Vesting ⚡

.@sohan_zhang from @catchback_cards on The Vesting Show on spending $470K of its $500K YC funding on cards:

“Even before I started YC, I was like, ‘This is gonna be venture scalable.’ The reason for that is that this type of business has existed in Asia.”

“He was like, ‘Out of the $500K that you guys have, how much of it do you have left in the bank?’ I was like, ‘I have like $30K left.’ This is like week three.”

“He’s like, ‘Where’d you spend the $470K?’ I was like, ‘Dude, I bought cards.’”

“The inventory that we bought during our seed funding, it’s gone up like 3x.”

“I don’t have a 401(k). I just park everything into cards.”

host - @brycent

.@sohan_zhang from @catchback_cards on The Vesting Show on how Catchback makes money from mystery packs:

“We give people an expected value above what they pay for the pack.”

“Let’s say you put in a hundred bucks. On average, you’re gonna get a card that’s worth around $104 or $102.”

“We allow people to create their own mystery packs. That’s the entire point of our company.”

“You can either get that card that you hit shipped to you, or you get a buyback offer of 90%. So every time a pack is opened, we have a margin of 10%.”

host - @brycent

,@sohan_zhang from @catchback_cards on The Vesting Show on the market inefficiencies behind its business model:

Brycent: “If I open a hundred-dollar pack, you can give me prospectively $104 in value and still look to make money on me lifetime?”

Joseph Zhang: “Yes, exactly. And the reason for that is some form of slippage.”

“The industry is a very inefficient industry that basically gets propped up on fees.”

“When you buy and sell a card through eBay, eBay will charge like a 15% fee. That margin of the 15% is basically an expectation that people have when they sell a card off.”

host - @brycent

.@sohan_zhang from @catchback_cards on The Vesting Show on whether Pokémon cards have hit the top:

“There’s no way we are at the top.”

“I guarantee you, in the next two years, it’s gonna be the most growth in this space.”

“A lot of people wanna become vendors. A lot of people wanna make a side hustle buying and selling.”

“I don’t think we’re anywhere near the top.”

host - @brycent