The best markets usually exist before someone builds the marketplace.
Every founder dreams of creating a new behavior.
But most of the greatest products did something much simpler.
They found something humans were already doing manually, and gave that behavior a place to live.
A public surface.
A scoreboard.
A market.
That’s the part I think founders underestimate.
Especially solo founders.
Hey everyone,
I’m James, founder of @JKIndex_
And before I go any further, I should probably admit my ulterior motive
I’m looking for the right growth operator to build this with me.
But my second reason for writing this is for the other solo founders out there.
The ones staring at a market everyone else thinks is too small.
The ones building something people don’t understand yet.
Because being a solo founder is weird.
- You’re the engineer.
- The designer.
- The product lead.
- The marketing team.
- The person celebrating the wins.
- The person debugging production issues at 3am.
And somehow, after all of that, you still have to convince the world why this thing should exist.
But there’s also an unfair advantage hidden inside that.
You’re close to the user.
Really close.
And when you’re close enough, you start noticing something important.
Users usually show you what they want before they know they want a product.
You just have to find the behavior.
Finding the Invisible Market
Before prediction markets existed at scale, people were already predicting.
Sports debates.
Election arguments.
Group chats.
Twitter polls.
People arguing over outcomes that had not happened yet.
The behavior came first.
The market came second.
The product just created the surface.
And that brings me to trading cards.
Every collector understands one moment.
The gap between buying a raw card…
and knowing what grade it actually gets.
That uncertainty is where everything happens.
Collectors inspect:
- centering
- corners
- edges
- surface
- print quality
- grader tendencies
They ask:
“Is this a 9 or a 10?”
And that question is not theoretical.
The difference can be hundreds, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars.
The funny thing?
The market already exists.
It’s just fragmented.
Go look at grading communities.
Hundreds of thousands of collectors are already posting cards asking:
“What grade do you think this gets?”
People are already debating.
People are already predicting.
People are already building conviction before the slab comes back.
There just isn’t a market layer around that conviction yet.
Another example: regrading.
Collectors literally crack open slabs, removing a known grade, because they believe the market got the outcome wrong.
Think about how interesting that behavior is.
Someone has a PSA 9.
They believe the card is actually a PSA 10.
They are willing to take risk, spend money, and wait weeks because they think they have an edge.
That is speculation in its purest form.
This is what I'm building with Before the Slab.
Not trying to force collectors into a new behavior.
The opposite.
Taking a behavior that already happens every day:
“what grade will this get?”
and creating the missing market around it.
I think the biggest mistake founders make is asking:
“How do I convince people to want this?”
A better question:
“Where are people already hacking together a solution because nobody built the real thing yet?”
Find the IG polls.
Find the Discord debates.
Find the Reddit threads.
Find the communities doing the work manually.
That’s usually where something interesting is hiding.
So that’s my current obsession.
Building the missing surface for something collectors already love.
And finding the right person crazy enough to help me grow it.
If you understand TCGs, communities, and finding behavior before everyone else sees the market…
https://x.com/i/jobs/2061053657366593692?s=20
DMs are open.
-James
