Collector Crypt’s revenue hit $100M in May. Here's their marketing advice.

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Digital collectibles marketplace Collector Crypt’s head of marketing Dakota Campbell has a rule when he’s talking with anyone not native to crypto: Don't go into the nitty gritties of blockchain tech.

"Technology should be experienced, not explained," Campbell said on StrataMedia's Talking Tokens podcast recently. "I'm not going to Instagram telling people to buy this thing on Solana because it's high throughput and 10,000 transactions per second. They don't care.” 

Campbell isn’t wrong. When I go to a coffee shop and tap to pay, I don’t need to know anything beyond the fact that it just works. Campbell said Collector Crypt is building toward and just selling “the sizzle, not the steak.”

That sizzle sell seems to be working well. In April, the platform saw trading volumes reach $165 million, and generated revenue of $85 million, driven almost entirely by digital Pokémon gacha machines aka randomized pack-opening systems borrowed from Japanese vending machines. In May, the platform hit $100 million in revenue and last week alone it did $88 million in revenue, Campbell shared.

But Collector Crypt, which deals in collectible trading cards that you can buy and trade digitally, didn’t reach such scale overnight. Campbell traces the demand back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when a generation of millennials and Gen Z rediscovered what made them happy as children, regaining a “newfound interest in memorabilia” like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh and sports. Since then, the marketplace’s growth has compounded. 

The infrastructure to support such endeavors at scale didn't exist until the platform launched on Solana, Campbell said, explaining that tokenizing a $5 card on Ethereum in 2017 could cost around $220 in gas fees. “Only when Solana rolled around and we saw high-throughput, fast transactions for very low fees did it start making sense." 

However, none of that is what Campbell leads with outside of crypto Twitter. The marketing challenge Campbell’s team is solving is a version of a problem every consumer crypto app faces: the crypto-native audience got you here, but they can't get you to the next level alone.

What he sells instead is the practical case of instant trading, a 2% marketplace fee vs. eBay's 14%, and access to inventory that you might not find at a major convention. For collectors who don’t have the space, cards can be held in Collector Crypt's vault in Montana that is climate-controlled and insured. The marketplace also lets users leverage their cards as DeFi collateral through partners like Jupiter and Loopscale. 

This feature isn’t unique to Collector Crypt, as mainstream wine vaults have existed for years, if not decades. But it does make the virtual vs. physical proposition more attractive to users who want to “own” an asset without holding on to it physically.  

"I don't want a $32,000 card in my house,” Campbell said. 

While the platform’s volume has surged lately, the metric he’s tracking the most is daily session spend, which has climbed from $7,000 to $18,000 since he joined three months ago. "That doesn't mean someone has set $18,000 on fire. It means they've bought and sold a hundred-dollar pack back and forth 20, 30 times, found the cards they loved, sold the ones they don't, [and] they keep coming back.”

Collector Crypt’s website is currently undergoing a full UX overhaul, and an app is expected this summer. The new design leans on ‘80s and ‘90s nostalgia, taking inspiration from blockbuster video stores and old comic shops. 

Going forward, Campbell says the marketplace’s roadmap extends well beyond Pokémon and the classic big name card collections. Campbell sees comic books, signed sports memorabilia, figurines, and eventually concert ticketing as natural extensions of the business model. 

He believes physical assets are better owned as digital deeds than stored in someone's living room. "If it exists in the real world, you can bring it onchain, and with the right rails, make a way better experience for everyone,” Campbell said. 

He expects the onchain collectibles economy to double within two years. "We're maybe 5% into seeing the fruition of our thesis. The sky's the limit [as] they're only making more collectibles."

Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.

For today’s episode, I interviewed Dakota Campbell, Head of Marketing at Collector Crypt, the platform that generated $165 million in volume in April alone by putting trading cards and physical collectibles onchain with Solana. 

Dakota expalins why the resurgence of physical collecting is what's actually pulling people toward digital ownership, and why Solana's low fees were the thing that finally made tokenizing a five-dollar card make sense after years of the idea being cost-prohibitive on Ethereum.

He also dives into how he thinks about marketing to everyday collectors vs crypto audiences, what it took to scale the business over the past few years and expansion beyond trading card games.

This episode is a part of the Solana Sessions campaign that Token Relations and the Talking Tokens podcast are doing, diving into founders' journeys and startups building on Solana. Check out the accompanying newsletter on www.token-relations.com 

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 The Evolution of Collectibles

02:55 Digital Collectibles and Nostalgia

06:12 Collector Crypt's Success and Market Dynamics

09:02 The Role of Solana in Collector Crypt

12:02 User Experience: Crypto Native vs. Mainstream Collectors

15:14 Marketplace Dynamics and Price Discoverability

17:45 Attracting Non-Crypto Collectors

21:01 Marketing Strategies for Diverse Audiences

25:21 Understanding Audience Engagement

28:41 Navigating Marketing in the Crypto Space

33:34 Expanding Beyond Trading Card Games

37:18 Rapid Fire Insights on Collectibles

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