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The "why" behind why I'm launching @KeyWire_io
If you're a collector, you'll understand.
It's fun, it's an escape, it's joy, it's a part of your life and personality. You find like-minded people and they become your people. It's community. It's life.
I've loved comics and cards since I was probably 4 or 5 years old. The only things I love more than collectibles are my family and friends. That's it. It's always been that way. I vividly remember being maybe 5 and being obsessed with Spider-Man, Batman, and Star Wars. As an adopted only child that lived in a rural New England town in the pre-internet stone age, I spent a lot of time by myself. Imagination was my companion. Art and story were my reality escape. Batman, Spider-Man, and the cast of Star Wars were all I could think about. This is deeply ingrained in my DNA.
Clearly, that kid never really left. He just got older and the collections got bigger. The feeling when you pull a card, dig a key issue out of a longbox at a show, or close on a grail you've been hunting for years, that feeling is the same at 8 as it is at 38. It doesn't age. It's the closest thing to pure joy I know outside of the people I love.
My kids were raised on this. We've waited in line at Target on Thursday mornings for Pokémon. We stood in line seven hours at San Diego Comic-Con just for a shot at buying exclusive Legos. We dig through longboxes together. We'll never stop watching anime.
But somewhere along the way, the hobby got noisy. Prices move faster than anyone can track. Hype cycles spin up overnight and vanish by morning. Scalpers pump products and leave real collectors holding the bag. The useful information lives scattered across a hundred Discords, random X threads, private spreadsheets, and group chats you're not in. The actual signal gets buried every day. The fragmentation just seems endless.
All of this preprogramming led me to launching KeyWire.io.
What started as an idea for a newsletter grew quite a bit as a few friends and my boys got involved. Now we've built the collectibles site I've always looked for. KeyWire is the front page of collectible markets. One surface covering Pokémon, Magic, One Piece, Lorcana, Gundam, comics and soon sports cards, retro games, anything that grades and anything that moves. A Fear & Greed Index for every category. Original research under our Signal desk. Movers, velocity, grading pop deltas, mispriced flags. Giveaways, drops, leaderboards, community. The loud fun that makes collecting what it is.
We're opening the KeyWire doors slowly, starting now. I just spent the last 20 minutes clearing a bunch of folks who signed up. If you want full access to the site early, grab a subscription. Subscribers get the most exposure to product giveaways (with tons of extra entries), and our Buyers Club launches very soon.
WTF is the Buyers Club?
When we get Pokemon ETB's, One Piece cases and other product at or near cost, we turn around and offer it to Buyers Club members for just a bit above our cost plus shipping. You save real money over time and get stuff shipped right to your door. We hate scalpers just as much as you do (and we're not stopping there).
We're starting small. Twenty Buyers Club slots to begin with. FCFS at first, then offered to existing Pro subscribers, then Collectors and invite-only based on Quests and community activity. We scale the club alongside our supply. We'll learn as we go.
Buyers Club members also get access to cards from the KeyWire packs we rip, priced 20 to 30 percent below FMV. We've come up with a fun way to do this. More on that soon.
If any of this hits, go grab your subscription at keywire.io.
Signals, not noise.
I'm building this for the kid sitting on his bedroom floor in rural New England with a stack of comics and cards and nobody to talk to about them. There are millions of us out there now. We deserve somewhere serious to go.
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