Editor's Note: As part of a paid partnership with Collectibles.com, cllct is publishing a series of stories highlighting the company's growth and future initiatives.
Living in Germany, Alex Ivanov and Anas Salem just wanted to build something for themselves.
Or maybe a product their friends could use, too.
But more than five years after launching Cardbase as a simple tool meant to track their own personal card collections, a major pivot to launch Collectibles.com in 2024 has spawned a super app with more than 350,000 active monthly users and nearly 40,000 paid subscribers.
The impressive growth for the platform seems unlikely — unless you knew the pair back in the schoolyard.
Now the CEO and COO of Collectibles.com, respectively, Ivanov and Salem first collaborated more than two decades ago when Ivanov moved to Germany from Ukraine in 10th grade. The two bonded over entrepreneurship and eventually launched their first venture by purchasing mp3 players in bulk from Alibaba to flip on eBay.
The first run of sales was a success, so they, of course, wanted more.
Ivanov and Salem turned classmates into investors and orchestrated their first round of crowdfunding to buy Chinese mobile phones, which they also flipped on eBay for a profit. They paid back their classmates and then some.
By 2020, the pair had worked together on a number of projects, including co-founding competitive intelligence SaaS, Rivalfox in 2013, which included customers such as Audi, Oracle and Marketo.
Like many collectors, Ivanov’s trading card collection was rapidly growing in 2020, and he was cataloging his hobby in a spreadsheet. That process was typical for the average collector, but an experienced app builder could do better.
“Why don’t we solve it for ourselves?” Ivanov recalled asking.
The Cardbase app was born soon after.
Designed without grand plans for scaling, Cardbase soon became a popular tool for thousands of collectors. Hobbyists were pouring their spreadsheets into the app for Cardbase to catalog and organize with images.
At the time, Cardbase had pitched an automated process for ingesting those cards. In reality, the team was carefully linking cards to images by hand.
The technology needed would come later, but for the moment they had to hustle.
A funding round, led by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, provided a cash infusion to help Cardbase grow in 2021. Among that group was Dietrich von Behren, an angel investor and serial entrepreneur who immediately connected with Ivanov, Salem and their vision for Cardbase.
Bringing decades of experience to the team, von Behren previously founded and sold a social network for parents, led business initiatives for a leading consumer data app and worked in corporate development and investments for major media networks.
Now the chief business and strategy officer for Collectibles.com, von Behren joined Ivanov and Salem as a co-founder in 2021.
“So it was the right product at the right place, right time,” von Behren told cllct. “Most card collectors keep their inventory in a spreadsheet, if at all. Here’s a great solution to introduce some technology that doesn’t try to disrupt collecting, but rather enhance it.”
Early signals for Cardbase were good — the tool provided utility customers were willing to pay for. The spreadsheets, when paired with images and pricing data, created tens of millions of valuable data points.
But as interest in cards and collectibles surged, competitors with similar tools and vision entered the marketplace. Cardbase was an early mover for collection management and pricing data, but the space was quickly heading toward oversaturation.
According to von Behren, Cardbase was well-positioned early, but the collectibles market — which also includes comics, coins, stamps, toys, sneakers, game-used memorabilia and dozens of other categories — was growing and the app’s early scope was limited.
For the company to maximize its potential, Cardbase needed to be reborn. Or at least be reimagined into something far grander.
“We can go after a far bigger pie, and we’ve already built the technology to support this,” von Behren said. “Much of the heavy lifting has already been done. Let’s apply our application and go after the broader market. And quite frankly, I think to achieve the idea of building a community for all collectors — we needed to offer a comprehensive solution.”
It wasn’t hard to convince Ivanov and Salem that a larger and more versatile platform was the right path. Actually getting there was far different.
Trusting the new vision became a key variable for the trio, but a foundation of trust was something Ivanov and Salem had been building for decades.
“A lot of people told me this is not going to work because this is your best friend. How can you communicate with them?” Salem said. “I think in business, one of the most important things is trust. You need to have someone who you can trust. And what I can admit here is I can trust Alex with anything.”
That foundation of trust expanded to include von Behren, and the trio began laying the groundwork for Collectibles.com in 2022.
Pivoting from Cardbase was a tricky move, but the upside was worth the risk.
Migrating more than 100 million data points from Cardbase to Collectibles.com without user disruption was a significant engineering hurdle, Ivanov said. Public perception was a challenge, too, with some early adopters resistant to the pivot.
Those users liked Cardbase for what it was and didn’t need it to change. Creating Collectibles.com required the team to more or less pause some major updates to Cardbase, which impacted certain users.
The early success also couldn’t be ignored, with Cardbase capturing more than 500,000 users by the time it switched to Collectibles.com.
“We had to take a step back to take two steps forward,” Ivanov said.
Those two steps forward landed in April 2024 with the launch of Collectibles.com as a super app aiming to stack a social collectibles community on top of the utility Cardbase delivered.
Early feedback hit Salem first as he monitored support requests. Those initial support tickets landed, and he questioned everything.
“I said ‘Oh no, what did we do? This is not correct,’” Salem recalled. “What we did, this was the wrong decision.”
“I don’t think I wavered from the vision, from the idea that this isn’t the real opportunity — that we have to go beyond cards if we want to truly be a service, a community for everyone who collects. We can’t just be one vertical,” von Behren said.
“But it was tough. It kind of always shakes you. It’s sort of like being a performer and getting out on stage and the crowd boos you. That ain’t fun.”
As expected, initial feedback was the harshest, and the detractors were the loudest. The reality was, according to Ivanov, for every collector who was frustrated, three others were pushing for expansion and a larger vision more in line with what they had created.
The team admits to some missteps in communication and the need to better prepare Cardbase users for the pivot. Those elements, von Behren says, have been improved.
“It was many sleepless nights, to be honest. For almost three to four months, until we got the system stable,” Ivanov said. “And you know, we really had to do a lot of communication. The most difficult part for me personally was to get people on board and tell them, ‘I understand it’s hard, but at the end you will see it’s worth it.’”
Initial frustration from early adopters eventually cooled, and the user base for Collectibles.com has surged since. The platform now boasts more than 1.5 million total registered users and is currently tracking more than 30 million items within its collection management.
The team estimates those collectibles are worth more than $10 billion collectively.
So far, Collectibles.com has focused heavily on becoming a leading destination, offering community and utility for collectors of any category.
Scrolling the platform’s main feed will deliver everything from trading cards, coins and comics to vintage magazines, Hot Wheels and antiques.
“I would say it’s like going from single player mode to multiplayer mode,” Ivanov said. “This had to be done because collecting is about community. It’s about connecting to fellow collectors.”
The next step for Collectibles.com will be unlocking the e-commerce side of the platform. The company launched its own repack platform, Repackz, earlier this year, further enhancing its product offering.
Collectors are often looking to buy and sell on the platform, too, and the team believes it must approach any marketplace feature carefully. Competing directly with major marketplaces could be difficult, but it also makes sense to offer as many features as possible when customers are asking for them.
For now, the Collectibles.com team believes it has the right foundation — built off basic utility — and the community to scale into whatever it wants to be.
Though the core of that might always be as simple as what they wanted Cardbase to be.
“Really a place where everyone who collects can organize and showcase what they have,” von Behren said, “what they’re passionate about, and share that with others.”
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Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture. He was previously the collectibles editor at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on X and Instagram @benmburrows.