Built by two friends who love trading cards. One vends at shows every weekend. The other writes code. Neither of us could find a tool that worked.
VNDR is Cortland's idea. He got into Pokemon and One Piece trading a couple years ago. What started as collecting turned into buying and selling, which turned into vending at card shows with his brother. They loved it. Setting up a table on Saturday morning, spending the day buying collections off the floor, selling singles, making trades. The whole thing.
The problem was the same one every show vendor runs into: at the end of the day, they had no idea if they actually made money. They were counting cash and comparing notes from memory. Cost basis on collections they bought was a guess. When both of them were selling at the same table, nobody had the full picture.
Cortland has a technical background, so he started building a solution himself. He also looked at what else was out there. Everything was built for game stores. Shopify integrations, hardware scanners, enterprise pricing. Nothing for the person behind a folding table who just needs to log transactions fast and know their numbers at the end of the day. So he kept building.
Cortland and Colin have been friends since high school. Colin is a developer who's collected Magic: The Gathering for years. He got into it deeper when he wanted a new hobby and a reason to spend time with his brothers who already played. He fell in love with it. Started ripping packs, tracking what he pulled, selling the hits.
When Cortland showed him what he was building, Colin immediately got it. Not from the show vending side specifically, but from the TCG side. The excitement of pulling a chase card. The mental math of "is this collection worth buying at this price?" The way your inventory is constantly shifting and you never quite know where you stand.
Cortland had the vision, the product sense, and the firsthand experience of what vendors actually need. Colin brought the engineering depth to take it further. They teamed up and the product took off from there.
VNDR is the app that should have existed already. It runs on your phone. You log a buy, sell, or trade in a few taps. Live market prices are right there so you don't have to switch apps. If two people are selling at the same table, they see the same inventory and the same transactions in real time.
At the end of a show, you don't count cash and guess. You open your session summary and see exactly what happened: what you sold, what you bought, what you traded, and what you made. An actual number.
It started as a show vendor tool, but it turns out the same problems exist for anyone buying and selling cards. Colin uses it to track his own collection. Every pack he rips, every single he buys, every collection he picks up. He knows exactly what his inventory is worth and what he's spent. Building VNDR actually got him bitten by the Pokemon collecting bug too. He's excited to start collecting One Piece and Riftbound next.
VNDR is a two-person company. Cortland runs the business, vends at shows, talks to vendors, and drives every product decision. He knows what the product needs to do because he uses it every weekend and he's in the community. Colin is the engineering side, writing the code and building out the platform. When you DM us about a bug or a feature request, one of us responds. Usually within a few hours.
We don't have a marketing team or a sales team. We have a product that works and customers who tell other vendors about it. That's the whole strategy.
We started with Pokemon, One Piece, and Magic: The Gathering because those are the games we know. We're adding more as the community asks for them. Cortland keeps finding new shows to vend at. The app keeps getting better because we use it ourselves and we feel every rough edge.
If you're a card show vendor, a collector who buys and sells, or just someone who wants to know what their collection is actually worth, that's who we built this for. Not game stores. Not enterprise retailers. People like us.