Have you ever picked up a potential purchase in an antique store or an old relic among your family's treasures and wondered, "How much is this really worth?"
Will Seippel has asked himself that question throughout his life, which is why he developed WorthPoint, an online database for researching, valuing and buying/selling antiques, art and vintage collectibles.
"I want to take in everything that’s possible in regards to data and art and go from $5 to $5 million on what’s in your house," Seippel said. "It’s important to tell someone, 'Hey, it’s not worth a lot,' or to tell them, 'You might be on to something, keep digging.'"
Using price points from items sold through auctioning, eBay and more than 350 different sources, WorthPoint's algorithm evaluates how much an item is worth for the user.
"There’s a consulting associate [who told me] stuff in people’s houses were worth more than their houses," Seippel said.
WorthPoint has a number of resources at the ready for users; the price guide that helps determine how much an item is worth; the M.A.P.S. tool that stores more than 100,000 identifiers of marks, autographs, patterns and symbols on glass, china, coins, currency, tools and other items; the WorthPoint Library, a digital library with roughly 1,000 books for users to use in their research; a dictionary to helps users understand terminology and history; and the WorthPoint vault, a virtual vault that lets users keep important details about their items, organize them with custom tags and either share their collections with the public or privately with friends and family.
Seippel was able to send his five children to college off the earnings he has made on eBay auctions.
Seippel turned his hobby of antiquing and collecting into WorthPoint to help others enjoy the hunt. He even uses the site himself to add to or sell items in his collection. Seippel once discovered a turkey call with a unique mark during one of his digs at an estate sale. The only place he could discover the value of the turkey call was on WorthPoint, which averaged the item at $15,000. Seippel listed the turkey call on eBay at 99 cents and let the auction run. In the end, he made $27,000 on the unique treasure. But this find wasn't just the luck of the draw --- Seippel was able to send his five children to college off the earnings he has made on eBay auctions.
"It’s what people collect and what they’re willing to pay money for," he said. "[WorthPoint is] a Bloomberg system that helps you understand what you have and what it’s worth."
Now, this bootstrapped company can even list your auction directly through the site. One tool Seippel said WorthPoint is working on is image recognition, where a user could upload an image similar to Google Image and search based on the data points in the picture to identify an item.
"Image search is way more complex of an algorithm, and we’re starting to link our databases together, so you can go right from --- for example, looking at this mark --- and going into the price guide," he said.
Not only is WorthPoint a resource for sellers or collectors, but for those who want to keep track of how much their items are worth to insure, Seippel said. In the event of a natural disaster, a death or any other emergency, knowing what their items are worth is essential.
"Collectively, you can figure out what all the stuff in your house is worth and keep the value updated for your insurance company, which is kind of neat," Seippel said.
As WorthPoint continues to grow, the company is gearing up to hire writers and a chief marketing officer in the near future, Seippel said. While most collectors and those interested in learning the value of their items start their online searches on Google, Seippel said most of their searches end on WorthPoint; They find what they're looking for.
"This little company here... [we're] tagging 1.5 billion items over the year," Seippel said.
