After these posts of the past few days - a handful of people reached out and wanted to get involved. A number of people wanted to invest money. If you’ve been following me for more than a few months,

After these posts of the past few days - a handful of people reached out and wanted to get involved. A number of people wanted to invest money. If you’ve been following me for more than a few months, you know that I already have about 90% of it in place. I have the software (that I built FOUR different iterations of - with the help of a couple of friends)...I have the physical grading supplies and workflow down...I have the tamper proof serialized hang tags...AND I have the packaging solutions.

But what I really need to figure out is a logistics chain for taking in shoes, grading them, processing, and sending them back out. Shipping shoes is quite expensive, and the only way I really feel it’ll be useful is through an existing middle man service. I have no interest in charging people $50 to get a pair of shoes graded (ie: $15-19 shipping EACH way + $10 for the service), so I’ve been stuck on this for a while.

I’ve graded a few hundred pairs of shoes for a few big companies and the solution we came up with was an onsite 360-degree camera and a professional photographer. They’d basically photograph each shoe they had in their warehouse with this camera and they’d send me blockchain-based links to each and every shoe. I’d pore over the images for quite a while inspecting everything from the glue to dust to stitching to...etc. If I’m being 100% honest - their camera and their photographer did such a great job that his photos were BETTER than my OWN in-person grading environment. The camera and photographer saved us a TON of time and made the shipping expense irrelevant.

Unfortunately, two of these companies went out of business or morphed into something else (they were software companies and not all that interested in being a sneaker middleman), but I STILL get their customers from time to time hitting me up asking about shoes I’ve graded for them.

All of that to say...there are a ton of ideas, but I really just need to get linked up with some shops and/or marketplaces that mess with the vision. If any of y’all have any ideas on that...or if any of y’all are starting your own marketplaces or know people who have - reach out. I am down to give it a shot...