When Nick Coglianese, the Wisconsin state manager for Heaven Hill Distilleries, isn’t sorting liquor bottles, he’s sorting through comics.
“I’ve been collecting [comics] since 1989 when I saw Batman with Michael Keaton in it,” Coglianese said. “I was always trying to find valuable issues.”
Locating those issues, commonly referred to as key collector comics, isn’t easy. But it’s what gave Coglianese the idea for his own startup.
Key Collector Comics, which he launched in Milwaukee in October 2017, is the first mobile database of key issue comics, ones that are first appearance origin stories, or have any kind of milestone storyline in them. There’s thousands of key issues out there and they are highly sought after, meaning there can be big money involved when it comes to locating and selling them. Shortly before the film Black Panther came out in February, a first issue of the comic sold in December for $54,000, Coglianese said.
“99 percent of comics are worthless and then that 1 percent are worth a lot,” Coglianese said. “To identify which issues those are, you have to put a lot of time into it.”
Using Key Collector’s platform, users can search comics by title or character, and find out which ones are valuable, why they are valuable and an estimate on how much they are worth.
Coglianese got the idea for Key Collector Comics after helping out a friend who owns a used bookstore and had hundreds of comics. Coglianese agreed to sort through them and sell the valuable ones on eBay, but it turned out that the project was much more complicated than he originally thought.
“I realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did,” Coglianese said. “The entire summer was passing me by and I thought, ‘why has no one ever built a database exclusively focused on key issues—the comics that matter.’ After saying that to myself for about a month, I thought, ‘why don’t I just do it?’”
“But I quickly found out why nobody had done this before because it’s time-consuming,” Coglianese continued. “All these movies are coming out about comic books and I haven’t seen one of them because I was busy with the database.”
The hard work has paid off to some degree, though. The mobile app now has more than 8,000 key issues on it and about 27,000 users. On average, users are spending about 2 minutes on the app, which has been endorsed by comic publishers like Dark Horse Comics and Valiant Comics.
Though users can't sell or purchase comics on the platform, Coglianese said it is a useful tool for those trying to identify comics they may already own. It also helps them determine a comic's worth in the event they want to sell or buy one.
The app is free and doesn’t have a built-in revenue stream right now, but Coglianese said he hopes to pursue advertising revenue in the future. But for now, he's focused on improving the app through updates and amping up its user base.
He’s currently working on a feature that will connect users with someone who is selling a comic they’re looking to purchase. Additionally, Coglianese said he wants to build a desktop version of the platform. But it will all take some time, Coglianese said. The startup is run by just himself and a developer.
“This was just an idea that is turning into something bigger than I had intended it to be,” Coglianese said. "But people can use this app even if they are not collectors. It’s a quick and efficient tool to look up these comics.”
