Paul Hontz

I bought $235,231 worth of sports cards in the past 15 months with my co-founder, Josh Seaborn. I know it sounds insane to spend that much money on pieces of cardboard, but the reason is straightforward: the math told us to do it. Here’s the story of more.xyz. In 2022, my good friend Josh Seaborn asked if I could help him scale his card hobby into a sizable business. It seemed like a good fit. My consulting work is focused on helping companies scale with tech, and Josh has been into cards his entire life. He knows the card market better than anyone I’ve ever met. It also helped that Josh and I have been friends for the past 30 years (yes, my knees creak when I go up stairs now), and we both have a pretty high drive. We knew we worked well together. There was just one problem. I didn’t know anything about sports cards. Sure, I had some fun memories of buying packs of cards with my dad when I was 5 years old, but that didn’t exactly translate into what we needed. I knew that I needed to level up my knowledge quickly. I believe you learn a heck of a lot more by "doing" instead of talking. As Buffet said, "Predicting rain doesn't count; building an ark does." I asked Josh if I could give him $10k, and we could test his thesis together. As we started the process, it clicked for me. It’s just math based on a market inefficiency around the cards conditions and grading services. Our buying model doesn’t mean that every card will be a winner (we don’t expect it to be), but I really liked the math if we could be disciplined with our buying. Frankly, it was a lot of fun. I was hooked and was ready to go deeper. I put in some more money, and with our first "proof of concept" wrapped up and all of our cards sold, a few friends asked to join us. At this point, we had $40k to spend, and Josh started purchasing cards while I shifted focus to unblock our next challenge. Then we hit a snag… Finding $40k worth of cards that fit our model was a challenge. Josh was having to sort through hundreds of pages of eBay listings (among other sites) daily to try and find cards that fit our model. This quickly became a bottleneck for us. If you’ve ever spent any time around me, you’ve heard me say the phrase "unfair advantage" so many times you’re probably sick of it. I want to find levers I can pull that will help my business compete at a higher level. I created a mini app that helps Josh immediately disqualify some of the listings that don’t fit our model. This sped up our buying time by approximately 50% and we were able to dramatically increase our buying capacity. Josh streamlined some more of his processes. Then I wrote an iPhone app that has our algorithm baked in to make quick calculations easier for Josh as he operates the day-to-day side. As our software and processes got better, we could purchase more in a batch. More friends asked to join us, and we started running multiple batches. Our current capacity for buying cards has now reached $70k per month and we’re filling that ability at a fast pace. Of course, not every batch will be a winner (just because we have never had a round lose money doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future), but it’s been a blast. My key takeaway from this adventure is to just encourage anyone to go and start building something, even if it seems silly to other people. I cannot overstate how fun it’s been building this, and I’m so grateful that Josh had the vision for this and invited me to be his partner in it. If you want to see some of our cards, you can check out more.xyz.

Curiosity is a competitive advantage.

The funniest outcome with this whole “Apple vs. Beeper” saga would be if Apple said, “Fine use the iMessage protocol. We won’t break interoperability and you can even have full feature parity… BUT… Any messages sent this way will still show up as the dreaded “Green Bubble”. (Pulling for @ericmigi and the @onbeeper team!)

Good things come to those who ship.

Do you ever screenshot things that they want to remember for later? Maybe it’s travel plans, a recipe you want to remember, or an article you want to reference later for work. I do this *all the time* but finding the what I want later is kind of a pain. If this sounds like you, would you shoot me a message or interacte with this post? I built a fun little side project and would love your input on it!

“It’s simple but it’s not easy”.

This simple quote from @paulg changed the trajectory of my life. Build things. Tell others about them. Ask people to pay for the product. Congratulations, you now have a business.