The granddaddy of all venture capital funds, Bessemer Venture Partners, keeps a tally of the mega-successes it passed on in a list known as the Anti-Portfolio. In it, renowned VC David Cowan is attributed for passing up on eBay:
“Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You’ve GOT to be kidding,” thought Cowan. “No-brainer pass.”
Good news David, lightening may in fact strike twice for you because here’s your chance to invest in Colnect, a community site for collectors of coins, banknotes, stamps, phone cards and bottle caps. And no, I’m NOT kidding at all.
Colnect (Collect+Connect) is a collector’s community site that assists its users to organize, share, trade and sell their collectables. There are no fancy algorithms, the UI is modest—old school some may argue—and it’s literally a one-man show having been founded, coded and operated by 29-year-old Amir Wald. He’s still the only employee(!)
The core of Colnect is a community driven wiki where Contributors add content (collectibles), Editors make changes to existing items, and Coordinators supervise content contributions and provide permissions to Editors. Wald also employed crowd-sourcing to translate the site to 35 languages.
Colnect’s catalogs currently encompass 158K phone cards, 68K stamps, 15K coins, 15K banknotes and 5k bottle caps. Users have marked 11M items so far: 6.6M collectibles in wish lists, 4M in collections, and another 800K in swap lists. Wald tells me that in the last month alone over 650,000 items were marked in the system. He plans on continuously adding categories, with upcoming candidates being PEZ dispensers, Kinder Surprise toys, baseball cards, and waif for it—barf bags. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
Part of Colnect’s charm is that it really doesn’t try to impress you, it just aims to provide basic but critical utilities for collectors of mass-produced collectibles. Collectors can easily manage their inventory with personal collection, swap list and wish list management tools. There’s also auto-matching between collectors’ inventory and wish/swap lists (huge time saver I’m told). Then of course there are the run of the mill social features such as personal profiles, ratings, friends and private messages. These are all on top of the actual catalogs which are continuously updated and therefore a godsend to collectors.
All trades on Colnect are currently free of charge for now. There is however a premium membership option starting at just over $6 per month with the purchase of a one year subscription. Benefits include Custom Personal Lists, Premium Member Highlighting which helps member profiles and their items stand out, and the removal of ads across the site (AdSense and eBay ads are plastered everywhere).
So there you have it Mr. Cowan, your second opportunity to invest in stamps, coins and barf bags.
Great site for collectors
great, never expected i will see a note from 1962 just two years after independent of Somalia.
As the catalogs are created by volunteering collectors (over a hundred so far), you’re sure to find more surprises lying in wait
Thank you Roi for the kind post!
To Twitter addict out here, Colnect is twitting on each new item and each edit made by an editor. See: http://blog.col...th-twitter.html
They won this year’s Startup 2.0 competition
Thanks Jose for your comment. Here’s the post about winning the competition: http://blog.col...ompetition.html
Keep up the good work Amir , great Video
Just wanted to congratulate Amir on being mentioned on TC. You can be added to the long list of symfony success stories.
wow! there are many cool sites like this one that no one knows.
“…lightening may in fact strike twice…”
No! It’s lightning, not lightening! No e!
“…upcoming candidates being PEZ dispensers, Kinder Surprise toys, baseball cards, and waif for it—…”
Wait, not waif! No f!
Your spellchecker isn’t cutting it; you really need an editor, or at least a proofreader.
These errors put speed bumps in the reading of the article. They distract me.
LIGHTNING. COLLECTIBLES.
cool story, bro
Bro? Are you sure? Because he kind of writes like a chick.
One more site that proves one single thing: if you keep it simple, it’ll be successful.
Is that such a hard principle that 90% of the startups fail to employ it?
Good collectors site !! i already check with Colnect,but i saw some coins i have and cheap one ….jajaj …funny …
colnect.com – It’s the best site in Web. I think all the collectors around the must go to this page.
Barf bags!!! Are there collectors of barf bags???
Any collectors of toilet paper out there? :p
Somebody has suggested tea-bags.
As I posted on the forums board,
‘Tea Bags??????
I don’t think that the postman will be pleased delivering my soggy used ones.
How do you count the perforations.
What next? The milk to go with the tea & sugar.’
I think that specialization is worth a lot and Cowan was right here. For people wanting extra income from their collectibles, I think this was a good time to fund a venture like this.
“David Cowan is attributed for passing up on eBay”
passing up as in NOT investing in eBay and later adding it to the VC’s anti-portfolio amusing page
Impressive site, maybe Cowan will pick up the phone
Naa
Amir – keep up the great job
what a niche idea, long tail to the point. well done my friend.
Wha? Wha? No Mama I don’t want to go to school!
Oh, ok, I’m awake now. Amir, I’d love to hear more about Colnect. I’m at david@bvp.com.
Thanks for the wake up call.
–”Mr. Cowan”
That’s one butt ugly logo.
Thanks, I made it myself. You’re welcomed to try designing a better one and we’ll see if the members of Colnect will like it better.
For those of you that are interested in the more visual aspects of collecting and want to see collectors showing off their collections, through video and photos should check out CollectorsQuest.com. There is also the ability to purchase on the site as well as meet other like minded collectors. You can check out our promo video at http://www.coll...deos/promo.html
Seems like a nice site (I’ve seen a few like it before) addressing different needs than those met by Colnect. Collectors of mass-produced collectibles may have a huge quantity of items and for them Colnect is a real revolution. Good luck
For those who speak German.. Tamundo has been successfully going for the exact same niche as colnet..they recently closed a financing round despite the economic situation. http://www.tamundo.de
My German isn’t very good but it seems like yet another nice niche-specific marketplace. Colnect’s essence is completely different.
Nice post…
Colnect is truly a great site and Amir is doing a wonderful work – all by himself. Amir – keep it up!
“If you build it, they will come…”
Amir, it has been said already many times, but I like to say it again.
Colnect is a FANTASTIC site for us collectors !!
Thanks for the link !
I personally uses a lot http://www.delcampe.net for my purchases… they have million of items… but so few techcrunch articles… why ?
… they are the best imho ! 
like the post and of course like ur site! good 4 u!
Colnect is the evolution of Islands Phonecards Database. Under the die hard phonecards collectors (like me) a well known site.
After Amir started to get involved it all went much faster and much better. Many nice features and regular updates of the phonecards database.
Colnect is moving up again with the introduction of other collectables.
If Amir manages to bind the collectors of the other collectables the way he did with phonecards collectors, Colnect wil become the leading site for many collectables.
In my opinion (and I do consider myself as a advanced phonecardscollector in Euope) Colnect is THE site for phonecards collectors!
Hope Amir will keep up the good work!!