I don’t usually write posts like this, but tonight I was sitting there looking at SlabShot on my phone and thinking about what it actually took to get here.
And I’m exhausted.
For the last five-plus months, this thing has basically consumed whatever free time I had left.
I have a full-time job. I have three kids who seem to have somewhere to be every five minutes. I run card shows. I have a house, a family, responsibilities, and all the normal stuff that comes with being an adult.
And then, somewhere in the hours that were left over, I decided I was going to build an app.
There were a lot of nights where everyone went to bed and I opened the laptop back up.
A lot of days off that weren’t really days off.
A lot of sitting in the car waiting for one of my kids and pulling out my phone to work on something.
A lot of telling myself, “I’m just going to fix this one thing,” and realizing a few hours later that it was 1 or 2 in the morning.
Then getting up and doing everything again the next day.
And the ridiculous part is that this whole thing started because I was trying to SAVE time.
I love cards. I love buying them, selling them, doing shows, finding something I forgot I had buried in a box.
But I absolutely hated listing them.
I’d come home, look at a stack of cards I needed to sell, and just leave them sitting there.
Because I knew what came next.
Take the pictures. Figure out the exact card. Search for comps. Dig through sold listings. Try to decide what it’s actually worth. Look at the condition. Wonder if it’s worth grading. Create the eBay listing. Type everything out. Set the price.
Finally get one card listed.
Then look over and realize there are 75 more sitting there.
I just didn’t have the time.
And I kept thinking there has to be a better way to do this.
Why can’t I just take a picture of the damn card?
Why can’t something identify it for me?
Why can’t it find the comps?
Why can’t it look at the condition and give me an idea of how it might grade?
And if it thinks the card could grade well, why can’t it compare the raw value to the value at different grades and tell me whether grading the thing even makes financial sense?
And after all of that, why can’t I just hit a button and list it?
That was really the beginning of SlabShot.
I wanted one place where I could snap a card, identify it, pre-grade it, check the comps, and get it listed on eBay without spending my entire night doing it.
I wanted to get through 10+ cards in the time I was wasting doing one manually.
What I severely underestimated was how much work it would take to make something that complicated feel simple.
There have been bugs that made me want to throw my laptop.
Things that worked perfectly one day and broke the next.
Features I thought would take a few days that turned into weeks.
Late nights questioning whether anybody was even going to use this thing.
And definitely moments where I wondered why I was putting myself and my family through all of this for an app that started because I was too busy in the first place.
But I kept going.
Because every time I looked at those boxes of cards sitting around my house, I knew I couldn’t be the only person with this problem.
There have to be other dads with stacks of cards sitting in their basement because after work, dinner, homework, practices, baths, bedtime and everything else, the last thing they want to do is spend three hours creating eBay listings.
There have to be breakers and sellers who love this hobby but hate how much of their life gets eaten up by the boring part of it.
And there have to be collectors looking at a card wondering, “Is this actually worth grading?” who would love to have something give them a useful answer before spending the money to send it out.
That’s who I kept thinking about while building this.
Because I’m one of them.
SlabShot is finally at the point where I can pull out my phone, take a picture of a card, have it identified, get AI pre-grading and comps, see whether grading might make sense, and get that card listed for sale on eBay without bouncing between a bunch of different apps.
And seeing it actually work is a strange feeling.
Because nobody downloading it is ever going to see the 1:30 AM nights.
They won’t see the days off spent staring at a screen.
They won’t see me working on it from the car while waiting for one of my kids.
They won’t see the bugs, the frustration, the features that had to be rebuilt, or all the times I told my wife, “I swear I’m almost done.”
They’ll just see an app.
And that’s okay.
Because the entire point was to make something that saves people time.
I spent an absurd amount of mine building it so hopefully other collectors don’t have to waste so much of theirs.
There’s still plenty I want to improve. I’m sure people will find things that need fixing. And I have a list a mile long of things I still want SlabShot to become.
But for the first time in five months, I’m trying to stop for a second and appreciate the fact that the idea I kept thinking about while staring at stacks of unlisted cards is actually sitting on my phone.
I’m tired.
My family is probably tired of hearing the word SlabShot.
And I’m pretty sure I’ve aged about five years in five months.
But I built the damn thing.
And I’m proud of it.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/slabshot/id6789745296
