I have broken this list out by the no regrets list, subscriptions to services and gifts for children. None of these other than my own website, Midlife Crisis Cards contacted me or paid to be included on this list. The list is genuine and frankly, is a list that I find interesting and would appreciate any gift off of.

The No Regrets List

Whether you are a sports card lover yourself or have no idea what the difference is between Topps and Panini, this list should be super helpful to you as you plan out your 2020 holiday season.

Supplies for sports card collectors are always in need. You can consider a Pastime Marketplace Graded Card Case, which is actually a case that I use here at Midlife Crisis Cards. I store my top graded cards in the case and it makes them extremely transportable to shows, friends homes, etc.

You can never go wrong with getting extra Resealable Graded Card Sleeves (BCW), Standard 3x4 Plastic Top Loaders (BCW), or Cardboard Gold Card Savers (Amazon). These are workhorses of the card protection world. They are also relatively inexpensive and you can purchase all three. You honestly cannot go wrong with any of these three.

For those who have space to display their cards, you could pick up an Oak Storage Box for Sports Cards (Etsy), a Wood Card Stand for Magnetic One Touch Cases (Etsy) or a Collector Card Wall Display (Michaels). I have personally been eyeing that Oak Storage Box and will most likely pick up a couple around my home office.

Last in this section are some fun t-shirts of new and old sports cards brands and graphics: Topps Baseball Card T-Shirt (Redbubble) and Vintage Sports Card T-Shirts (Homage). These are just two examples of sports card clothing but there are dozens of examples if you search online. So many cool shirts and hats around the sports card trade.

Surprise With a Subscription

There are some websites that provide utility to card collectors. They help us understand population reports, pricing of cards, and provide additional information to help card collectors make better decisions. A unique holiday gift would be to surprise your family or friend with a monthly or yearly subscription to one of these sites:

CardLadder: provides pricing information and market cap value reports on 10,000+ cards. I personally use CardLadder and find their charting and information valuable.

Sports Card Investor / Market Movers: the software is called Market Movers and it’s by Sports Card Investor. Similar to above, I am a paying customer and I use it to track cards in my collection. Market Movers is fairly robust, very well featured, and well liked by many.

Beckett: The most well known magazine er, website. Any hobbyist has been subscribing to Beckett as a child but may not still subscribe today. This could be a fun historical subscription to get. Additionally, it could be cool to go on eBay and find some old issues of Beckett Magazine and wrap them up in a gift for the holiday season.

Gifts for Children

I have children and they have recently gotten into card collecting. I created a specific product for new card collecting children called The Cardboard Box for Kids. This box includes 20 cards of the top NBA players, 20 penny sleeves and 5 plastic top loaders. This box has everything a budding collector needs in order to begin collecting. The penny sleeves and plastic top loaders will teach the child how to care and keep their cards safe which is a big part of the hobby. Additionally, we have starter packs that can be purchased in quantities that are all big name players. The perfect gift for kids ages 5–15 who are starting to collect sports cards. For 15% off the kids box or starter packs, use “MediumKids” at checkout.

The BIG Idea for a Sports Card Fan

Here’s a big idea for any sports card fan… a hotel reservation for the National 2021 Convention in Chicago. The National is the “super bowl” for sports card collectors. Roughly 15–20,000 card collectors coming from all over the world descend upon a convention center for three to four days and attend seminars, walk the trade show flow, buy a ton of cards in the exhibit halls, trade with each other, etc. An incredible gift would be a hotel room or registration to The National. Assuming no Covid-19 issues, the 2021 National show will be held in Chicago.

I hope this was helpful. Sports cards are all the rage this year and this guide should be helpful as you think about what to get your family and friends for the holidays. Stay safe and be well. Happy (early) holidays.

As an investor, I have made two angel investments in the space so far, and one of them recently publicly launched, called Loupe. It is a live streaming platform that enables breakers and beyond a 10x better experience than what currently exists in the market. The other investment is still private and should launch MVP in the next 100 days or so. Since I began writing here on Medium about the space, ESPN, BI, and others have covered it extensively.

Putting aside my passion for the hobby, I love the sports card industry from a business perspective because it’s ripe for evolution. I have highlighted the digital transformation opportunities and the market map in previous posts. I talked about them on the Bench Clear Media podcast.

While I called this a $1B+ opportunity in an earlier post, it’s a minimum market of $8B+. As I have met with more and more companies and have further peeled back the onion, the space is more extensive than I had expected. The card manufacturers alone are doing roughly $1.25B+, and the secondary market is 4–8x that number. Add in distribution, licensing, marketplaces, storage, breakers, and beyond… you can easily see your way to a large and investable market.

In a recent podcast with Ty of Breaker Culture, I talked about why I believe the sports card market saw such recent momentum. I boiled some of my thoughts down into the graphic below. There is no single reason why the sports card market exploded, particularly basketball, but there are a handful of influences that drove the market to recent highs when added together. We have seen the high, and we are now in a bit of a depressed market, but many folks like myself are making quiet purchases ahead of the upcoming basketball season.

In this post, I’d like to focus on areas that I believe are ripe for investment within the sports card sector.

Some may wonder why I would be making this public; I learned earlier in my career to test my hypotheses out loud, and by making these thoughts public, I hope to attract the startups and companies in these hot sectors to message me. Using this framework, I have made lots of investments and relationships over my career, and it’s been more beneficial than not.

Before you can dive into investment areas, you should learn how the sector works. Here is a graphic showing how sports cards go from manufacturers (e.g. Panini, Upper Deck, Topps, Leaf, etc) to you, the collector. It’s super simple, but it boils down nicely. Players and teams are licensed from the leagues and players associations, cards are manufactured (I learned that there is a huge card manufacturing region in Texas), go to national and regional distributors who then work either hobby shops or large accounts like Walmart to stock the cards. Then we, the customers, get to purchase the cards. The diagram makes it easy to understand.

Once the customer has the card… an entire world opens up for them. The cards may get sent into grading services such as PSA, BGS, and SGC, increasing their market value. The owner may then choose to put the card up for sale on a marketplace such as eBay, StockX, Comc, Starstock, Mercari, MySlabs, SlabsandSigs. Or the owner may try selling the card directly on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any myriad of sources. And there are a ton of other things that a card owner may do with their cards. I list a lot of these out here.

As an early-stage investor, here are some areas that are ripe for investment. I believe this entire category is starved of institutional capital that could build technology platforms that tremendously improve customer experience. Necessity has breaded creativity, and that’s held true for the category but imagine some solid capital investment, real product management, platforms built, and breakthrough user experience will go a long way in #thehobby. Yes, please.

Grading & Assessments: There are three prominent card grading companies in the sector today: PSA, Beckett, and SGC. PSA is the only publicly traded company in the space, and its public financials show record numbers for card grading. Rumor has it that they have 1–3M cards in the backlog and have been hiring like crazy for sports card appraisers. I am a fan of all of these companies as they help add value to the ecosystem by creating a sense of trust around a card’s quality. These companies are grading cards the same way they did back 30 years ago… a process driven by humans. The human process takes a ton of time (wait times are incredibly long right now), prone to mistakes, and, therefore, plenty of conspiracy theories. In a digital first world, I would imagine that you can build some pretty solid scanning technologies that can assess a card without having to send in, do it in under 30 seconds, and build a record of a card that will ultimately change hands a few times in its life. In theory, can open up an entire market of trusted and assessed raw card sales. I know of a couple of companies going hard at this space and would love to meet others.

Business Models: per card fee (current market conditions), subscription, or potentially SaaS by providing technology to marketplaces, sports card shops, etc and allowing them to facilitate the grading.

The hard part: how do you build a brand that competes with the incumbents? Grading is all about trust and safety and usually those brands are built over time.

Collection Management Software: This is probably one of the largest areas that I see an opportunity for innovation. If you collect cards, you likely have more than a few hundred cards. Understanding what you have, their market value and the ability to quickly list these cards on a sales platform is purely a dream these days. Some tools like Card Ladder and Market Movers help you understand the value of a card, but there is no easy end to end software that allows a collector to manage his or her collection. I recently polled my sports card Instagram following, and the most frequent answer to what people use to manage their collection is “Excel” or “Google Sheets.” I fall into the Google Sheets camp, but I built my own system that uses the eBay API to find the market value of each of my cards. I believe there is an opportunity to build a true collection management platform that not only helps understand market value but helps you catalog your cards, make proactive recommendations, helps you understand how and what to bring to card shows, which to sell online, etc. There is so much white space to innovate here.

Business models: SaaS most likely. This actually is a really good Software as a Service business.

The hard part: How do you onboard collections in the hundreds and thousands of cards easily? How do amass such a broad and deep collection of training data to help your software recognize cards?

Trusted Marketplaces: There are no less than a half dozen sports card marketplaces today: eBay, Starstock, Comc, Mercari, StockX, MySlabs, Slabs and Sigs, and others popping up. I have bought well over $50,000 on cards in these marketplaces and was very surprised over the lack of trust and uniformity. Additionally, on Facebook Groups, Discord Servers for cards, Instagram sales, the number of dollars changing hands without escrow, or any trust-based system frankly scares me. To get a sense of this, check out this video on the Underworld of Sports Cards. Because these issues exist, there is a real opportunity to build a well-lit marketplace or platform that builds trust, verification, and safety into the entire card sector. I do not know anything more than you, but I imagine eBay could extend their crackdown on sneakers into the sports card space.

Business models: The typical marketplace models of % fee per transaction. For sellers, there are proven marketplaces models of charging for basic and enhanced listings.

The hard part: Marketplaces are tricky to achieve supply and demand at scale. Additionally, how do you build in the trust factors that would make your marketplace special?

Alternative Cards: Something is amazing about holding a piece of cardboard in your hands and admiring its beauty. I have been doing this for basketball, baseball, football, and hockey cards. I see other opportunities for sports cards: going after the eSports world would be low hanging fruit. I imagine you can broaden that to include streamers (e.g. Mr. Beast) and beyond. I see lots of excitement in the card community around games like Pokemon and MTG; but historical entertainment cards like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have picked up a bit too. While many of these are not “sports” cards, they are collectible cards that could have quite a bit of following.

Business models: You could go direct and sell the individual cards, packs, and wax by the case, or can stand up a competing manufacturer and produce these cards for others.

The hard part: Licensing good and aspirational talent, initial distribution at scale.

Card Funds: An area that has been gaining some traction and attention are the sports card funds. This is where you can invest $250,000+ into a fund that has been setup to buy sports cards and wax that is supposed to appreciate such as Michael Jordan and Lebron James rookie cards. An example of this type of fund is the Attic Investments, LLC Wax Fund. There are other nonpublic funds being marketed right now and I am not at liberty to include them here but if you are interested, feel free to reach out and I can point you in the right direction. I do think that this is an investible area and there could be some technology built that would enable a more effective Chief Investment Officer for these funds.

Business models: All the funds that I have seen so far are on the 2/20 model or similar. 2% management fee and 20% of the carry. Some funds may command more of a premium. This is typical in the “fund” world so it should not be hard introducing this model.

The hard part: A true belief in $250,000 minimum investment into rare or not so rare sports cards. Educating the investor market is not easy outside of the investors who also collect already.

So those are some investable areas that get me excited. I hope they get you excited as well. If you are going to study the space further, you should start by looking at the below updated market map and seeing how all of the companies play together. keep in mind that this market map is purely directional and does not include every single company in each category. As you dive in, you hopefully will become even more fascinated with #thehobby.

I am always open to chatting with entrepreneurs and companies innovating in the sports card industry. If you are someone who is or knows someone who may be, please do not hesitate to reach out. I can be found on Instagram @midlifecrisiscards or Twitter @dherman76. Thank you for your time.

I cannot promise you I have covered everyone, but I have created a Sports Card Market Map as I have begun to dive back into the hobby after a 30-year hiatus.

My intention of diving back into the hobby is pure: I love sports, and I used to collect cards as a kid. Now I have children of the age that can appreciate cards, I am ready to share my passion with them. My previously told story is here.

Over the past few months, I have spent time talking to dozens of collectors and innovators, buying from hundreds of others on Amazon, eBay, Mercari, StockX, Comc, MySlabs, Discord servers, and visited plenty of hobby shops. This knowledge has unearthed investment ideas and opportunities, and this Market Map has helped me comprehend the overall space. Hopefully, it helps you as a potential public or private investor, hobbyist, speculator, collector, or anyone appreciating the hobby.

Note that the sports card market map is not perfect or comprehensive for every company in the sports card industry. Including all companies would be near impossible. If I did leave you or your company out, please fill out this form and ping me on Twitter (@dherman76 @midlifecrisisc1) or Insta (@midlifecrisiscards) and let me know so I can update the market map. Note, no company paid to be part of this market map, and most have no idea I was putting this out. If you’d like to be removed, please ping me via Twitter/Insta, and I’ll gladly remove you.

Market Map Categories (in no particular order):

Podcasts: There is no lack of podcasts or videos about sports cards. The majority of these are discussing “the next big card” or short term speculating/pricing information. GaryVee has been a massive proponent of the sector, and his podcasts generate huge numbers. What’s been nice is to see the contrast between the professionally produced videos and the hobbyist. Both are great and have a place in my learning of the space.

Grading: The opposite of a raw card is a graded card. A graded card can be any card that has been assessed, verified, and documented by a 3rd party and given a (usually) 1–10 value, 10 GEM-MINT being the highest. The majority of sports card grading is being done by one of three companies today, PSA, BGS, and SGC. I see tremendous opportunity to disrupt these grading companies as they are very subjective, human-driven, and leverage very little innovation. There is little they do today that they could not have done 30 years ago when I was a kid in the hobby. Apparently, others think so too.

Marketplaces: I always knew eBay was the leading marketplace, but there have been other marketplaces like Mercari, Etsy, Amazon, and StockX that have gotten into the card game. Etsy feels too *off* to me for being part of this ecosystem, but you can find sports cards on their platform. There have been vertical marketplaces such as Check Out My Collectibles (COMC), MySlabs, PWCC that have launched and have been successful. New vertical platforms are emerging soon.

Pricing Platforms: One of the most challenging questions to answer is the one around, “How much is my collection worth?” This is hard because most people have hundreds, if not thousands of cards in their collection, and it’s been challenging to understand the market value for every single card. Some of the better and more polished tools only track a subset of cards. Other pricing platforms try and find the most accurate data. Way-back-when I used a monthly magazine from Beckett to help me understand pricing. We have now taken a big step forward, but we still have a very long way to go.

News/Research: As this sector matures and has well over $1B in committed capital, research and news platforms are entirely focused on sports cards and collectibles. Altan Insights is tracking the fractional ownership market and providing information around market caps, recent IPO/auction info, etc. This section is early days and can get much more quantitative in their analysis… which undoubtedly will happen as the market matures.

Fractional Ownership Platforms: This is probably the hottest sector on the market map right now, as it’s perhaps one of the top innovations. Borrowing the fractional ownership playbook from other sectors, we now can own a share in a sports card such as the 1953 Mickey Mantle. There has been a lot of recent press and attention to this sub-sector because of new companies and fresh funding. The big question to me is whether the SEC gets involved in this subsector and find a way to regulate it — if it should be regulated.

Insurance: Cards can cost 10c but can also cost $10M. Many of today’s highly coveted sports cards are in the $1,000+ range each. The value of cardboard sitting in one’s home could be a security issue, and therefore, we now have sports card insurance. Yes, insurance for your sports card collection. Some of the premium insurance companies like Chubb have had products for this sector for years, but there are new upstarts like Wax.

Blockchain: There is an entire sports card industry built as “digital cards,” and many sit on the blockchain. These are cards you will never touch (as cardboard), but you will be able to view using your digital devices. Some of these cards are trading at $30,000+. You can read more about digital cards here.

Card Manufacturers: Since I have returned to the sector, there has been a ton of M&A of the sports card brands and manufacturers. Most of the consolidation has occurred because sports leagues have limited their licenses for sports cards and are fairly exclusive now. In the US, Panini and Topps are the two top manufacturers for our major sports. There are other manufacturers, but they are less mainstream. Many of the beloved brands of old sit under those companies as they have gobbled them up over time.

Hardware: There is plenty of hardware in the sports card category. This sub-sector includes penny sleeves, plastic top loaders, magnetic cases, cardboard storage boxes, graded card cases, break mats, and more. There are some well-known companies in this space that must capture the majority of the dollars and quite a few on the long tail.

Social Platforms: Many of the well known social platforms have large sports card followings and groups. Facebook has a ton of sports card groups, which I wrote about in my previous article. I am active on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Discord. Blowout Forums is another great messageboard and has a very engaged audience.

Group Grading Submissions: When you submit to PSA or BGS to get your cards graded, you can submit directly or go through a group. The group grading submission companies value prop is that they lower the grading price per card, and they can supposedly get faster turn around times. Some group grading submission companies also pre-check your cards and evaluate ahead of sending in to save costs. I currently have a 50 card submission in with KK Sportscards right now and have about 150 additional cards to get sent out and graded soon.

Breakers: I’ve enjoyed both online breaking and group breaks. When you go onto a social platform like YouTube, Twitch, or Instagram, you can participate in a box or case break. More on that in my previous article. There are some well-known breakers out there, and the goal is to find someone you trust as you do not want them skimming your cards.

Seller Tools: This category is for all of the tools that help us manage, track, price, and sell our inventory. There also some tools that help us buy our stock. A collector or seller needs these tools when doing things in bulk, which is fairly often for this category. Most tools are built around the eBay ecosystem, but others are starting to branch out into others.

Hobby Shops: Exactly as it sounds, these are retail shops that you may visit during the week or on weekends and may sell online. You may have a handful around your town. It’s impossible to list them all, but I tried to list the shops with a strong online presence. I’m a big fan of Dave & Adam’s Card World and anxiously awaiting what Dan Fleyshman opens up in Los Angeles.

As mentioned, this list is not comprehensive but rather a solid starting point. If you’d like to have your company or name added to this list, please fill out this form. I will not include every company in each infographic, but I will do my best.

In my next post, I will explore some areas that I think are ripe for innovation and evolution.

The Sports Card Market Is At An All-Time High; Let Me Explain What I’ve Learned Through the Lens of Digital Innovation

It all started roughly 30 years ago when I began to receive baseball, hockey, and basketball cards as gifts for my birthday. Back then, the card packs we would receive had sticks of gum in them that we had no idea who touched or added… but boy, did they taste good.

A few friends got into sports cards too, and together, we would go to the Westchester County Center every so often and attend a sports card show. At the time, we were kids with pocket money walking around the mostly adult cottage industry of sportscard collecting. Buying a $3 card at the convention center was pure adrenaline, and every so often, we’d buy a full set or box and come home to open it.

We probably made every mistake a rookie card collector could. We opened everything. We touched everything. We sleeved very little. Take care of edges? Oops. The double card in plastic sleeve pages. Yup. Store cards with rubber bands around them? Absolutely.

But, we had fun, and I would not trade that for anything.

I’d like to say that I started to learn “business” from reading the Becket magazine that I would receive each month in the mail. This magazine lists card prices of recent sales and highlighted cards that had high and low volume. I never knew how they got the information, and my parents always reminded me that cards are only worth what someone will actually pay you, regardless of whatever Becket says. I had a few cards worth $1, $2, $3… and I was over the moon.

Fast forward to today… 30+ years later. I’d all but forgotten about my cards. I bought my son a few packs last year and started to get the itch. I recalled my conversations with entrepreneur friends Nat and GaryV about their collections and inspired me to get back in.

November and December 2019 was when I started to make some “real” purchases. I also dove back in the market during a ski trip in January 2020… those evenings were when I purchased multiple Lebron James eTopps and some 2018 Luka rookie cards. I didn’t do much else until June 2020, just 85 days ago. Since then, it’s been game on. The “good cards” in the collection now number close to 900 and they are all available here if anyone is interested.

Today’s card market is such a transformation of what I remembered way back when. The Westchester County Center exhibitions still exist, but the digital experience is absolutely incredible these days, and collecting and/or investing is no longer solitary, a community now exists 24/7 online.

Do you know what happens on Instagram, YouTube Live, or Twitch after 9pm EST? Do you know what happens on the multitudes of message boards like Blowoutforums each day? Or the dark web of Discord and all of the card related chat rooms?

Card collecting has taken off. That is an understatement. If you do a Google Trends search, sports card collecting is seeing a significant resurgence.

Many smart people have thoughts as to why now is an all-time high in the card market. Some of those thoughts are:

1/ The stimulus checks are going into the sports card market,

2/ People have more time at home to browse for a variety of reasons, therefor, card collecting is an area that they are spending more time in,

3/ There have been 100–300% price appreciation in cards recently, and it’s hard not to make money. So people have dove into the industry with the hopes to make quick profits,

4/ People with large followings like GaryV and Darren Rovell (the cooler Darren) have openly discussed the card market and have introduced people who might have never experienced it or forgotten about it,

5/ The internet has brought exponential amounts of buyers and sellers together from across the world,

6/ More comfort in alternate asset classes,

7/ Sports gambling was relatively quiet for a while so sport card games offer up an opportunity,

… and clearly, there are many more reasons

To give you a sense of size and scale, a Mike Trout 2009 Bowman Chrome SuperFractor just sold for $3.84M. He’s still an active player in Major League Baseball. You might recall that Honus Wagner, another baseball player, was the previous high sale… at $3.12M. A bunch of Lebron James just sold for well north of $1M, and Luka Doncic, an active NBA player on the Dallas Mavericks in his second season, now has routinely six-figure cards on the market.

What is most interesting to me about this is how digital innovation has penetrated this entire hobby, which is now end to end digital.

I study, strategize, invest, and execute digital innovation at work and have been super impressed at the creativity occurring within the sports card sector.

Acquisition of cards, packs, and boxes (aka wax) has become more accessible (but expensive) than ever. You can go to the mega marketplaces like eBay, groups on Facebook, vertical marketplaces like Comc or StockX, boards like Blowoutforums, live platforms like Instagram Pullwax Marketplace, follow the 5dollarcard account, or the many underground chat servers such as SportsCardInvestor on Discord. Or, of course, you can go to your local Walmart or local hobby store (Baystate Cards for me) but most likely will find that Walmart has been wiped clean by sports card investors and speculators. Note, I went to my local Walmart recently, and since it was not a megastore, it did not carry sports cards. Who knew?

Social + Following: Many folks have set up Instagram accounts for their sports card collections, including me: @midlifecrisiscards. I even have set up a simple Google Sheet that lists my collection for prospective buyers. On Instagram, YouTube Live, Twitch, and possibly other platforms, you will find many ways to participate in buying cards, packs, and boxes. Facebook Groups has a bunch of solid sports card groups including Baseball Card Trading, The Alternate Live Auction for All Sports, Sports Cards Buy Sell by Case Breaks, and Baseball, Football, and Basketball Card — Buy, Sell, and Trade Auction House.

In order to understand the options available to you as a speculator or collector, you must understand the terminology. While this is not fully comprehensive, it’s a solid list of digital innovation at its core with a bunch of additional ingenuity.

Box Break: Multiple people split the cost of a box(s) of cards, and the hits (cards) are divided up amongst people in the break based upon which sports teams they select when signing up for the break. For instance, there are 30 NBA teams, and if the break contains 10 slots, there will be 3 teams per slot. Sometimes, you pick your own team (PYT) or other times, it’s randomly assigned using Random.org. The randomization will usually be done live via video and chat so everyone in the break can watch and validate the spot/team they receive. Some breaks allow you to choose more than one team. Some breaks also treat different teams as different buy-ins. Meaning, to select the 2019 Heat will cost more than picking the 2019 Cavaliers. Box breaks are an excellent way to get many players from a limited number of teams and lead to some big hits. Box breaks range in price based on the actual cost of the box. Usually, within 24–72 hours, your cards will be mailed to you in sleeves and top loaders, depending on what you hit from the box. You can watch this video to learn more about how a group break works.

Razz: essentially a lottery. For instance, a 2003 Lebron James eTopps rookie card has a street value of say $750. There will be 10 spots in the lottery though there could be any number of spots. Each spot costs $75 to participate. The organizer of the Razz will get the $750 of street value based on 10 spots * $75 to participate. You sign up for a spot #, and then the organizer uses Random.org once the Razz is filled (all spots are taken) and rolls dice to determine how many randomizations will be used. The winner is in the #1 spot, after all, randomizations are selected. This is a game of chance, and I’ve found this to be a quick way to lose some money :) You can watch this video to learn more about how Razz works.

Pick & Pulls: you can go on Instagram Live each night and find accounts like @daddy_rips, @shortprintpulls offering you the ability to purchase a pack (or box) of cards, and they will rip it open live on Insta and show you what hits you have. Or for pulls, they have say 50 cards laid out and charge $3 per pull. You purchase say $15 worth of pulls (5) and tell them which card numbers you want. They will then go through and show you which cards you “pull,” which then become your cards. You will then receive them in the mail shortly after.

Repacks: if you trust your source, you can purchase Repacks, or cards that have been repackaged together to create a new pack. You can see a solid example here from @pullwax.

If you log onto Instagram after 9p EST and tap thru the live feeds of sports card accounts, you can join the live breaks, razzes, pulls, etc. You can learn a lot by watching — kinda like going to the casino and standing aside from the craps table before you dive into playing.

Organization: Now, once you have your cards, you probably want to price check and keep them organized. There have been a few recent tools that have hit the market, such as Market Movers by SportsCardInvestor and the forthcoming release of Slabstox. There’s also a pretty nifty Excel sheet template created by @balxoriolesx_sports_cards.

The hobby is full swing with digital penetrating both the front end and back end of the market.

But beware, markets work in cycles and expect there to be some pullback in the next year or two. The transient money will run, and prices will come down a bit. Those are critical buying times within the market, and I look forward to that.

The above chart comes from a DailyFX post about financial market cycle phases. I believe that history repeats itself and the financial markets are indicative of other markets as well. Not a perfect parallel but similar. The smarter investors will keep this in mind. In talking to some smart investors and collectors, they have mostly sat on the side of this bull market and will dive back in when it dips. I am not saying that is good or bad, just trying to provide some context.

For those who want a few tips on collecting, take a peek at these few articles.

Some Instagram accounts that I have found awesome to follow:

Basketballcardguy

Chris_hoj

Oli.cards

Pullwax

Natsturner_cards

Laytonsportscards

Platinumcardbreaks

Newenglandpieces

Southtexasbreaks

Bigboydsportscards

Hopefully, one day I’ll run into you at The National, the world’s largest sports card show. Until then, follow me on Instagram @midlifecrisiscards or @dherman76 on Twitter, and let’s chat. For those who want to talk about the digital innovation of the industry, let’s geek out.

Put simply: scarcity breeds wantedness.

• Yeezy is a sneaker collaboration between Kanye West and a handful of sneaker brands, including but not limited to Adidas and Nike.
• Topps Chrome is a type of collectible card and is one of the most sought after rookie cards for Lebron James.
• Supreme is an American skateboarding shop and clothing brand established in NYC.

Wantedness creates opportunities for the PPC framework: product, partnerships, and community, as mentioned in Operating Partner #142 (reposted here on Medium).

Have you seen the demand for Yeezy sneakers? Check out Yeezy Mafia or Yeezy Supply. What does Yeezy get right? The product. They understand that if they create multiple colorways but limited inventory per SKU, they could make it seem like there are a ton of Yeezy products. The product is comfortable but in no way is it remarkable or groundbreaking… plenty of other sneakers are comfortable too.

It was no secret that Lebron James was going to be an all-star caliber athlete. He came up through high school with more fanfare than most NBA players get in their entire career. Topps knew they had to do something special when making the Lebron James rookie card and certainly did… as of this writing, a PSA 10 (highest rated) rookie card is going for $6,122 with 25 bids (and 152 watchers), and there are plenty of others that are similar.

Supreme is one of the most interesting to me as it is limited edition clothing that gets knocked off everywhere. Their website looks like it’s from the mid-1990s with limited and wonky e-commerce functionality where almost everything seems to be sold-out at any given time.

Yeezy and Supreme have leveraged scarcity exceptionally well to play into wantedness. Topps Chrome did so as well, though they had a running start as they knew Lebron James was going to be very good.

The Internet is the perfect Medium for these products, especially in this InstaTok world we live in where we as consumers radiate some of the seven deadly sins daily. People see these products on Instagram, TikTok, in real-life, and know exactly what they are. It’s only a matter of time until Yeezy’s show up as a virtual good in Fortnite.

In a world where everything is a photo or video, these brands hold real wantedness value. Whether this is good or bad for society is an argument to be made for another day.

I wonder what Prada and Hermes would have been like in their early rise in popularity had the Internet been around. There are roughly 5M+ posts of the Birkin… not bad for one of the most prized handbags of all-time.

I believe that the PPC model works exceptionally well with scarce products: whether natural or artificial scarcity.

So how do you think about building scarcity into YOUR products?

This is a function of product planning and customer experience. An intertwined team of product + CX will most likely get you there. CX will cover off on partnerships and community too. Kanye was not able to create his own sneaker… he had to partner with a few other major sneaker manufacturers to trade off each other’s equity. Had he tried himself, he would have had the Starbury on his hands.

If you are building a product without partnerships or community in mind… stop. If you are in the consumer space, or b2b, scarcity helps as evident above.

While you may be reading this and saying “well, I’m a b2b marketer, this does not make sense for me”…

This absolutely should make sense for you. Do you have a community around your product or service? Think Slack community. The Notion community. The Trade Desk’s Edge Academy for programmatic advertising skills. The list goes on.

As for scarcity for b2b; why not build a feature that gets greenlit on a very limited basis based on customer value or longevity? Just an idea…

This post originally appeared in The Operating Partner, a weekly newsletter that is written by Darren Herman. If you are interested in subscribing, you can subscribe here.

If you were to name three extremely hot consumer brands today, you might very well select Fortnite (Epic Games), 100 Thieves, and MSCHF. Each of these brands has a loyal and passionate community and leverages a different playbook than what you might typically see from other consumer marketers.

For those unfamiliar:

• Fortnite is a video game, entertainment platform, and social community that has amassed hundreds of millions of players. Just last week, Fortnite hosted a Travis Scott concert, and there were over 12M concurrent viewers.
• 100 Thieves is a “premium lifestyle brand and gaming organization.” 100 Thieves is as famous for winning eSports tournaments as it is for its clothing drops. Each member of its gaming squad is an influencer in their own right and they produce a ton of content.
• MSCHF started as a marketing agency and now creates product drops that sell out in minutes. Earlier this week, it cut up a $30,000 Damien Hirst dot print and sold each dot individually… and sold out faster than I could get my hands on one.

When I look at these brands and their success so far, I see them doing three things exceptionally well: product, partnerships, and community. I term this framework, PPC.

Product: each of these three companies has a product that feels premium, exclusive, and ridiculously social. Their product is made to travel the speed of the Internet and frankly, kinda sucks when alone. The more social the product is, the better the engagement. They all know the value of content… and have trained their users and viewers that the content will not stick around forever so scarcity is built directly into the model.

Partnerships: each of these companies uses the term “drop.” Their products drop usually when a partnership is announced or they are ready to release something to sell. They recognize that they alone have brand equity value but the value of another brand teamed up with their own is even more valuable. Fortnite x Deadpool, 100 Thieves x Stockx, and MSCHF x Inri Air Max are all examples of partnerships. They also all invest in business development, an underappreciated role in many marketing departments. BD is born out of the necessity of being scrappy and these organizations have mastered the craft.

Community: I never understood how powerful a community could really be until I spent time at Mozilla/Firefox. Each of these three companies has built communities that want to hear from them, wear their brands, and want to connect both online and offline. The multiplier effect of the community is tremendous — and enables these companies to sell products quickly and build deeper relationships with their fans.

Here are some useful articles about how these brands approach marketing and business strategy:

• CampaignLive article on MSCHF founder, Gabriel Whaley
• Business Insider article profiling how MSCHF sells out products in minutes
• NY Times profile on MSCHF, and it’s ten employees
• 5 marketing strategies we can learn from Fortnite
• The genius of Fortnite’s business strategy
• Forbes article on how Fortnite is changing YouTube
• Dexerto’s essay on 100 Thieves success
• Forbes piece on how 100 Thieves partnered with a brand to basically pay for its brand new HQ.

And, if you wanted to find some of the architects behind the genius of these brands, you should look at the following employees (and founders). Note, this list is not comprehensive or conclusive — just a starter to find great talent who “get it.”

• Andrew Watts, Product & Community, MSCHF
• Gabriel Whaley, Founder, MSCHF
• Nate Nanzer, Head of Global Partnerships, Epic Games
• Shak Khavarian, Marketing Lead — Fortnite, Epic Games
• Matty L, Head of Partnerships, 100 Thieves
• Doug Barber, VP Brand & Apparel, 100 Thieves
• Julie Wu, Senior Marketing Manager, 100 Thieves

When we think about excellent consumer marketers in the context of traditional business, we think of marketers who come out of Kellogg (MBA), Pepsi, Unilever, P&G, and other similar places. These factories taught people how to buy reach and frequency in smart ways, which used to be a barrier to entry in their industries. We then had a crop of companies come up and through the ranks such as PayPal, Expedia, Booking, Uber, and others who wrote the modern book on Growth Hacking. We then saw the rush of brands that were able to buy Facebook, Insta, and similar social platforms well… every DTC brand and DTC agency thinks they are the best. (truth)

Now we’ve entered the world of the fabric of product, partnerships, and community. Frankly, it’s not new. LVMH, Supreme, and others have been playing this card for years. What I specifically like about this particular playbook is the human interaction and badge value of the brand… the brand is not just advertising via a video spot and having it disappear in the commercial pod, but rather, consumers are pulling it, and they want to interact. I wrote about brands getting pulled vs. pushed back in 2016… read it.

This feels like the Absolut ads that I used to tear out of magazines and place on my walls. Maybe I’m dating myself… but it’s a similar feeling. I, as a consumer, want to feel closer to Fortnite, 100 Thieves, and MSCHF. I will wear their clothes, go to their meetups, watch their streamed and on-demand content, and go out of my way to buy their products.

PPC forces a marketing organization to rethink structure. While there is still demand harvesting components of buttons, banners, video, paid social, etc.; that is ancillary to the primary functions of partnerships, product, and community. How this is set up in the marketing organization will require a bit different thinking than the traditional paid media only culture.

For investors, thinking about this construct could help understand where marketing and brand equity lies. Running excellent social media campaigns is a skill that can be acquired with the right hire(s) and the right tools and process. Having a legitimate community is a powerful barrier to entry. Having companies who want to partner for no money is a barrier to entry. Having an incredible product that gets pulled is another barrier to entry. Have all three, and you are in the right spot.

This piece originally appeared in my weekly Operating Partner newsletter. If you are interested in similar content, you can subscribe here.

P&G and Unilever powered the early days of television. With their ad spend (and sponsored content), media companies underwrote and helped produce shows for mass audiences.

Both pricing and measurement were straightforward in those early days. Because TV and radio spots were finite, prices for them rose as TV viewership grew. Meanwhile, measurement could be reduced to two factors: frequency (the number of people who tuned in) and reach (the number of times you reached each person). Pretty easy to quantify, right? (Ha!)

Many years passed — along with a number of wars, presidents, and Yankee dynasties — before the emergence of the Interweb and a new method of addressing audiences. The new medium bears some similarities to static, finite media channels but also differs in some important respects.

Whereas P&G, Unilever, and other advertisers used TV for mass reach, the Internet for the first time enabled targeted reach in an electronic medium. The [correct] theory goes that the more targeted you are, less waste will occur, and your ad spend will thereby be more effective and possibly more efficient. I’ve seen this play out firsthand for brands I looked after prior to BCP, and now in many companies that come to us in diligence or within the portfolio, as well. Targeted reach handily outperforms mass reach.

The key development occurred in the late 1990s when GoTo/Overture emerged and put keyword ad buying directly in the hands of marketers. The early subscribers to Overture and Google were, unsurprisingly, agencies on Madison Avenue. Agencies already managed ad spend on TV, print, radio, and OOH on behalf of their clients and it was natural for digital spend to follow suit and be managed by them, as well. In the beginning, then, the advent of Overture and Google served to further concentrate power within traditional agencies.

However, once agencies started to write big checks to platforms that enabled targeted advertising on search engines, venture capitalists got excited. An entirely new investment category had opened up consisting of advertising and marketing technology companies that sell primarily into agencies. These businesses either sold recurring seats by the year (aka SaaS) or engaged in media arbitrage (where I got to cut my teeth as an entrepreneur — IGA Worldwide and Varick Media Management).

At some point in the late 2000s, roughly around the time of Yahoo’s acquisition of Right Media and the acquisition of Invite Media by Google, we entered into the era of peak venture capital investment into ad/mar tech which IMHO caused a funny ripple on Madison Avenue. These ad tech and marketing tech providers who create simple interfaces to the complex media buying world had to expand their TAM beyond just agencies… as agencies alone wouldn’t create enough revenue to satisfy the demands of the public markets or Venture Capitalists.

The ripple above turned into a large wave… one in which started to cause Chief Revenue Officers to task their sales teams to sell into agencies and directly to brands. Brands, especially smaller, nimble, and digital-first brands started to adopt this marketing and advertising technologies and became a solid sales channel for the marketing and advertising technology world.

The early brands who jumped at this did this because:

1/ They couldn’t afford to hire big agencies so they went directly to the technology

2/ These brands didn’t want a middleman and had the capabilities to pull the media levers themselves

3/ These brands saw the value in owning the data and having carte blanche access to it, not dumped within a data lake at some large agency

Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, and many others started to take notice and followed the trend.

The same buying tools that were available to agency conglomerates like WPP, Omnicom, Havas, Dentsu, Publicis, IPG, MDC Partners, and others were now available to a small brand with $100,000 in the budget.

Talk about the democratization of an industry. Agencies still exist and they haven’t gone away. They most likely will not because there are good reasons to use agencies for various tasks. But IMHO, the centralization of all media execution within a media agency now and in the coming years is and will be on a decline.

So, with that said, enter the DtC evolution.

An entrepreneur who decides to make carbon fiber pencils can get their product up on an e-commerce platform (Shopify, BigCommerce, WorkArea), advertise it via bottom of funnel tactics like paid search and paid social (Kenshoo, Acquisio), launch a newsletter (MailChimp) and do this all within a weekend — for less than $5,000. And by the way, that $5,000 includes the initial media spend to which the company can test product-market fit and know whether carbon fiber pencils are a good idea.

At the same time, outside the ad and marketing tech world, it became easier to source product for a variety of reasons. Transparency into the sourcing ecosystem has occurred, Alibaba has played a significant role, and 3D printing is now available to put in anyone’s basement. Buying fabric for your new clothing line used to mean a trip to New York City or Milan. Now it means… go online and Google search.

So what happens?

Well, as it turns out, history repeats itself. While all of these modern companies have algorithmically-data-scienced their way to the world of growth, and many have achieved the hockey stick that venture loves… they got and continue to get, stuck. Turns out business is hard. We know that.

But it does not have to be. History will continue to repeat itself (IMHO) and what we used to do will make its way back in some shape or format. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction says, Newton.

With the above stated, I believe — and could be terribly wrong or fashionably right…

1/ Algorithms will get us far, but winning the heart will get us the farthest. Humanity still exists and humans love emotion.

2/. We talk about how important digital is — but frankly, it’s not digital. It’s about Customer Experience. Great experiences know no boundaries.

3/. We will balance the funnel rather than over-index in a media vehicle. Over-reliance on a singular media vehicle is not healthy and we’ll see a re-balance. We’ve proved this has worked with a handful of portfolio companies as well, as, in our prior lives.

4/. A great customer experience driven from data exhaust will enable us to win, similar to how the great sports teams study and optimize to game film and telemetry data. An even greater parallel would be the study of F1 racing, which is basically 85% data…

5/ … which leads me to: data and creativity can co-exist. The *winner* will understand how to make this happen — create a habitat to bring out the best in both and drive the insights into the full product experience.

Why are we getting excited about DtC brands? Content studios (e.g. creativity) and optimization (e.g. data).

I’m sure there are additional items to add but I’ve not fully thought them through.

The takeaway:

1/ We must embrace creativity to break through the algorithmic ceiling.

2/ We must think about the entire experience, not just the physical product itself.

3/ A modern infrastructure to leverage data in ways we cannot even think about yet.

4/ A nimble, agile, and strong to execute upon this.

5/ A ton of DtC companies will peek at the algorithmic ceiling and we’ll have the pick of the litter.

Thank you for reading!

I have not posted on Medium in a while. I hope to change that. With that said, below is a copy of a post I wrote in my weekly email letter called The Operating Partner. I think you will enjoy it — and if so, subscribe to my OP letter for more content like it. I have recently been writing about Amazon as well.

This post is about AT&T vs. Verizon. Frankly, it could be about any carrier who wants to deposition the others. I hope you enjoy.

I would venture to guess that 100% of the people reading this Operating Partner letter has a mobile device, which connects to either Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, or some other network.

According to Statista, Verizon Wireless subscription market share in Q1 2017 was 35% and AT&T was 32.1%. Together, 67% of the US subscription market has Verizon or AT&T.

Verizon Wireless is going down a very interesting path. They have they been most expensive to the subscriber over time (I cannot find the exact fact to support but I am sure it is out there) and are looking to additionally monetize the user through data infused advertising. Earlier this week, Verizon discussed their intention of collaborating with T-Mobile, Sprint, and others to leverage their data as well.

They are not the only carrier looking to get into this business, as evidence by Singtel and the Turn and Amobee acquisitions.

Verizon has a mobile device business (Verizon Wireless). Verizon has FIOS for the home — Internet and TV. Verizon knows exactly who a user is on their network and can build a very robust graph of them in the home and out of the home. This is multiplied by all of their hotspots around town as well. If a person is exposed to an ad on TV (FIOS), Verizon theoretically knows if that person visits a store that carries said advertised product (Verizon Wireless) via location tracking. They may need to augment a bit with third party databases but I’m making the point that they have the infrastructure for the centralized identity of a Verizon customer . Correct me if I am wrong but this feels more powerful than Facebook or Google (I guess one can make the case about Android).

The acquisition of Yahoo! & AOL — wrapped up into Oath — speak to bundling this rich data along with media. I imagine the corporate development folks ran numbers to proforma the ability to raise CPMs pre-acquisition against post-acquisition because of this data infusion.

I am a data driven marketer and believe in the use of data. I am also a strategic marketer and see a clear path for AT&T to gain share by doing the complete opposite of Verizon here: allow subscribers to be private and untouched for data and advertising purposes. This may be a little of my Mozilla background speaking but there is a clear path to positioning against Verizon here for AT&T. Make the network about subscriber privacy, not subscriber capitalism. If advertising is the tax on the poor… per Professor Galloway, then AT&T can make a very strategic move here.

I can see a national campaign with local heavy up “AT&T, the only network at scale which does not sell or use your data” (or something of those lines).

The bigger question will be who cares? Do subscribers in the US care enough to either switch from Verizon to another carrier or opt-out of Verizon’s platform (if they allow for that). I imagine that in Germany, subscribers would be up in arms. This could also go in the complete opposite direction: could Verizon find a way to create so much value from this platform that people do not mind it?

As always, these views are my own and not those of my employer. Thank you for your time and attention for reading this!

I left Mozilla in December of 2015. Since then, you might have heard from me, or read on Business Insider, that I was working to create a modern marketing network — that’s true. I had an extraordinary opportunity to cofound that company with someone I have admired since I first interned for him in the late 90s. As sometimes happen in the startup world, on our journey of starting this new company, something unexpected happened and things changed for me.

I am excited to announce that I am joining Bain Capital Private Equity as its first digitally-focused Operating Partner. My mission with Bain Capital is to grow its current portfolio while at the same also working alongside the deal teams to identify new acquisitions.

Bittersweet is a good way to describe how I’m feeling as I write this. I won’t be involved in helping to grow the company we started earlier this year but I will be its biggest cheerleader and I wish my cofounder all the best. For those who supported us along the way, thank you.

My first day at Bain Capital is October 24 2016. I am super excited. My family will continue to live in New York but I’ll be commuting up to Boston frequently to do my thing with Bain Capital — I hope to see you somewhere on the journey.

Here is a post about some companies that I’m following these days ever since I left Mozilla. We talk a lot about the largest marketing services players such as WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, and IPG but there is a whole new crop of emerging platforms arriving on the scene.

If you are into advertising and marketing, then this list should be completely relevant. If you are a Wall Street analyst and you’re covering the publicly traded advertising holding companies, this should be relevant as well.

This list is in no particular order.

You & Mr. Jones: Created by the former CEO of Havas, David Jones. Making acquisitions around the marketing and advertising space where technology and advertising are merging.

Lake Capital: The capital behind Engine Group, Deep Focus and Trailer Park amongst others. Doing a roll-up of marketing and advertising services. Run by Terry Graunke.

Stagwell Group: Run by former WPP and Microsoft exec, Mark Penn. Looking to acquire marketing and communications companies into a portfolio of services.

Project Worldwide: Founded in 2010, building a range of wholly owned complementary marketing and advertising services agencies.

This list is not exhaustive of everyone in the marketing landscape but I wanted to highlight the new entrants to the “holding company” arena. I am working on something in this space as well, to be released soon.

I believe that the modern chief marketing officer needs modern thinking and tools serviced from a platform which does not suffer innovators dilemma.