Physical Collectable Market
I have been playing around this idea for many many years now as I am huge collector of many things ranging from baseball cards(back in the 90s mostly) to more recently trains(HO scale etc) and other things. Instead of using excel worksheets which i used in the past, i am curious what other people think about help with a particular genre of collecting with a modern application to drive some of these lists. I have seen a few for comics but they are rather hard to use in my opinion.
Thoughts?
Posting to my own thread but why not. I started to worked on this project over a month ago and apparently a few times in the past as well as I found various excel worksheets listing toy lines in various states.
My first version was way too complex as I was trying to learn React and MongoDB and other tools out of the gate. This was getting super complex and a huge learning curve. I love to learn, however the time to learn these tools would taken too long and discourage me as well.
I did not want to take a complete year 2000 approach with a LAMP stack and creating my own forms and not using CSS. I decided to use Flask/MySQL/BootStrap got my initial deployment which allowed me to build some rapid. Also i decided not to use VI as my editor(mostly) and use a modern development kit being Visual Studio Code. This helped with syntax on things i was not super familiar with.
Hopefully this weekend, I will finish setting up the Load Balancer and VMS and deploy the initial release. I realized that if even no one uses it but me it is still win as I accomplished something that i wanted to do for many years.
The other important lesson here to others who make it this far in my babbling is that it proved to myself that I can still write code and deploy a product which i have not done since 2004. I have a framework that I can use for other products as well now which will allow me to explore other ideas now.
This software for collectors of anything was built by the same engineers who built Thumbtack.com
http://www.collectorcollector.com/
Can you clarify the question? Are you talking about making an app to help collectors...what, manage their collection? If so, I think different niches have vastly different needs. Some collectors of certain things only buy to collect and never sell even a single piece from their collection because they want to enjoy their collection and they don't care about the financial value of what they're collecting. Some collectors only care about the financial value of their collection items and might be constantly buying and selling to turn a profit. I think if you can make a useful, time saving app, fanatical collectors will eat it up and it can quickly become the market leader for that niche.
One of the major challenges for this type of app is the data entry aspect. There are lots of serious collectors who don't write anything down or keep spreadsheets...especially older rich guys who never have to worry about selling any of their collection for money...while younger collectors are more likely to keep track of their collection because they have to sell pieces from time to time to free up cash for living expenses.
I used to collect pocket knives and had a collection of 900 pieces. I did have a minimal spreadsheet with the date, item, purchase price, seller.....but the list was never useful for me because whenever I wanted to sell some pieces, what I paid didn't matter...only the current market value of that particular artist/knife maker is what mattered. Artists gain and lose popularity over time so the artwork prices fluctuate accordingly which makes my record of what I originally paid, useless.
I think it needs to be customized for the market rather then a generic tool. Let us say we pick an 80s toyline for example where there is a known list of items that you are trying to collect. The key would having a list of items for people to select from and add their own comments like in my example i am missing a gun for
The other thing to explore would be to trading with other people as they might see you have a Widget they want and you have listed as available for trade. (Phase 2?)
Maybe i should mock up a prototype of what i thinking to clarify as i am a bit of a visual person myself
I did some research in this space awhile back. It seems that many app for collectors, especially ones with a social media component, only existed in the early 2010s. I'm not sure why they did not catch on.