For Love & Money
From 2016 through 2020 collecting on Quidd was done for fun or love, but not money.
While hundreds of collectors have spent tens of thousands of dollars building up their Quidd collections over the years, the primary motivation for doing so has not been to profit. Why? Up until this point -- and in spite of an active black market on eBay -- Quidd collectors could not easily sell their digital collectibles for real money. That is, like a F2P mobile game, there was only cash-in, and no cash-out.
So why did they collect?
Original Quidd collectors, the so-called OGs of Quidd, spent significant time and money collecting for the pure joy of it. For some it was about bringing order to chaos, for others it was about the love of the brand or character, and for others still it was about social status.
This is significant because it presents an incredible opportunity to up-level Quidd by adding economic motivations to collect and ensuring they can co-exist alongside psychological or sociological ones.
In Q1 2021, Quidd opened the private beta for Cash Account. With Cash Account, collectors can:
Create and maintain a secondary Cash Wallet
Fund their Cash Wallet through deposits from outside financial institutions
Turn any item from their collection into a Cash Listing
Sell their Cash Listing to another collector
Use proceeds from sales to top-up their Cash Wallet
Buy Cash Listings from other holders of a Cash Account
Withdraw funds from their Cash Wallet via PayPal
Cash Account is more than just a feature. It changes everything. In particular, Cash Account fundamentally alters the following:
Business Model: every successful cash-based aftermarket transaction between two Cash Accounts generates a 10% sales fee for Quidd, deducted from the seller’s proceeds. This new revenue stream is perpetual in nature and rises or falls with the value of items in circulation on Quidd. Additionally, the fee, being imposed at a very different moment in the typical collector’s journey, helps ease the antagonistic relationship that can develop between collectors and producers over time. Prior to Cash Account, Quidd only monetized with the release of new collectibles in the primary market, namely through the sale of blind purchase packs. While fun, blind purchase packs invariably leave many collectors upset, particularly those that spend money but are unable to pull sought-after insert cards. The shift in business model to the aftermarket monetizes at a “transaction moment” when all parties are happy with the outcome, not when 99% are left empty-handed.
Alignment of Motivations: this new business model cuts deeper, fundamentally changing the motivations of the company by aligning them with the collector community. In simple terms, Quidd does well when collectors do well. This alignment will set Quidd apart from other collectibles companies. While most collectibles companies dream up ways to remove money from a collector’s wallet, with Cash Account, Quidd is laser-focused on ways to help collectors put money back in. Moreover, this newfound alignment helps reduce the urge to oversaturate the market with increased supply, a known trap from many producers of trading cards.
Total Addressable Market: the ability to generate sales from one’s digital collection is Quidd’s final piece of the puzzle to gaining parity with traditional physical collecting. For years people looked at Quidd funny in its evangelism for digital collectibles. Now, with high-stakes, real money collecting complementing the pure enjoyment of emotional collecting, Quidd has a potent value proposition sure to appeal to the most conventional of physical collectors.
Further still, it is the marriage of Quidd’s legacy of “collecting for fun” with its new reality of “collecting for money” that makes the future bright.
For collectibles markets, the more diverse the “demand drivers” for a collectible, the better.
As the saying goes, “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” But whether something is “trash” or “treasure” is the perception of the buyer. Stated simply, supporting multiple perceptions of treasure broadens demand, helps ensure liquidity, and is a very good thing.
Conversely, if the demand driver for a collectible is singular and homogeneous in nature -- say economic speculation – when price growth slows, there is no so-called greater fool and the speculative market, or bubble, is ripe for popping.
Quidd is very close to what it calls “sustainable market magic”, that moment when a collectibles market just hums because buyers and sellers come together for different reasons -- the emotional buyer meets the economic seller, the two transact, and each one thinks they got the better end of the deal!
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