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A sports-card scanner and collection tracker that turns a phone camera into a collector’s pricing and inventory tool.
~15,000 active subscriptions · ~13,000 downloads/month (founder's dashboards, on camera) · $1.5M/year together with sister app Scanemon
“I want to catalog my cards” became a scanner and portfolio app collectors return to as their collections change.
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Card Stock is a mobile collection and valuation app for trading-card collectors. The founder describes a personal pain: he wanted to catalogue his cards, but sorting them physically did not help when he was away from the collection or could not recognize an individual card. The app uses a phone camera to identify cards, surface values, save cards into a collection and follow the collection's value. The reported scale is about 15,000 active subscriptions and $75K monthly recurring revenue, alongside about 13,000 downloads per month. Card Stock began as a solo iOS project in winter 2019; the founder said the path from idea to finished app took about six months including a three-month gap. Friends joined during the early period, and the team later grew to five. The business shows how deep hobby knowledge can point to a narrow utility with repeated use: collectors need to identify, organize and price cards as their collections change. The revenue and operating details are founder-reported in a creator interview, rather than audited financial statements.
For a card scanner, the first customers are easiest to reach where collectors already ask identification and pricing questions: hobby subreddits, local card groups, show floors and store communities. Start by scanning cards for collectors in person and recording the exact moments where the app saves them time.
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Data credibility: Kyle Fowler reads the numbers off his subscription dashboards when Pat Walls asks him to pull them up on Starter Story: about 15,000 active subscriptions, up to about $75K MRR and about 13,000 downloads a month for Card Stock, and about $17K MRR for Scanemon. The on-screen dashboards make this stronger than a verbal claim, but nothing is audited, and churn, pricing and margins are not given. The $1.5M a year is his combined figure for both apps.
The first dollar for a card collection app usually arrives when a collector hits a recurring limit: they have more cards to scan, want ongoing price tracking, or need a complete digital inventory.
For this product, the reinforcing loop is collection utility leading to more scans, which creates richer saved portfolios and gives users a reason to return for updated values.
A card app can spend months improving catalog coverage without seeing obvious growth, especially when early users have different sports, sets and condition expectations. Keep the learning loop small: interview a handful of active collectors weekly, review failed scans, and select one catalog gap to fix at a time.
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