getting followers, becoming an influencer, etc.
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      Thanks for your insight. There are a handful of itches we're trying to scratch with this. Most of the collectors we interact with have hundreds to thousands of items. Remembering what you have and don't have can be hard. It's even worse when family wants to get you something but have no idea if you already have it. So an easy way to give access to that list to your sister/mom/child/etc. that they can search and get an answer is helpful.

      Many people have many thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars invested in their collections. Being able to report on what you have, what it's worth, photos, where it's stored, etc. is valuable should you have to file an insurance claim on it.

      Lastly, people are getting well sick and tired of eBay, Mercari, Etsy, Marketplace etc. As they keep changing rules, charging more, limiting payment methods, etc. We won't be doing any transactional pricing at all. Instead different account tiers will allow a maximum number of items listed for sale at a time from the casual user selling duplicates to the person who makes part of their living buying and selling. Just flat rate pricing based on the number of sale slots.

      At least that's the plan(s) at the moment...as always when building, details are subject to change.

      Oh, another thing that came to mind. My girls collect Breyer model horses. Facebook's "animal rights" AI filters are so strict that people often have to add "PLASTIC MODEL -- NOT REAL HORSE" type notices to pics/posts just to list up what they find. It's certainly frustrating. But yeah.

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    I have actually started a similar project but stopped a few months ago as I was spending too much time building the collection lists for people rather than working on bugs. I am a huge collector of way too many times and most people use excel for tracking but there are limitation on that approach.

    Email me at marv "@" linuxgames.com to talk more

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      Just sent you an email Marv. Thanks!

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    I don't particularly "collect" – though my partner probably disagrees – but rather keep "inventory." Mostly electronics components for a wide range of electronics projects, from motors to IC's and anything in between. I don't need to show it off, but keeping track of what I have and where I have it has been challenging. In the end, I built my own inventory tracking system, hooked up to a label printer that prints labels with item information and a QR code to a page with more details.

    Probably out of scope for what you're building (or: most of your product would be useless in this use case), but my 2¢ anyway :)

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      No, thanks for the feedback Ray. Learning what people have kludged together on their own is helpful too. The more understanding I can get of the pain points, the better prepared we are to address them. There are TONS of people using notebooks, Excel/gSheets, etc. to try and keep track, but it's clunky at best, and certainly not easily ingestible to share with others. That's been a large part of the drive.

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