There are 57 million sellers on eBay. Most of them hate it.

They pay 13% in fees. They fight an algorithm that buries their listings. They compete with counterfeits and dropshippers who don't know the difference between a 1960s no-feet PEZ dispenser and a Dollar Tree novelty.

And for all that pain, their customers don't even remember their store name. They remember eBay.

I've spent the last decade building marketplaces. Eight of them. I've watched what works, what dies, and what gets killed by people who never should have been in the room. The pattern is clear.

The era of one-size-fits-all marketplaces is over.

Every collecting community deserves its own marketplace. Not a subfolder on eBay. Not a hashtag on Etsy. A real home.

I'm building the platform that powers all of them.

The Seller Problem

Talk to a collectibles seller for five minutes. You'll hear the same story every time.

They run a Shopify store. They list on eBay. They cross-post to Mercari. They manage a Beehiiv newsletter to stay in touch with buyers. They track inventory in Excel. They check prices on three different apps. They scan barcodes with one tool and manage shipping with another.

It's insane.

We live in the age of AI and these people are duct-taping together eight different services to sell a yo-yo. Every one of those tools takes a cut, charges a subscription, or demands hours of manual work.

I watched this same problem at GoCamp, at BookOutdoors, at Fitted. The seller always gets the worst deal. They do the most work, carry the most risk, and get squeezed by platforms that treat them as interchangeable supply.

So I built Nerdbase. One platform. Marketplace, storefront, community, reputation, price charting. Everything a seller needs, in one place. No more duct tape.

Why I Care About This

I dropped out of high school. Dropped out of college. Joined the Navy.

I spent years building AI systems for NATO military intelligence, deployed to combat zones where the systems I built had to actually work. Not "work in a demo." Work when lives depended on it.

After the military, I taught myself to code and went all in on marketplaces.

GoCamp was the one that changed me. A van rental marketplace. I built it as the sole engineer to $4M GMV. It was working. It was growing. Customers loved it.

Then the investors decided slow growth wasn't exciting enough. They wanted hockey sticks. They wanted to burn money chasing scale before the unit economics were right. I watched them shut it down. A profitable, working business, killed because the people with the money wanted a different story.

That one sticks with me.

I went on to be the founding engineer at BookOutdoors (acquired by Hipcamp) and lead the technical build at Fitted, Inc., a B2B marketplace that powered over $100M in GMV across 500 shoe stores.

But GoCamp taught me the real lesson. Build something that works at small scale. Prove the economics. Don't let someone else's impatience kill a good thing.

That's exactly what I'm doing now.

What's Actually Working

Nerdbase launched six weeks ago. Here's where it stands.

13 sellers converted from Shopify in the first month. Over $60K in inventory. Zero ad spend. Every seller came through direct outreach and word of mouth.

$2,700 in GMV on $150/month burn.

Three verticals live: vintage toys and art slabs (Nerdworth), PEZ dispensers (Sugrworth), and yo-yos (Yoyoworth). Each one looks and feels native to its community. PEZ collectors see PEZ language, PEZ categories, PEZ culture. Yo-yo collectors see theirs. Same platform underneath. Completely different experience on top.

470+ users. All organic.

I built this alone. One person, using AI agents for code review, QA, market research, content creation, and financial analysis.

This isn't a flex. It's the thesis in action. AI automated roughly 70% of execution so I can make better decisions on the 30% that matters. The code, the outreach, the data pulls. All amplified. But the taste, the judgment, the conversations with sellers. That's mine. That's the moat.

The 1,000 eBays

Here's the big idea.

There is no "eBay for PEZ." There is no "eBay for yo-yos." There's just eBay. And collectors have been putting up with it because nothing better existed.

But every one of these communities has its own language, its own grading standards, its own culture. A PEZ collector doesn't think about rarity the same way a yo-yo collector does. Forcing them into the same search box is lazy. It's a product design failure masquerading as scale.

What if every collecting community had its own marketplace that spoke their language? That organized inventory the way their brains work? That featured the sellers they already trust?

And what if one platform powered all of them?

That's Nerdbase. The operating system underneath. Each new vertical launches on the same infrastructure. Same payments, same auth, same search, same seller tools. But wrapped in a skin that feels like it was built from scratch for that community.

Every new vertical is pure margin on the same spine. The playbook compounds. Each launch gets faster than the last.

What Comes Next

I'm not building the next eBay. I'm building the thing that replaces the need for eBay across a thousand communities.

Each one is small. That's the point. A $10M niche is a rounding error to eBay. But it's everything to the 500 sellers who live there. And when you stack a thousand of those niches on one platform, you have something enormous that no generalist marketplace can touch.

The sellers get lower fees, better tools, and a community that actually knows their name. The buyers get a shopping experience built for how they think. The platform gets compounding economics with every vertical added.

This is what happens when you stop treating sellers as supply and start treating them as the business.

I've built eight marketplaces. I've seen what kills them. I've seen what makes them last.

This one is going to last.