Ryan Gonzales

I don’t own a card shop. Let’s get that out of the way.

I’ve been a collector most of my life. I’m a vendor. I’m also not here to pretend I’ve built the biggest card business in the room. I haven’t.

The rest of the time I build products and companies. More than twenty years of it, including work with The Walt Disney Company and FedEx, where I led UX on a major redesign of its mobile app. I helped build StratiFi through its path toward Series A, with product work that went on to win an industry award for Best Risk Profiling Tool. At Shine I helped take an idea from its earliest stages into a real product in production across hardware, software, and AI. Five-time founder. Two exits.

Why Card Business Playbooks

In 2020 my cousin opened a card shop, so I went, and then I kept going. I opened packs, bought cards, sold cards, asked questions, and relearned a hobby that had changed while I was away. I also couldn’t stop watching the business: how inventory came in, how it got processed, where information lived and where it didn’t, how much depended on one person knowing something.

Before I ever got the chance to help fix any of it, the shop failed. A business doing millions of dollars a year in revenue, busy every day, customers in the building, right up until there was a sign on the door.

That stayed with me, because the lesson is sitting right there in it: revenue does not mean the business works. It’s a large part of why Pulltrader exists, why I started my own vending business, and why I wrote this book.

So I became an operator too

It’s easy to stand outside an industry and point at things. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to sell, buy, ship, lose money, make money, make bad buys and good ones, deal with marketplaces and customers and inventory, and actually live with the consequences of the decisions I was talking about.

So I did. I built most of that business on consignment before I was buying much inventory outright, which is its own education in whose money is whose. And I built my own tools along the way, because nothing that existed did what I needed. Spreadsheets first, then increasingly elaborate dashboards, then eventually a platform. That’s where Pulltrader came from.

Which means I know what zero looks like, and what happens when inventory starts multiplying, and what it feels like when something that was fun starts producing an alarming number of operational problems. I also know what those problems look like from the other side, because I spent twenty years fixing them for businesses considerably larger than mine.

What I’m actually bringing

Not a secret formula, and not more hobby knowledge than you have. I’ve spent most of my life doing two things that eventually collided: building businesses, and collecting cards. That’s the whole qualification. It turns out to be a more useful one than I expected.

I’m not here to teach you how to be a card person. You already are one. Your card shop does not need a Chief Synergy Officer. It needs to make money, and it needs to do that without destroying the things that made you want to build it in the first place.

Pulltrader

I built what I needed to run my own operation, and then found out other people needed it too. Inventory, cost basis, research, listings, and the decisions that change what you keep. The book is the writing. Pulltrader is one place that writing shows up in the work.