Founder's Note · San Francisco, CA
Why I'm building Worthy solo—and why we're just getting started.
Every great thrift find, vintage jacket, or trading card has a story—and a real market value hidden in the details. When I started building Worthy here in the Bay Area, I wanted to solve a problem I experienced firsthand: standing in an aisle or looking at a shelf of collectibles and trying to piece together what an item was actually selling for across ten different browser tabs.
Early on, I realized that taking a single photo and asking a generic LLM "how much is this worth?" doesn't work for real collectors. The difference between a $40 denim jacket and a $220 1970s Levi's Type III is the care tag, the button stamp, and the red tab. So I built Worthy to take up to 5 detail shots plus custom context, and wired it to pull real, clickable sold comps so you never have to trust a black-box guess.
"When copycats started flooding the App Store with purple magnifying glasses and even lifting our tagline word-for-word, it only proved one thing: the demand for instant, trustworthy physical-world valuation is massive. While clones copy yesterday's screenshots, we're building the social and financial graph for physical collectibles."
As a solo founder, I've designed, engineered, and shipped Worthy across iPhone, iPad, and Android—from the multi-image AI appraisal pipeline to drag-and-drop collection folders and real-time collector chat. Whether you're a weekend thrifter, a full-time reseller, a lifelong collector, or an investor looking for a high-velocity SF founder in consumer AI: welcome to Worthy.
01 / Product Velocity
1 Founder. 3 Native Platforms.
Live on iOS, iPadOS, and Google Play with full-stack AI scanning, sold comp retrieval, portfolio tracking, and live chat.
02 / Defensible Moat
Utility Wedge → Collector Network
Users arrive for the 3-second AI price scan; they stay to track their $10K+ collection vault and connect with other collectors.
03 / Physical-World AI
Multi-Shot + Sold Market Data
Bridging computer vision with live secondary-market liquidity (Low / Median / High + verified sold eBay comps).