Alright. Welcome back to another episode of Passion of Profession brought to you by my good friends at eBay. Excited to bring back a guest for the second time, in this conversation.

I am joined by founder, chief product officer at Comsee, Tim Getsch. Tim is doing the podcast circuit. I was telling him I was just listening to his conversation with Ryan at card collector too. So, excited for this chat.

Tim, welcome. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. It's, it's been a fun journey, and I'm looking forward to having a good chat about it. Let's maybe talk about I know this probably what this wasn't on the, agenda, but I'm curious.

Have you I know you're a collector yourself, but have you maybe since the last time we spoke, have you picked up any cool cards or anything that really excites you?

I think we talked to the National. And at the National, I made my biggest purchases ever.

I don't remember if I did that before or after talking to you, but, I I I think I mentioned in the podcast with Ryan that I think it's kinda messed up that I probably spent more money on Paige Becker's cards than she got paid this year.

So, yeah, there there's, generally, right now, my focus, I've really had to limit my time, and so I'll follow one on ones, of WNBA. That's pretty much it.

Occasionally, I'll pick up other things, but, I I'm actually working with someone right now on, Neka Gomakei, collection, obviously, with her here in Seattle. I just picked up her most recent, Seattle Storm one zero one that hit eBay.

That's probably my my most, interesting recent pickup. I I don't get a chance too often outside of, with my friend Caitlin to talk WNBA, but I I gotta ask you about, you know, the close of the season, the Asia Wilson of it all.

Like, you are a long storm season ticket holder, a long time fan of the WNBA.

What what are we seeing right now with Asia Wilson and just her prolific career? Like, how do you put it into context based on some of the other all time greats you've watched?

Yeah. Asia is special. She's just, like, steady. She yeah. I had to watch her up close and personal because we played that was our one home playoff game was, against the aces.

And, like, she she has so many, skills. She's so solid. She plays good defense. I I think there's a few people in the WNBA that are, just absolutely incredible and have changed the game. Cynthia Cooper, Sue Bird.

There there's there's some, like Maya Moore, my goodness. Like, it's hard to top Maya Moore. I I don't think people realize I no. People do not realize how amazing Maya Moore was. I I think it was in one of your podcasts.

You guys talked about, how Maya Moore was the greatest winner of all time. I I, again, I I loved Minnesota when I first got into the WNBA. It was actually at a Minnesota Timberwolves game that I first fell in love or sorry.

Minnesota Links game that I fell in love with the the WNBA. And so I I watched as it was, like, year after year, it was either Seattle or Minnesota that would win the championship. And Maya Moore would just take over games.

She was so incredible to watch. With with Asia, yeah, she's she's in the the top few people ever to play, obviously making a case to be the best WNBA player ever. Right now, she's at the peak of her game.

I it's it's hard to compare to other sports because WNBA is relatively young. Like, baseball's been around a hundred years, so there's, like, like, so much tradition. Basketball is like seventy years.

Again, when you're looking at a twenty, twenty, I guess now they're closing on a thirty year old league, The a lot of people just haven't even thought about, being a basketball as a professional, be it as a profession.

So, like, we're getting used to this new world, and it's only the the rest of you that are catching up now.

So you guys are getting to see Asia at her at her peak right now. But the the interesting thing, you look at the season, and they, halfway through the season, like, didn't even know if they're gonna make the playoffs.

And they got a crazy wake up call from Minnesota and then, like, went on a tear. And Asia's like, this is ridiculous. We let's just win them all. Like, let's, like, let's just go do it.

I I don't I mean, they basically went the second half of the season without a loss. Like, I I you I don't I mean, maybe in football, you have something like that, but other sports, like, that's unheard of.

And it would okay. So the Seattle storm playoff game against the aces went down. Like, our our, seat neighbors, were almost not able to make it to the game, And they I I we my wife surprised me and upgraded our tickets.

And so we actually were able to gift our our tickets to our seat neighbors, and they told us after the game, thank you so much.

That was the best game we have ever seen in our entire lives. The it was so close. It could have gone either way. There's so much excitement. The whole crowd was into it. Obviously, the, aces hadn't lost.

And so to come back to see Dominique Malonga, like, make her presence known as a 19 year old at the biggest stage, like, hitting two free throws after getting followed by the defensive player of the year.

Like, oh my goodness. Like, it was so intense, and I just felt that whole stretch.

If Asia would have just done anything slightly different, we there's we would have no chance. Like, we had to play it perfectly down the stretch. And, and Asia so easily could have just changed the game.

And then, of course, after that, she did. So Yeah. We we me as a fever fan, we fell victim. You know, we tried real hard, but it the wheels fell off with all the injuries, and we we took it you took a moment. Yeah. We we we kept going.

And but during that series, what I learned I learned was this, like, Asia Wilson's always gonna be great. But when you've got Jackie Young playing at the level she played at that series, The aces are next nearly impossible to beat.

So I was a little surprised at the finals at how it shook out and at by the end of it. But, here we are again, Asia Wilson champion MVP.

Those those terms which shouldn't be normal for individuals, it had it's becoming very routine and normal for Asia Wilson. It it's it's good. I'm looking forward next year to Caitlin being healthy.

It it'll be amazing to see, what what you guys can do with hopefully a full roster. Obviously, it's incredible how far you got with the team that you had. But, also, I I'm looking forward to seeing another season with Paige.

What she can do, get now having gotten familiar with the WNBA, there's this next year is gonna be so incredible. It it is. I'm already excited and waiting for it. And that was a little warm up. You know?

When Tim's on, we gotta talk a little WNBA. But what what I wanted to talk about was just your perspective as a business builder, a founder, and trying to get your perspective on observations and things you have seen in the 2025 market.

And been having these, like, conversations with a lot of people, and it's a lot of the same, but it's also a lot of different perspectives.

So maybe just to kick it off, like, what stands out to you most about the 2025 market compared to maybe even a year ago?

So I I'd looked at a bunch of the numbers, but I first wanted to just set the stage. When you talk about the market in general, there's so many different parts of the industry.

And for those of you that, may not be familiar with COMC or, don't quite understand the portion of the market where we sit, The obviously, eBay is a huge piece of the market, and there's a lot of other relatively high end marketplaces.

We basically facilitate what I call the $5 market. Pre pandemic, it was the $2 market.

So it's this long tail of all these different cards, rare parallels that people are hunting for, not necessarily, something that's like everybody's hunting after, but there's there are true collectors out there that want those cards.

And, so in that long tail of relatively inexpensive cards, we probably facilitate moving about 10% of the cards of the sports card singles that move around on the Internet.

Now you look at other marketplaces and many of them have an average selling price of easily 10 times what what our cards sell for.

But we're we're here to bring joy to collectors, And the metric we've been mainly focused on is, like, how many cards do we get in the to the hands of a collector that enjoys it?

And so we haven't been chasing historically, like, the thousand dollar cards, the 10,000, and, oh my goodness, the million dollar cards.

Like, no. That's not even been a thought in our our our, process. But given that portion of the market and I I'm not gonna speak to the rest of the market. I'll just speak to ComC and really the this significant volume of, $5 cards.

We, actually saw a significant dip in average selling price from October through February. You can probably think about what was happening October through February and uncertainty and why people might pull back.

And now everybody's like, oh, it's a crazy bull market. Everything is going up. The $5 market has recovered to exactly where it was the previous four years.

So it the market, our market is right where it's been for four years. Now remember I said that used to be a $2 market. I'm gonna give you a couple other interesting tips. This is not recent, but this is history.

It's kinda interesting to see kind of how things changed. For over a decade, we were flirting right around $2 a card. Like, almost a solid decade average card sold for $2 Exact same inventory, nothing changed. Kobe passed away.

We went from $2. 50 to $3. 80 in one month. Then the pandemic happened, and we got all the way up to $6 a card. So, like, the market again, nothing changed the inventory. Like, we it's the same inventory, just people paid more for it.

So Kobe's passing was, like, an insane change to the market. And then the, you know, The Last Dance just, like, everything skyrocketed. And and so it was right around I think the peak was maybe, like, $6.

50 was February, March 2021. So and it kinda settled in right around $5 a card, and it was there for like, when there was a market correction after the peak of the the pandemic, that correction just took $6.

50 cards and brought them down to $5. And now, obviously, that's on average. Some cards had wild swings, especially cards that really shot up in value and then came down significantly.

But when we're just looking at our market in general, right now, we're sitting at the $5 market, and and that's, been pretty consistent.

And so for the last now, again, if you look at the last few months, it's been ratcheting up from, like I think it got down to maybe $3.

75 ish, at the beginning of the year. And it has steadily grown back, and now it's back to the $5 market right now.

What I I I love the space that Commsi plays in, and it feels almost underserved in the way we communicate and talk about the hobby. For the most part is from this, you know, 4 to 5 figure Mhmm.

Dollar price cards, which that's fun to talk about. We get excited, but the reality is is most of us, so the majority, don't play in that space. They play in the space that ComC serves. Like, what what is the like, what is that like?

Or what is that been for you knowing that these are the customers we serve? And although it might be attractive to try to move up market, like, it doesn't make sense for us based on what we're doing in the business we're building.

Like, how how when did you come to the realization that, like, this is your sweet spot? So I, as a collector growing up, I remember going to card shows and buying rookie cards, spending a couple dollars.

Like, back in the eighties and nineties, you didn't really have opportunities to spend a ton of money on cards. There was usually just a few bucks, maybe $30.

40 bucks on my card here and there. So that was the market I fell in love with. It was just collecting things that were, attainable by by anybody. And and everybody had basically the same stuff.

And the market has changed significantly since the the eighties and nineties. But the the core collector, the person who take who buys something and takes it off the market, is the foundation of the entire industry.

If nobody takes things off the market, it's a Ponzi scheme. Like, it that's you're just speculating and hoping, like, you're not the last one standing. Someone has to take it off the market.

Someone has to want it enough to take it off the market. We if you are focused on the cards that are getting the attention today, they may change, and it may be something else that gets attention tomorrow.

And as a marketplace, it's really dangerous for us to pick winners and losers. Like, we should not be doing that.

We should just be facilitating getting the cards into the hands of the people that want them. So we don't, we don't try to encourage people to collect certain things or, try to manipulate the market in any ways. We don't own inventory.

The only inventory we have are generally cards that got returned, and we didn't wanna bother the seller. So we just ate the return and then we're trying to like recoup some by selling off a few cards here and there.

But the we don't we're not, we don't wanna get ourselves into a situation where we have to compete against our customers or be biased and encourage certain cards to sell instead of others.

So we really try to just let the market do what it does. And if we are making it easy for collectors to find the things they want and take them off the market, then we're helping the market.

Then and that's a fun part of the industry to know that, yeah, even though I as a I have a personal collection and I have tons of cards that I've never put up for sale, I've hardly sold any WNBA cards ever.

The it's I keep an eye on the market, and and I'm I'm sure I wouldn't be willing to spend as much on the cards if I had no idea what I could sell them for if I had to. Or or, like, I may choose to sell off.

Honestly, I have a ton of stuff where I'm like, you know what? Other people would appreciate this. Like, I have I have so much, 19, 2,019 Donerous. Like, I should just put some of my It's back in the aisle. On my like, I have so much.

I didn't, like anyways, the but, anyhow, I want as, our focus in this we we kind of realized this doing an exercise early on in the pandemic when we were hiring tons of employees and we didn't wanna lose our culture.

We we worked with a company to identify what our culture was.

And it was just an organic process of not saying, like, oh, what do we strategically wanna focus on? But, like, what are we? What like, let's talk to our our leaders at the company and and executives and and see, like, who are we?

What are we? And and we realized we're all about optimizing joy for collectors. Like, that is us. That's our core. It's not enabling speculators to make money.

It's not, helping people invest in the hobby. It is helping collectors find joy. We don't sell cards. We don't own the cards. Literally, people just pay us fees to, like, facilitate moving cards around and hold cards.

The reason they do that is because they find some joy in this process. And so we're just focused on that. I this, as a brand guy, this helping collectors find joy, this brand message resonates with me.

And I'm curious because from what I gather from the typical comm c user, the individual I hear on a podcast who's spending time and money on comm c to pick up cards for sets, to pick up obscure cards that they've been chasing that no one else wants, that resonates.

I'm cur like, how are you how do you, like, measure that? Because that's a that's a, very obscure thing to be able to measure, especially if it's, like, your your brand message or your your company's North Star.

Like, what sort of things do you look at to make sure that you're not veering off in another direction, but you're staying true to serving, that mess.

So, over the years, there's been lots of people that have said, like, oh, we gotta go after graded cards. Like, graded cards are the the next thing. Everybody's spending tons of money on graded cards. Let's go focus on that.

Our core technology has been raw cards, and there's a lot of advantages and shortcuts you can take with graded cards, but up until recently, and and we're hopefully gonna get a chance to talk about that, we really have not invested in our systems for graded cards.

And that's been because I've really wanted to focus on getting as many cards in the hands of a collector as possible. And I always saw like, people like, any fee is gonna slow things down.

It's a speed bump. Grading itself is a massive speed bump. You're spending, like, tens, twenties, hundreds of dollars just on the grading fee. And, sure, we have fees that we charge on top of it as well.

But, like, that, really, I I felt like I could get 10 raw cards in the hands or maybe even closer to a 100 raw cards into people's hands for every one graded card I could get into people's hands.

And today, our our market, 2% of the cards that are sold are graded. Like, the vast we're 98% raw cards.

And it's really just been us trying to get again, if if you look at a $100 card versus a $1 card, sure, you probably get a little more joy with the $100 card than a one, but I don't think it's a 100 times as much joy.

And so that again, our metric has been, like, how much joy can we get, to collectors.

And and raw cards has created a problem for a lot of people. It's just not easy to buy and sell raw cards online, where graded cards make it easy for you to just, like, hey.

We're all talking the same language. It's printed on the card. We all know the condition. Great. Now we can like, there's there's all sorts of advantages that help you with that, and there's tons of services that help you.

And we're we're we've just been saying, you know what? This part of the market's underserved. We're gonna invest here, make this, efficient. And and rather than chasing usually, the higher end cards end up being graded.

Instead of chasing that, we've just stayed true to to raw cards and bringing people joy. So that's kind of the I I have found myself just saying, you know what? I don't wanna charge people more. I don't wanna create more speed bumps.

I don't wanna, limit us to these higher dollar cards. I really wanna invest in high volume, lowering our costs, getting more cards through the system as our our form of growth. That's been how we have operated for many, many years.

That's not necessarily the only way to ever operate. And, we've made a ton of investments, and there's new changes in the market and other factors, but that's just historically how we got here.

So knowing what we know, about the regular ComC user, the, you know, $5 a card range, you know, buying more in value volume.

Has there been anything you've noticed about that group based on what's happening with the data and trends on the platform that has stood out to you particularly this year?

We have seen about 20 to 30% growth in and most of that is just increased volume. It's not the price point changing.

It's just, more people wanna get cards in their hands. I think a lot of the, high dollar, attention just brings cards into people's minds. And we again, this is the kind of everyday cards, just high volume, lots of everyday cards.

And that market is, like, our growth year over year by, like, number of cards we have to handle is the biggest growth we've had because we're big and and we're growing by 20 to 30%.

So, like, the the sheer volume of an additional incremental cards that we have to move through the system, is the highest it's ever been by far.

Yeah. I I want to I wanna, like, understand how you think about this opportunity, and this is, like, a little bit of a hypothetical, but I I it I'm thinking about, like, expansion.

I'm thinking about, like, tops and fanatics. Right? They released tops basketball, and it's inevitable with how they're going to market with athletes, like, where they're showing up there.

They're trying to bring in not just people who have always collected, but just fans of sports and get them introduced to cards. So inevitably, like, that's a funnel.

Right? And then they get into breaks. They start consuming content. They start buying on eBay. Like, how do you think about introducing those net new individuals who are experiencing the hobby for the first time?

How do you think about introducing, like, ComC as a brand to those individuals, like, how do you start showing up to make sure that people like, people who've been here know who ComC is, but, like, how do those new individuals end up finding who you are and what you do?

So, historically, the big thing I mentioned before is the long tail. We have the largest selection. So if you Google anything, we're gonna end up being one of the top links because we have all this variety of stuff.

If you're on eBay, which is the biggest marketplace, you're gonna see our our search results, because we have so many millions of listings on eBay. And so, really, just organically, because we have the breadth, people find us.

And then what I've really strived for is to help people make sense of it. Every manufacturer is trying to create reasons for people to collect. When people are new to the hobby, they don't know right from left.

Like, it's oh, I have a Babe Ruth card. Is it good? I have no idea. Is it a reprint? Is it in good condition? Like, just because it's Babe Ruth does that's not sufficient. Like, there's so much you have to learn.

And then you get into like, oh, this is a one of one. How much is this worth? It's gotta be worth a ton. Oh, it's a leaf one of one. They literally made a 150 of them. They're not actually one of ones. Right?

There's so much more to the hobby to learn than just, well, I'm looking at this card and it says it's rare. It must be valuable. If I'm a collector hunting for certain cards, what are the things that I might also be interested in?

What else exists? I looked at Paige Becker's when I was looking at the, the purchase that I made at the national, and I I got these Bowman one zero ones, and I realized there's, like, 50 of them. So okay. That's cool.

Like, I got a a I I think I have, like, five of her 51 ones. Like, there's now, like, different gradients of, like, how interesting is that one of one. Like, but you kinda need to know what's out there to know what you're getting.

If you just look in a vacuum, you have no clue. So I we want ComC to be the place that helps you discover all those things. And there's still more opportunities for us to make that experience even better.

But even just browsing comc and seeing, oh, I found this card. What other parallels exist? What other cards of this player exist? What are the prices people are asking?

And being organized instead of just, like, here's a flood of millions of listings that, like, you gotta just hunt through. Like, we try to give you structure, and that's kind of our introduction for people to the hobby.

Mentioned, license change, new manufacturer. There's we could literally spend the rest of this podcast talking about all the changes and shifts that are driving growth and expansion across the hobby.

What what are like the as you think about it, as a founder of com see, like, right now, and you've been through these cycles building a business, several times, I'm sure in in your run.

What what do you think right now is driving the volume and the demand of so many, you know, existing hobby participants transacting, but then also new, collectors coming in?

So I I would love to do more analysis of the profile of all the different buyers.

I don't have that readily available. But listening to other people in the research that they've been doing and seeing the trends, so just observations. The The US is the dominant market.

The US, is becoming more and more polarized as far as wealth. Wealth is accumulating in the top 10%. People are looking for things to spend their money on. They, like, people that have money can easily make money.

And then they're like, well, now what do I do with it? And a lot of that has been spilling over into cards, things like people. They put money into Bitcoin. They put money into investments.

They put money into businesses. They put money into art. Sports cards is another thing that they can put money into, and it it's not surprising. Like, cards are an interesting combination of cultural relevance.

They're they're beautiful. They are like, rare cards, are works of art. So it makes sense that people put money there, and there is a lot of social media now making awareness of all of this. It's just lots of reminders.

Fanatics has this massive investment in relationships with all these leagues. They need to make this thing grow. They need to grow the industry. So there's all those headwinds of, like, the marketing dollars now finally being spent.

People with disposable income looking for a place to spend it. I think Jason Mascara from president of Upper Deck made a really great observation that a lot of the growth right now is pricing out the collector.

There's a ton of speculators driving up the cost of boxes and breaks and, trying to get the million dollar cards and all these really, really high flashy things.

So I think there's a lot of dollar when you're looking at the raw total volume of money being spent in the industry, a lot of it is being driven by people with, excess of disposable income, or investments that have just ballooned.

Right? A lot of people put money in Bitcoin and then, like, okay.

Bitcoin is at an all time high. What else do I wanna and they didn't it's not disposable income. They just made money off an investment or a speculation, and now they wanna diversify into other things.

I and I don't know how long that's gonna last. I don't know, like, we saw a similar boom at the beginning of the pandemic, and I don't know if they're gonna change their focus, if those investments slow down.

I don't know what's gonna happen there. But I think the right now, a lot of the market a lot of the like, the fact that Donres WNBA, I just picked up a couple boxes for $500 a box.

I got them for $800 a case in '9 yeah. In 2019. Like, the that is nuts. Like, $500 a box is not like, you can't get very much like, kids can't get that.

Like, that's nuts. So right now, it's just that's where the market is. I I do want to warn people, do not buy things because you think someone else is gonna want it.

Buy things that you love. Buy things that you wanna take off the market. If you're gonna take it off the market, it doesn't matter what the market value is.

Like, this is something you love, you're passionate about. If you're buying it because you hope to sell it to someone else for more, it's so hard to time the market.

Yeah. You may get lucky. You may get lucky for a while. Eventually, the music is gonna slow down. Eventually, the music might stop.

It like, there's ups and downs in the market, macro, in the trading card industry. So just be careful about that. And and Commsi is gonna help you find actually, I I like that people buy into those big expensive breaks.

And then they're like, I don't know what to do with all these one on ones and one to tens of, like, random role players. Great. Send them all to CompSeate. CompSeate loves all of those cards.

The million dollar card, sure. Like, go find some way to publicize it and do whatever. Get some hype. Have dicks buy the card or something. Like, someone some big company will wanna make a splash and and invest in it.

But, or billionaires just looking for a way to, like, spend some extra money. But the the core collector, Commsy wants to be here for you. And, you get to enjoy all these rare cards at reasonable prices.

That's what we're I I love collecting just the variety of beautiful cards that are created, not necessarily the superstar, But I can get one of those I I can get, get even the one on ones at reasonable prices if it's not, like, the best player on the team.

I love how you brought up, and I'm glad you did because I'm I was saying to myself as I sat down at my desk today, I was like, am I gonna get a chance to talk about this this week before it the net the the hobby news cycle moves on?

I'm glad you brought it up. Jason, the president of Upradex, post. And this is what I love about the post.

I I as a someone who just, like, obsesses over this stuff, I love the fact that this post was put on LinkedIn, which is where you wouldn't imagine collectors to be, like, looking for content like this.

But he's he's running a business, and there's, you know, a reason why he's putting it out on that platform. And then it gets it it gets picked up and and cut, and it's literally dis disseminated and then distributed everywhere.

And it the like, I open up my phone today, like, several days after it was posted, and people are still talking about it.

And so what what I wanna know from your perspective, especially as, like, I think this his post resonated with you.

It resonated with me. It's like, why why is it resonating with so many people? Like, why are we still talking about a post that most people shouldn't have seen, but everyone saw it, and everyone's still talking about it?

You you know, interestingly, he made the same almost identical observation in 2019, and and gave a similar warning.

It was, like, 2019, 2020. But you you don't know where the market's gonna go and how long it's gonna go. But it's like, hey. Like, just be careful.

And then, yes, we had the boom in 2020 and '21, and then the market corrected. But we're still around, and the market is super healthy. Like, anything that's exciting, AI is a bubble. Like, AI is totally a bubble, but so was railroads.

So was the Internet. They're key aspects of our, like, existence today. But when they were new, people didn't know how much to put into it. Right now, there's gonna be interesting things that happen in the market with AI.

We'll see how all that stuff pans out. But the with trading cards, it's it's got, like, attention right now. It's it it's exciting. There's a reason peep it connects with so many people. But there's also a lot of people piling in.

So just be ready for just plan for it. But I think the core base is interest the the core the the industry is interesting as long as there's collectors. And so we wanna keep catering and investing in collectors. Yep.

Do you as the the individual behind kind of the the product at Comsee, when you see these changes or these this increase in demand and more people, does it influence or change the way you think about your product roadmap and priorities that you're thinking about?

Yeah. So, one of the things that has changed, I alluded to this earlier, is, we have started investing in our technology that employees use for handling graded cards.

We have invested in our techniques and technology for, trading card games, Magic and Pokemon.

Pokemon is growing insanely fast right now. We, with with graded cards, basically ran an experiment this summer that blew us away. Totally surprised us. We offered free ingestion of graded cards, and it was a three week promotion.

I I I to be honest, I don't understand why people sent us a 100,000 cards, which was way like, there are so many other vaulting services that all offer free ingestion.

That's their norm. They don't charge for ingestion. So why when we just say, like, hey.

We're now on par with everything else. We get a 100,000 graded cards. For context, PSA, amazing company. They've done their vault for three years and just crossed a million cards. Three years, a million cards.

Three weeks, a 100,000 cards. Like, basically, I I did I looked at, like, I mentioned how much we're focused on raw. And raw is definitely where our growth is. We we've grown easily 20% in raw, 25% in raw this year.

Graded cards are basically flat. It's not because there's not enough demand for graded cards. It's because our capacity is limited. We only have capacity today for about 25,000 graded cards a month. And we got a 100,000 graded cards.

So we are now changing our system so that we can increase the capacity and handle more graded higher volumes of graded cards. We're change retooling our systems to support, Magic and Pokemon and other CCGs more natively.

We just launched our, TCG by ComC eBay store that's just focused on, actually all of our collectible card games have moved over to that that store so we can give a great experience for it.

Those investments have been informed by the current market trends. Like, we there's a whole variety, like, integration with grading company APIs to help make our ingestion process more efficient.

We've invented new devices. We literally have robots that help us with certain aspects of our business because we have to be able to handle this volume.

So, yeah, the the that portion of the market has definitely or of our investments has been informed by the current market trends.

And just, like, people wanna give us this, and we're at capacity. And we have to increase the volumes just to be like, we have to handle these things more efficiently to be able to handle the volumes that people wanna send us.

Help us understand because comm c is not the only business that the demand is so crazy that you're at capacity and having to make these decisions.

Like, how does like, we're everybody's striving for growth. Right? You wanna serve more customers.

You want more people introduced to Comseas services. How challenging is it for you as a product guy to assess the landscape and the situation and then work with your team to make the changes with the tech stack with just the processes?

Like, how challenging is that to do while more cards are coming in? Like, help us understand how that gets done. That's a great question. Actually, a topic I wanted to talk about here.

I the way I see COMC fitting into the the broader market, I like to refer to COMC as infrastructure. Think of highways and bridges, railroads. A lot of other vault services are like bank vaults.

The way you invest in a bank vault, the capacity of a bank vault, the the targeting high end goods and not you don't go to a banking well, if you go to a decent bank, they shouldn't charge you money to store your card your your your dollars.

Right? They they give you interest on it. They'll entice you to put money in the bank. So the business model of that is different than infrastructure.

Think of every marketplace today as some form of, like, highway, getting a card from one person to another, every marketplace charges some fees. Those fees sometimes are visible in dollars and sometimes they're in time.

Like you have to you have to do it yourself. You have to spend your time doing it. Some marketplaces have, like, consignment services integrated into them or a lot of partners that do consignment services, they charge fees.

K. That's kind of like a toll. Like you it's a toll road. So every every highway has a toll. Like it it whether it there's either a tax that everybody's paying or a toll. In our industry, there's no such thing as a tax.

There's no government charging a tax. Everything is a toll. The closest thing to, like, free roads is, like, Facebook marketplace or something like that where you just, like, deal with it.

It's wild West. No one's there to protect you. Just be careful. But if you wanna, like, get somewhere quickly and have some security, you wanna get on a toll road.

So, we're in the business of building infrastructure. Infrastructure scale. I mentioned we probably handle about 10% of the singles that are moving on the Internet. So 10% of, like, all the cars on the the highways.

When the market grows by 25%, we had a four lane highway, and now we have five lanes of traffic. I don't know if you've been around a city that's been trying to expand a highway from four lanes to five lanes. It's not pretty.

No. It is I'm living in Indianapolis. Yeah. It is hard. That is our reality. Something as simple as, like, adding a fifth lane is really, really hard. So what we've been doing is investing in how do we make it safe to double the speed.

We it's the we've got those lanes. Can we can we think of the lanes for us as employees. And if you wanna go from four lanes to five lanes, you gotta hire employees.

You gotta train employees. You got, like okay. That but if we can empower those employees with better technology, now the employees can get twice as much stuff done.

So now you can get those lanes going twice as fast. So that's where like, with the current market, the current investments, that's where we're focused is, like, how do we double our speed?

Whether that is on raw cards coming through our system, graded cards coming through our system, expanding from sports and entertainment to trading card games.

How do we efficiently handle the trading card games and get those through through the the highways?

But managing the investments to make people faster, to hire people, to train people, to, like, keep the highways running smoothly, to avoid track traffic jams, to predict volumes, like, year over year, it might be 25% growth.

But the the lightest month to the busiest month might be two x. What do you do when, like, you have a month where you don't need to run as many vehicles on the the the the infrastructure that you you paid for?

What do you do when you need double the the the volumes? Do you do you pay pay people to do overtime?

Have your cost spike, and now those extra lanes are even more expensive? Do you try to rush technology onto the mark like, try to run cars faster, and they might crash because it's not ready for the that that speed.

Like, those are the things that we're dealing with on, like, a daily basis of, like, how do we get the system to work well and and and stay on top of it.

And we've had times where we'll we'll introduce, like, an amazing, auction service for eBay.

And people love it, but what it does is mean more vehicles need to get on the road because We got to get the those auctions that sold shipped to people.

And then we've had to turn off those services because we our roads couldn't handle it.

So now we've been like over the last year making this massive investment so we can turn back on all those auction services, and we can handle the volumes that come from it.

And we can sustainably operate at that much higher capacity. Yep. Yeah. I love the, of the analogy and this is perfect visually thinking about the work you're doing by adding another lane in the highway.

And I want to get as as you're overseeing this construction and trying to get it done for all the reasons you suggested.

How do you make sure that it gets done at the level that best represents, ComC and the user of ComC, while also you as the product guy making sure that you're looking towards the future and maybe thinking about, you know, a few miles down the road, we're gonna have this exit ramp.

And in this exit ramp, we're gonna be building these things because we know these users are gonna wanna take and try something new.

Like, how do you how do you direct the the current initiatives while also putting your eye kind of on the future and what the Comsee customer is gonna want?

So the the it's really hard. It's hard to predict the future. It is super hard to predict the future, and it's very dangerous to predict the future. It's it's hard to, like, hire in advance and have the right amount of people.

It's hard to invest in the right technologies and have it come together at the time when the market is ready for it. It's a lot of little decisions, a lot of incremental decisions.

There are big bets that we have to make, but we have to be really careful with those bets. And and really for us, it's super important to constantly stay focused on our costs and how to make everything more efficient.

If things are more efficient, we can adapt more easily to whatever the market does. We basically have to come up with plans that work for a whole variety of scenarios.

We need fast lanes. We need slow lanes. We need cheap services. We need expensive services. We need, things tailored towards high end, things tailored towards loan, things they things tailored towards manufacturers.

And and then we have to juggle that, like, as much as we can, the get as much insights as we can into the future.

It's, again, really hard to predict all this stuff. But that's why it's important for us to have some of our really slow services.

Like, we have a four month ingestion service. We're we're actually looking at considering some form of, like, a bulk ingestion that might take a year just to help e like, spread the load when things go up and down.

If there's a a crazy spike for a month, can we dedicate a hot ton of resources to that? And then as the market kinda settles down, you'd redirect at the things that are have lower SLA.

So that having a whole variety of services and being able to adapt helps us. But it's it's definitely been a challenge to provide services that are fast and cheap. I mean, fast, cheap, and and good, like, you can't get all three.

And we can't really sacrifice good. So it's really a balance between fast and cheap. Do we sacrifice SLAs and keep our price down, or do we charge more and offer it faster?

And we basically lean towards, like, let's just create services and let the customers decide what they want. If you want it fast, you gotta pay for it. If you want it cheap, you gotta you pay for it with your time.

So that's kind of how we've been balancing things. And there's gonna be some more adjustments to our fees. We just made some recent adjustments to our fees to, kinda head down that path, but that's kinda how we think about it.

As we're around in the corner on this chat, you've been at this for almost two decades building in this space, seeing a lot of different things.

Mhmm. I'm always fascinated especially by long long term builders, like, how you stay motivated.

Like, what motivates you most right now about leading product at ComC? Like, when you get out of bed in the morning, what do you what are you most excited about?

Yeah. I I was I was thinking about that. I I don't think I need much external motivation. I was passionate about this when no one else was interested. I I've I've been focused on enabling, the collector for now twenty years.

And the the focus for me is just giving people as much joy as I can. Trying to manage our team and our infrastructure and our technology so that we can give as much joy as possible to our, to our customers.

And so that's been our our main focus. That's where we are consistently trying to trying to give people the the best experience.

And for me, it's just, like, I love this industry, and that's where I wanna spend all my time is just allowing other people to enjoy collecting like I do.

This we covered a whole lot of ground. This conversation was a ton of fun, and I'm looking forward to doing it again down the road. Tim from Comsea, always fun to chat.

I would encourage everyone to check out check out my cards. We'll put the links in the show notes. Tim, always fun. Appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it. It's been a blast. I appreciate all of our our customers.

One of the things I wanted to just quick mention before we hop off, I I talked about the investments that we've been making in our, support for graded cards, our support for card collectible games, magic Pokemon.

The we have some new service offerings specifically tailored towards high end cards. I, the scenarios that we've enabled are what we call direct to cash services. Historically, everything has been Compsi store credit.

So if you have cards generally that would sell for a $100 or more, we have new services that are on par or better than everybody else that does consignment. So you can now if you are collecting, for me, $100 is high end.

Other people, that's normal. But, $100 plus, thousand dollar plus cards, a lot of times in that space, when you're collecting those cards, you often have to trade up. You find a good card, and then you need to sell something else.

So that's really what we're focused on with our direct to cash service is if you see an auction for something that's gonna upgrade your collection and you win that auction, and then you're like, I don't wanna tap into savings to pay for it.

I wanna sell off some of my other cards. We now have fast direct to cash services, auction services, where you can send the cards in and, anything that sells for a thousand dollars or more, it's just 5%.

That's it. No other fees, just 5%. And the we send you, PayPal or check, however you wanna get paid. Anything under a thousand dollars is $5 plus 8%.

And, those allow you to basically say, you know what? I gotta part with some of these cards, and you should basically have our goal is to put that money in your bank account in time for you to pay your credit card bill.

Don't be wise with your money, but we understand definitely with the the trend in the market and how expensive things are, you often have to do that.

I've been listening to the the WNBA card podcast and how you guys you and Caitlin are collecting.

Honestly, some of these services are literally tailored towards exactly how you collect. I know you have a a one card WNBA PC of, like so if if you see a better card, you're gonna, like, buy a new card and swap out the old one.

And a lot of times, you're gonna want the cash to help pay for it. So we want those services. We want you to just think about, like our highways now support those direct to cash services.

If you have a card already on COMC, we have cash auctions, similar thing. You can send it, same fee structure. And if you just want Comsee store credit because the cards you want are on Comsee, our our auctions are now really simple.

It's 4% with a 99¢ minimum. So basically anything over $25 is, like, just 4% Commsi store credit in your account. Go take advantage of those services. We're looking forward to handling whatever volume comes our way.

We're we're ready for it. I would imagine that's going to be a very, very popular service based on a lot of different, interactions, conversations in my own collecting behavior that, I've, dealt with.

So, yes, everyone go check it out. Tim, always awesome chatting. Looking forward to doing it again. Yeah. Appreciate it. Thank you.