The archive · Commerce & Marketplaces · Product decision · 2024-2026
Misprint turned a $40k/month Pokémon card hustle into a YC-backed bid/ask marketplace
Ex-Goldman analyst Eva Herget's Pokémon side hustle hit $500k ARR; Misprint turns that into a bid/ask marketplace for a $3.5B resale market.
Misprint
What the business is
Marketplace for trading cards — Pokémon first — combining machine-learning price analytics with a bid/ask exchange so buyers and sellers trade at transparent, data-backed values.
How it started
Eva Herget, an equity analyst at Goldman Sachs, had a Pokémon-card side hustle that out-earned her salary — by fall 2024 she was selling over $40k/month with $16-20k in profit, and she quit her job in July 2024. To fix slow listings and messy pricing, she asked her best friend Jon, a machine-learning PhD student, to build a pricing tool. Gathering millions of sales across 200k+ unique cards convinced them the idea was a marketplace, not a side project; they applied to Y Combinator and joined the Winter 2025 batch.
What happened
Misprint launched as a two-sided exchange: buyers place bids, sellers list asks, and machine-learning models price each card in real time from auction results, grading data, and past sales. Listing is 20x faster than competitors — 10+ cards from a single photo. TechCrunch highlighted the pitch at W25 Demo Day, noting that $3.5B of secondhand Pokémon cards sell every year and that the platform treats cards more like stocks, with a bid/ask system replacing haggling.
How it ended up
Still active. YC listed Misprint as an active W25 company with a four-person team in New York, and the founders' roadmap extends beyond Pokémon into sports cards, comics, and other collectible categories.
Background
Misprint started from Eva Herget's own numbers. A Goldman Sachs equity analyst with a lifelong Pokémon-card habit, she found her side hustle out-earning her salary — over $40k/month in sales by fall 2024, with $16-20k in profit — and quit in July 2024. The pain that remained was operational: listing took forever and pricing was guesswork.
She asked her best friend Jon, a machine-learning PhD student, to build a pricing tool; together they gathered millions of sales across 200k+ unique cards. That data changed the idea from a tool into a marketplace: Misprint is a bid/ask exchange where buyers place bids, sellers list asks, and ML prices cards in real time from auction results, grading data, and past sales, with listing 20x faster than rivals.
The pair applied to Y Combinator and joined the Winter 2025 batch. TechCrunch highlighted it at Demo Day, noting the $3.5B in secondhand Pokémon cards sold each year and the stock-exchange framing. As of August 2026 the marketplace was live in New York with a four-person team, with sports cards and other collectibles as the stated roadmap.
What has to be true
- The founder lived the problem: her own $40k/month resale operation made the pricing and listing pain impossible to ignore.
- ML pricing needs data, and the team already had millions of sales across 200k+ cards before building the product.
- A bid/ask order book is a differentiated mechanic versus eBay-style listings, giving collectors transparent, instant prices.
- YC W25 gave distribution and credibility inside the exact audience — founders and builders — that collects cards.
What can be applied
The wedge was the founder's own painful job: a pricing tool built for her $40k/month hustle proved demand first, and the marketplace grew out of a tool that already worked.
Aftermath
As of August 2026, YC listed Misprint as active with a four-person team in New York, and the company was hiring. The founders' stated plan was to expand from Pokémon into sports cards, comics, and other collectible categories, using the same ML pricing and bid/ask infrastructure. The core pitch remained the one from launch: know your true value, and trade collectibles like securities.
Sources
- 10 startups to watch from Y Combinator's W25 Demo Day
- Misprint: Misprint is building Robinhood for Pokemon cards
- Launch YC: Misprint - Robinhood, but make it Pokémon cards
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