{"id":1071,"date":"2026-05-05T06:15:25","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T06:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/collectionizer.com\/?page_id=1071"},"modified":"2026-05-05T08:06:53","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T08:06:53","slug":"why-i-built-collectionizer","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/collectionizer.com\/?page_id=1071","title":{"rendered":"Why I built Collectionizer"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I collect board games, comics, and retro games and consoles \u2014 mainly Nintendo. My wife collects vintage Disney books. Between the two of us, we have a lot of stuff spread across a lot of different places.<\/p>

For board games, BoardGameGeek is excellent. It knows every game ever published, tracks plays, shows ratings, and has a community of millions. If you only collect board games, BGG is probably all you need.<\/p>

But I also collect comics and retro hardware. And none of those have a BGG equivalent that I actually liked. So for a while I did what most collectors do: spreadsheets.<\/p>

The spreadsheet problem<\/h2>

Spreadsheets are flexible enough to track anything. Purchase price, estimated value, condition, edition, where I bought it, whether I’ve lent it out \u2014 you can put anything in a spreadsheet.<\/p>

The problem is everything else. Spreadsheets aren’t on your phone in a usable form. They don’t have images. Sharing one with someone means emailing a file back and forth. And maintaining four or five separate spreadsheets for four or five different collections means four or five separate systems to keep in sync \u2014 each one slowly rotting as life gets busy.<\/p>

What I really wanted was something that felt like a proper app \u2014 fast, visual, accessible on any device \u2014 but was as flexible as a spreadsheet when it came to the fields that actually matter to me.<\/p>

Building it myself<\/h2>

I started building Collectionizer in 2023. The core idea was simple: one place for all your collections, no matter what you collect. Each collection gets its own structure \u2014 its own fields, its own layout \u2014 but they all live under one roof.<\/p>

I launched a beta in 2024, let a small group of people try it, and learned a lot. Then life got in the way, and most of 2025 went by without much progress. In 2026 I came back to it properly and have been making it production-ready.<\/p>

I’m a solo developer. This is not a VC-backed startup with a growth team. It’s a tool I built because I needed it, and kept building because other people seemed to need it too.<\/p>

What makes it different<\/h2>

There are collection apps for specific hobbies \u2014 BGG for board games, Goodreads for books, Discogs for vinyl. They’re all great at what they do. Collectionizer isn’t trying to replace them.<\/p>

What it does is fill the gap for everything else. And for collectors who have more than one hobby, it means you only need one place to look.<\/p>

A few things I built that most collection trackers don’t have:<\/p>