Side-Project

I own a shelf of sealed Pokémon product. Sixty-odd items - booster boxes, elite trainer boxes, premium collections, a few Pokémon Center exclusives from Japan - and over the last couple of years the shelf has quietly become worth more than some of the furniture it stands near. Which means it belongs on the contents insurance, and contents insurance has a very specific idea of what “owning” something means. An insurer doesn’t want your enthusiasm. They want, per item: what it is, what it’s worth now, and photographs. Notably absent: what you paid. Insurance is about replacement value, and a box that cost $60 at retail and sells for $300 today is a $300 box. A list and a folder of pictures. If the shelf burns, that folder is the claim. ...

I’ve spent the last year on WealthRelay, a valuation API: portfolios, trades, instrument prices, returns, currency conversion, all behind GraphQL. It has the problem every B2B API has at the start. The first customer doesn’t exist yet, and until one does, every design decision is a guess about what the API is for. So I became the first customer. I collect things - sealed Pokémon product mostly, which I track in Collectr - and the collectibles that have genuinely behaved like an asset class these last couple of years are POP MART blind boxes. A set is twelve figures. One of them is the secret, which you can’t see through the box, and which sells on eBay for a multiple of its siblings. People buy whole cases to complete sets, trade their duplicates, and argue about what their shelf is worth. Every tracker I found answered that with a checklist. None of them treated the shelf as what it is: a portfolio, with a cost basis, a market value and a return. ...