Hobby Jobs: The Hobby Cannot Grow Without Collector Trust

Foreign. Welcome back to another episode of Hobby Jobs here on the Stacking Slabs Network. Excited for you to be here. Appreciate all the engagement and support for Hobby Jobs. It has been an awesome project to sink my teeth in digging into the industry side of the sports card hobby and everything that makes it up. And as this episode gets released, we are here. It is the week of the National. I will say this up front. Last year's national was a pivotal event for the stacking slaps business. Not only was I running around doing content, recording episodes, making connections, but I had so many new conversations at the event with business owners and operators that then turned into business opportunities on the other side. There is something special about the National. There is something special about everyone being under one roof. And if you are building a business in this space, you should do whatever you can to make those connections because they will be fruitful on the other side if you handle those relationships appropriately. I'm fired up. I've got a full slate. I hope I get some time to look for the cards, but I will be doing content at Card Ladder Booth. We're throwing wrestling card takeover July 31, the Friday at the Embassy Suites. I've got meetings, I've got Donruss I've got all the things. I'm thrilled, I'm motivated. I've got a lot of energy. Even after Fanatics Fest this week, a large portion of the sports card industry will be in that convention center. The national is opening on Wednesday, and for collectors, that means cards. They mean showcases. It means trying to find something you have not seen before. It means the trade nights, the autographs, breaking, buying, selling, and probably walking more miles than you planned. Make sure you get some good shoes on those feet. They're going to be sore when you hit the hotel room each night, I can promise you that. But if you're working in the sports card industry or you want to work, I want you to look at the national maybe a little bit differently. The national is not only the biggest card show of the year. For five days, it becomes the temporary headquarters of the sports card industry. The official numbers tell part of that story. This year's show will cover 500,000 square feet, more than 600 dealers. The organizers have already added an extended show area with more tables and more corporate space. Even the way companies buy space tells you what the event has become. Corporate footprints start at 10k, the largest tier around 80k. That is before the booth is built, before the staff files in, before hotels, dinner signage activations, giveaways and content. Companies are making massive investments to show collectors and each others that they matter. Last year I remember walking the Fleer and feeling like something had changed. The national had has always been important, but it looked more professionalized. More companies had dedicated spaces, more teams were present. The show Fleer felt less like a collection of separate hobby businesses and more like a visible industry. And I think that distinction matters, especially for the people listening to this show. If you have wanted to build relationships inside grading marketplaces, manufacturing, tech supplies, auctions, retail or media, you rarely get this many decision makers in one place. But I want to be very clear about something. Being in the building does not automatically create opportunity. Walking up to somebody and saying I love cards and would love to work in the hobby is not enough. Passion may earn you 10 seconds. Fluency earns you that second conversation. So before you go, identify five companies you generally care about. Learn about what each one does, what their problems are, understand what they serve. Look for one problem it appears to be solving, and prepare one thoughtful question, not a pitch that proves you've paid attention. Maybe it's something like what are collectors having the hardest time understanding about your service? Maybe it's what part of the customer experience becomes more difficult as your volume grows? Maybe it's when collectors try your product once and do not return. What do you believe is getting in the way? Those questions open up better conversations because they are about the business and the collector, not about what somebody can do for you. Then listen. Do not corner somebody during their busiest hour. Do not hand them your life story. Do not force a job conversation on the show Fleer Make a real connection. Learn something. Follow up after the show with enough context that they remember you. The opportunity at the national is not to collect business cards. The opportunity is to begin relationships. And if you are already working in the industry, I think the same principles apply. Don't spend the entire week inside your booth talking to the same people you already know. Walk the fork. Meet the operator sitting one or two steps before you in the value chain. Meet the people sitting one or two steps after you meet the ask what is creating friction for their customer. The national gives us a physical map of the industry. The most valuable thing you can take home may be a better understanding of how all the pieces connect. And this brings me to this week's operator note. Because the size of the booth, the polish of the activations, and the volume of transactions can all make the industry look healthy. But those things do not tell us whether collectors feel supported in growth. That leaves collectors behind is not durable growth. There is a sentence I keep hearing in different forms. When businesses talk about growth, it sounds like we need to bring new people into the hobby. I totally agree. New collectors matter. New demand matters. More people discovering cards can create opportunity for everyone. But I think the industry has become so attracted to the top of the funnel that it sometimes ignores the people already standing in the building. The collectors who are already buying, collectors who are already submitting, those that are already trading, those who have already trusted companies with their money, their cards and their time. They can start to feel like a completed transaction, like the hard part is over. We acquired them. We converted them. Now we can move on to the next person. That is a dangerous way to think about the collector. A collector is not a conversion. A collector is a relationship. And in this industry, the relationship can last for decades. The business case for supporting that relationship isn't soft. It is not simply about being nice. It isn't about retention. It's about is about trust. It's about repeated activity. It's about referral. It is about what your product actually feels like from the other side PwC surveyed more than 5,500 customers for its 2025 customer experience study. 29% said they have stopped using or buying from a brand because of poor customer experience. More than half had stopped buying because of a bad experience with a product or service. Here is the part that should get the operator's attention. Roughly nine out of 10 executives in this study believed customer loyalty had increased. Only 4 out of 10 consumers felt the same way. That is not a small disagreement. That is an operating blind spot. The people running the business think the relationship is becoming stronger. The people buying from the business are not nearly as convinced. And I think that gap can become even wider in sports cards because collectors are unusually invested in the outcome. This is not always a normal package. It might be a card someone searched for five years. It might be the most expensive collectible they've ever purchased. It might be tied to their father, their childhood favorite athlete, or best season their team ever had. It might be an asset. They are trusting a company to authenticate, grade, insure, store and sell. When something goes wrong, the collector does not experience it as a line item in a support queue. It feels personal. That does not mean the collector is always right. It does not mean every demand should be met. It does not mean a company should abandon its policies every time somebody gets angry. Supporting the collector is not the same thing as surrendering to the collector. Good support requires boundaries. It requires consistency. It requires people who can explain a decision clearly, even when the customer does not like the answer. The standard cannot be make every collector happy. That's impossible. The standard should be did we make the process understandable? Did we set the right expectation? Did we communicate before the uncertainty turned into fear? Did we treat the collectors concerned like it mattered? Did we make a fair decision? And did we learn enough to make the next experience better? That is Real Collector Support I think collector support has four jobs inside a sports card business. The first is resolution. It's an obvious one. Package is late, card is missing. Payment is held. Submission status is unclear. A trade does not match the agreement. A customer needs an answer. Resolution matters. But the company that defines support only as resolution will always be reactive. It will spend the time cleaning up problems after the collector has already felt them. The second job is education. This is where many hobby businesses are leaving value on the table. If a collector does not understand how to use their service, then that's not just a collector problem, it's an education problem. Every repeated support question is telling you that something in the customer journey is not clear enough. The question can become a better Onboarding Email More Content Checklist Help Desk Article A piece of content that shows a real example of someone using it. Education does more than just reduce tickets. It gives collectors confidence. And confidence creates participation. People use products they understand. They return to processes they know how to navigate. They recommend experiences they can explain to someone else. The third job is intelligence. Your support team may understand your product's weaknesses earlier than anyone else in the company. They hear the language collectors use when they're confused. They know which promise is being misunderstood. They see where expectations and reality separate. They know which product decisions look clean in a meeting but creates friction in the wild. If those insights stay inside a support inbox, the company wastes them. Support should be connected to the product. It should be connected to operations, marketing, and leadership. The goal is not to to forward a pile of complaints. The goal is to turn patterns into decisions. What are the five questions we understand most often? Where do consumers most frequently abandon the process? Which status creates the most uncertainty? What promise are we failing to explain? What issues keep returning after we believe it was fixed? Those are not only support questions, they're business questions. The fourth job is advocacy. Someone inside the company has to represent the collector when the collector is not in the room, when a new feature is being planned, who asks how a first time user will understand it? When a policy changes? Who asks how it will be experienced to the person affected? When the company prepares a major activation, who asks whether it creates value for Collectors or merely creates attention for the brand. When the business is moving faster, who protects the parts of the experience that made people trust it in the first place? Collector advocacy does not mean the loudest voice on social media gets to run the company. It means decisions are not made as though the collector is an abstraction. The best businesses bring the customer into the decision before the decision reaches the customer. I think there's a few reason sports card companies struggle with this. The first is volume. When the market gets hot, companies are rewarded for moving quickly. More orders, more submissions, more transactions, more inventory growth exposes every week system. An experience that felt personal at a hundred customers can feel cold at a hundred thousand. The founder who answered every direct message can't do it forever. The informal process that worked when everyone sat in one room begins to crack. And that is normal. What is not acceptable is pretending the relationship can remain strong without replacing founder attention with a real system. The second reason is that support is often measured as a cost. How many tickets? How quickly did we close? How many people can one employee handle? Those metrics matter. But speed without resolution is not good support. A fast, useless answer is still useless. Closing a ticket is not the same thing as restoring trust. Companies should ask, did the collector need to contact us more than once? Did they have a repeat story? Did the issue cause them to stop using the product? Did we identify the root cause? Did we remove the same friction from the next collector? The third is distance. As a company professionalizes, more employees may enter the business from outside of sports cards. This is a major advantage. I've been talking a lot about it on hobby jobs. The industry needs experienced operators. It needs people who know how to build systems, lead teams, manage logistics and scale tech. But professional experience without collector fluency can create decisions that are technically correct and emotionally wrong. If you do not understand why a collector checks tracking 10 times in one day, a delay can look trivial. If you do not understand the difference between replacing a commodity and replacing a one of a kind card, a reimbursement policy can look complete when it's not. If you do not understand how reputation travels through the community, one unresolved case can look isolated when thousands of collectors are watching it. This is why category fluency is an edge. It helps an operator understand what the spreadsheets can't show. But I need to add the other side. Collector passion without operating discipline is not enough either. Knowing every parallel in a product doesn't automatically make someone good at support. The work still requires judgment, documentation, empathy, clear writing, de escalation, pattern recognition, Follow through and the ability to distinguish a one time exception from a broken system. The best collector facing professionals combine both sides. They understand the category deeply and operate with discipline. If I were advising a hobby business that wants to improve collector support, I would start with five moves. First, map the collector journey. Write down every meaningful step from discovery through repeat use. What does the collector expect at each step? What information do they receive? Where are they waiting? Where are they trusting you with money or an item? Where can they become uncertain? You cannot support a journey you've never mapped. Second, audit. The moments of highest anxiety in cards. Waiting creates stories. If collectors do not know what's happening, they fill in the blank themselves. Usually it's with the worst case scenarios. We've all been there. A useful status update can prevent a support request before it exists. Proactive communication is not decoration. It is part of of the product. Third, turn repeated questions into education. Pull the top 20 questions that you've received from the last 90 days. Do not write answers for the support team. Fix the point in the journey that created each question. If 10 people misunderstand something, assume the 11th person will too. Fourth, create a feedback loop with an owner. Someone has to be responsible for caring, support, intelligence and into the rest of the business. Not occasionally on schedule. The same themes should be reviewed by support, product, operations, marketing and leadership. That meeting does not need to be long, but the loop needs to be closed. The team should be able to say, we heard this, we investigated, we changed it. Here's what happened afterward. Fifth, measure trust. Not only ticket volume, track responses, track resolution time, but also track repeat contacts, recurring issues, customer retention after a problem and the percentage of support demand that could have prevented. Then talk to collectors. Not only the whales, not only the people with the largest followings. Talk to the new collector who found the process confusing. Talk to the longtime collector who quietly stopped using the service. Talk to the people who had a problem and remained a customer because somebody handled it well. The people who stay can teach you what creates loyalty. The person who leads can teach you what the dashboard missed. Here's the larger point. Collector support should not live at the edge of your business. It should influence how the business operates. If the sports card industry wants to keep growing, it cannot only become better at acquiring attention. It has to become better at keeping trust. That idea came through clearly in my recent conversation with Evan Parker. It's on the main feed. Passionate Profession. Go check it out. Evan is the CEO of ONIT Athlete. He also helped build Mantle, a community platform for collectors. And his career has Moved through journalism, agency work, nascar and the athletic. What stood out to me was not simply that Evan understands brand. It was how he defines the people a brand serves. He does not talk about community like it is an audience sitting at the end of a distribution channel. He talks about community as a participant in the business. The difference is enormous. Evan has said that the goal is not to build for the collectibles community. It is to build with the collectibles community. That can sound like a nice line until you consider what it demands from the operator. Building for someone allows you to keep control. You decide what they need. You create it, you present it, then you measure whether they accepted it. Building with somebody requires listening earlier. It means the community can affect the product before it even launches. It means you have to hear the feedback you did not request. It means some of your assumptions will be dead wrong. It means the people closest to the passion may see things the operator can't. Evan also made a point in the conversation that applies directly to Onnit. Onnit has to understand multiple people who may encounter the same product. One person may buy collegiate cards because the player means something to their school, their family or memory. Another person may buy the same card because they believe it can be resold. Those are different motivations. They create different behaviors and and a business cannot serve them well if it pretends they are the same customer. The collector may want context. Why does this athlete matter? What makes this release meaningful? How does this card connect to school, season or community? The reseller may prioritize liquidity, timing and demand. Neither person needs to be insulted, but the product and communication should understand what each person is trying to do. That is one of the most useful lessons an operator can take from Evan. Do not flatten your customers into a demographic. Understand their motivation. Sports card collector is not a complete customer profile. Neither is college football fan. The useful question is what job is that person asking the product to do? Are they trying to feel closer to the school? Commemorate a season, support an athlete, build a set, find an early card, make money, join a community, share the experience with their child. The answer changes how you should serve them. Evan's career offers a lesson for people who want to work in the industry. The collectibles business is not only hiring people who have spent their entire careers in card shops. It needs people who can bring proven skills and into the category. Evan brought journalism, communication, content, community and executive leadership. But he did not treat the hobby like a generic market onto which those skills could be pasted. He paired his professional experience with real Curiosity about why collectors care. That is the combination transferable skills plus category fluency. If you come from the outside of the hobby, do not apologize for it. Your outside experience may be exactly what a company needs, but do the work to understand the collector. And if you have spent your life in cards, do not assume passion completes your resume. Learn the professional discipline required to turn your knowledge into a repeatable result. The future of this industry belongs to the people who can do both. The job I want to highlight this week is the collectors relation lead at Veriswap. I chose this role because it sits directly at the intersection of everything we've discussed. Veriswap is a marketplace built around card trading. Instead of two collectors shipping directly to each other, both sides send their cards to Veriswap. The company verifies the trade before the forwarding the cards. Think about the trust involved in that process. Two collectors have agreed on value. Cards are moving in two different directions. Cast cash may be added to one side. Packages are in transit condition and identity matter. Each collector is waiting for the other side to perform. The product does not work without confidence. That makes a collector relations central to the business, not peripheral. The company says it's completed more than 160 million in transaction in three years. That's a ton of serves 120,000 user and handles trades as large as 300K. At that scale, the collector experience cannot depend on a founder answering every message. It needs ownership. The qualification tells us that Veriswatt believes that ownership requires they want deep knowledge of high end sports cards, completed sales, industry trends, collector psychology. They also want at least five years of customer support or sales experience. And they want someone who with a high agency mindset who can launch experiments, learn from imperfect data and scale what works. That combination is worth paying attention to. That isn't generic customer service job with sports card added to the title. It is category fluency plus operating experience. The right candidate has to understand that the card and the person they have to know when a collector is raising a legitimate issue. They have to communicate under pressure. They have to see patterns across individual cases and they have to turn those patterns into a better marketplace. If you're interested in that role, do not apply by saying only that you love cards. Show evidence. Where have you owned a difficult customer relationship? Where have you improved a process rather than merely followed one? Where have you turned feedback into measurable change? Build your resume and interview stories around questions like that. The role also tells us something larger about the sports card job market. Collector relations is becoming a real operating function that creates an opening for people who have built their careers in customer success, account management, sales operations, hospitality or support. The industry needs builders who know what collectors feel and know what scalable businesses require. If that sounds like you, this might be a role to take seriously. This week, Hobby Jobs will be on the ground at the National. I will be recording conversations at the Card Letter booth with owners, operators and entrepreneurs who made the decision to build their lives around sports cards. You will hear many of these conversations in the coming weeks on this show. They'll be integrated in these episodes. I want to document what they are doing before cards, what they left behind when the business became real, and what the industry has forced them to learn. Because the professional side of sports cards is growing in public, but too much of the operating knowledge stays private. Hobby Jobs exist to change that. If you work in the industry and or want to work in it, or care about building better hobby businesses, make sure you subscribe to the Hobby Jobs newsletter. Link is in the show Notes Every week I go deep on operator psychology. I talk, I highlight people. I'm having a lot of fun doing it. If you're going to be at the National, I'd love to say hey, if you are a business who wants to get involved in hobby jobs or wants to have a chat about how what we're doing can help you, I'm always open to that conversation. I appreciate your engagement, your support. Hobby Jobs is just getting started. This is episode 10. We put out more newsletters, but there is a growing need and demand for content like this in this space and I believe I am an individual operator who's running a business who is also worked 15 years in tech and scaling businesses, building go to market strategies, creating operations, doing marketing, doing sales. I have a lot of experience and I have a lot of knowledge to share. I'm really fired up about what we're doing here. Happy National Week. We'll take care. Talk to you soon.