Co-Founder, Michael White
Nab New is the new destination for the fandom community. The $19.5B US collectibles market is fragmented and ignored. Nab unites the conversation, stores, and products, so fans have one place to go to escape into their passion.
Co-Founder Michael White will pitch Nab New, Inc. in the 10th annual CVC-NY Demo Night on Wednesday, October 14th. Nab New, Inc. will be one of five teams who will participate in our second all-virtual Demo Night event.
This year’s events are a little different than years prior. The New York Demo Night will feature exclusively E-commerce & Retail businesses.
The all-virtual nature allowed more teams to apply from all over and will also allow a larger group of attendees. While we will miss the in-person event, we are excited to host all of you that might not have been able to travel to these cities. Remember to RSVP!
Michael White graduated Columbia ’14SPS, and is now the Co-founder & CEO of Nab New, Inc. - a social shopping platform for new fandom collectibles.
What lead you to working with your co-founder?
My business partner Nick Rapagnani and I met in business school at the University of Maryland in 2008.
We were both spending a lot of time working on projects in the Entrepreneurship Center, and bonded over shared interest in starting our own companies and our love of horror movies, thrash metal records, and Philly sports.
While we share similar values as people, we have complementary skill sets as professionals, which makes for a good team.
Nick scales businesses as a talented developer and information architect, while my background is in scaling businesses through marketing and communications strategies.
What was the inspiration for Nab New?
I've been an avid collector of pop and geek culture - records, DVDs, comics, games - for over 20 years.
As the scene has grown (taken together the collectibles we feature on our platform were a $19.5B US industry in 2019) and migrated online ($7.1B), more and more manufacturers and retailers have entered the game, to where it's nearly impossible as a fan to keep up with all the new releases.
They're limited by nature, so once they sell out, you end up on resale markets paying big markups.
In short, it's become too much work with little reward. There seemed to be a lot of people tackling the resale side of things, but no one was working to simplify the experience of tracking new releases and making it fun online, the way it is in person.
While Nab is a painkiller, it's also a the vitamin. Something that's really important to fans, and that's being lost in the move to e-commerce, is the community.
When I first fell in love with the space, you would go to the mall with friends and hang out for hours in places like Tower Records, FYE, Spencer's Gifts, or the local indie music or games shops, and that's how you discovered new things.
You checked out what each other was chasing down, and you talked to the people who worked the counters and knew all the coolest new stuff coming out, and you came home with the stuff you knew you liked plus five new things to explore.
This still exists in-person at local stores or at big conventions, but for most of us it's been lost in the every day online experience.
There are fragmented groups across Reddit, Facebook and niche sites, but they're always separate from the products themselves, and you have to wade through whatever else those platforms offer to get to what you want.
For example, most of my friends simply start text threads to talk about the things we find.
At Nab New, we believe there's a better way.
A 2019 Fandom.com report found that the top motivations for consuming fandom content is to be entertained, to have “me time,” and to escape from everyday life.
Collectibles are another avenue through which people immerse themselves in their favorite fandoms, and our goal is to be the daily destination connecting fans around the world with all aspects of the collectibles community—the stores, the products, and each other—so they can engage in and grow their passion.
How have you answered to the challenges of 2020?
We were always remote, with one founder in Brooklyn, the other in Philadelphia, and our support teams all over the world (Russia, Ukraine, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, and so on).
So from a Nab workflow perspective, we didn't miss a beat.
Personally there have been challenges—spouses who lost jobs for extended periods, kids home from school, etc.—but we believe so strongly in what we're building and we have so much passion for the problems we're solving, we've been able to keep grinding and adapting to new normals as they emerge.
If we look for positives, Covid is greatly accelerating the need for Nab.
When stores were forced to close, a lot of people who clung to the in-store model and trusted their local games shop, record shop or comic shop to keep them up-to-date, were forced to go online.
Concurrently, while many of these small shops have suffered—and that's heartbreaking—those that survive are adapting by moving more of their operations online.
So a new wave of stores now need a way to tap into online demand and a new wave of fans need a way to stay connected with the community while they're stuck at home, making it the perfect time for a platform like Nab to meet both their needs.
Do you have any words of advice for other founders?
For first-time founders like ourselves, I would simply encourage you to build something you're truly passionate about. Product-founder fit is so important, because everything takes longer than expected and the challenges are unrelenting.
That we have conviction in the needs we're addressing gained through 20+ years of experience as our user, and that we care deeply about the community we're solving it for, has helped us stay steady through the ups & downs, Covid challenges, and so on.
What’s Next in your process?
We were accepted into the '20-'21 cohort at the Columbia Startup Lab in NYC.
That just opened back up in September, so I get to go in five days a week and benefit from the advisors and, most importantly, the other founders who are tackling a lot of the same challenges we are.
After shipping our MVP in the spring, gathering feedback, and keeping our heads down all summer, we're launching our first market-ready version of the site in a week, and it feels like we're at an inflection point.
The need for Nab has never been stronger, we've put in the work to position ourselves to capitalize on it. Now we need to execute, and I think being a part of CSL can only help in that regard.
Thank you Michael! We look forward to hearing you pitch on October 14th. Don’t forget to RSVP!