Meet Joshua Johnson | Co-Founder & CTO of Card Ladder

We had the good fortune of connecting with Joshua Johnson and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Joshua, what is the most important factor behind your success?
The most important factor behind the success of my start up business was having a small, passionate, hard-working team.

Often times I’ll hear from people around me their business idea that they have and the number one goal they have is to profit from that idea. It’s usually an idea that they hope to hire out to someone to build for them and they would be the business leader.

Our business succeeded because everyone involved in building it was passionate about sports cards and we each poured in thousands of hours. We had all been heavily involved in the industry for years before starting the business. We already knew what customers wanted. We already had a vast network in the industry who we could partner with when the time was appropriate.

The success of a business isn’t the idea, everyone has ideas. The success is dependent on execution by the people involved. The execution is everything.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
My business is called Card Ladder. It is a SaaS product that tracks pricing data for sports cards. We offer a monthly membership service that allows you to search our database of sales, get estimated values for any card, track the value of your personal collection of cards and lots of other things.

We are set apart by our data accuracy and manual verification aspect. We have a team of employees, including our Co-Founder, who verify millions of sports card sales to guarantee 100% accuracy. We build indexes off of this dataset to provide accurate estimations across any card. We also have a searchable database of over 60 million sales dating back to 2000 that you can search instantly using text or taking a picture of a card. Nobody else offers these things.

We got to where we are today because everyone on our team loves sports cards outside of the business. We are able to dog food our product easily because we know what we want from it. It was certainly not easy to build the business. It required tons of hard work and passion. We overcame that because we actually love it. We started the product with the intent of just using it for ourselves but we got interest from friends and it grew from there to make it SaaS.

One lesson we learned was to keep everything in-house. We tried hiring a marketing agency and they had no passion for our business and it failed miserably. It was a huge waste of money. You will always be able to market your own business better than anyone else. We also learned not to take on investment money if you are building software and can afford it. We never did take on investment money but were tempted a few times. We kept costs extremely low and were able to make profit immediately and put that back into the business. If we took on investment we’d always be paying something back.

I would want the world to know that our brand is based on reputation. Our reputation in the industry is our #1 priority. It’s everything for our team. Our data needs to be held to the highest standard and we treat our customers privacy with the highest respect. We had a strong reputation in the sports card industry before we started the business as collectors that were respectful and we continued that with the business. I would also want the world to know that you should pursue business ideas that you are passionate about. I basically get to do exactly what I want everyday now for a hobby I already love. I can’t lose.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Our company is fully remote and spread across the country but I’m from Chandler, AZ so I’ll answer for that.

Well I’m a pretty simple guy so if my best friend visited then I’d take him to my favorite pizza spot for pizza and beer and watch basketball. My best friend is incidentally the Co-Founder that I mentioned before, Chris McGill. I’m positive Chris would love this plan.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My co-founder Chris McGill certainly deserves a shout out. Chris and I were 50/50 on the business from the start both in the vision and the execution. Chris left his highly profitable career to pursue this business because he trusted me and our team.

My wife also deserves a shout out. I’ve been an engineer for about 13 years now and I’ve switched companies maybe 7 times. She puts up with a lot with me changing my direction frequently. She believed in me each time and trusted me to build this start up.

Website: https://www.cardladder.com

Instagram: @cardladder

Twitter: @cardladder

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/cardladder