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Buck

Your spare change could be worth a fortune! Buck lets you scan any coin or banknote to discover its value and history, and build your collection.

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Inspiration

This app is a comeback for me.

I’ve always been a collector, but everything really started in 2022, when my grandpa passed away and left me a box full of old coins.

At the time, I knew almost nothing about coins, so I started researching them manually on Google and eBay, trying to understand their history and how much they were worth.

Then, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT launched.

I started using it to research the history and value of the coins much faster. Later, when the API became available, I had a simple thought: if this was solving a problem for me, there were probably thousands of other people with the exact same problem.

So I hired a developer on Upwork and built the app.

It became one of the first coin scanner apps of its kind, and I scaled it completely on my own from $0 to $37K MRR through organic TikTok content.

Unfortunately, I had to sell it to an app studio in May 2024 after I ended up in a coma for two weeks. When I woke up, I wasn’t in a condition to keep working on it, so I had no real choice but to let it go.

But I never really stopped thinking about it.

For years, it felt strange watching other people build on my ideas and learnings, especially seeing the person who bought my app grow it to $300K MRR and profit from something I had spent years building.

Then one day, a friend told me: “Why don’t you just do it again?”

Then he added: “Why don’t you just do it better?”

So I did.

That’s what inspired me to build Buck.

What it does

Buck is an interactive coin and banknote scanner that helps you instantly discover the value, history, future value, and other key information about any coin or banknote.

You can build your own digital collection, keep track of every coin and banknote you own, monitor their value over time, and compete with your friends or against everyone else to see who can discover the most valuable coins.

How we built it

The app is built entirely in Swift and Kotlin.

We chose to go fully native to ensure a smooth experience and high performance across a wide range of devices, from older models to the latest ones. Fonts, animations, images, and interface elements are all rendered natively to keep everything sharp, responsive, and consistent throughout the app.

It was designed as a minimal digital portfolio where you can keep track of every coin and banknote you own, while making collecting more fun through a semi-gamified experience.

Challenges we ran into

Since our target audience isn’t limited to collectors, but also includes everyday people, one of our biggest challenges was the onboarding experience.

We spent a lot of time figuring out how to introduce users to the world of coin collecting, explain why it’s worth checking the coins they already have in their pockets, and show them how easy it is to overlook something that may be worth far more than its face value.

Another major challenge was building a UI/UX that felt appealing and intuitive without making the product feel overly technical or complicated.

On the technical side, we also spent a significant amount of time improving the scanner’s accuracy, especially when it came to recognizing small details, variations, and the materials coins and banknotes are made from.

A lot of existing apps in this space struggle with accuracy and were built without a deep understanding of how collectors actually evaluate coins. Many also feel outdated, overly complex, or visually designed for a much older audience. We wanted Buck to feel completely different: younger, modern, simple to use, and approachable even for someone who has never collected a coin in their life.

Everyone has had a coin in their pocket at some point, and we believe everyone should be able to understand its value and history, not just collectors, so we built the app having this goal in mind.

No one in this niche creates organic content, all our competitors rely on paid ads, but we decided to do the opposite from the very start. We wanted to prove that, even in an "ASO-only" niche, it was possible to produce excellent organic content by being creative and addressing the right topics.


Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite launching 24 days late, we generated over 4.2M organic views across TikTok and Instagram and reached #1 in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany multiple times.

So far, our users have scanned more than 230,000 coins and banknotes. Buck has generated over $13K in revenue ($13k in the last 28 days) and is currently at $6K MRR.
 More importantly, we’ve already seen real outcomes from people using the app. Several users have discovered genuinely valuable coins, including one girl who found a coin worth around $19,600.

We’ve also heard from people who were trying to sell their coins and realized, thanks to Buck, that the offers they were receiving were far below their actual value. By checking the price in the app first, they were able to negotiate better and sell their coins for a fairer price.

At the same time, Buck is being used in ways we didn’t fully expect. Teenagers compete with their friends to see who can scan and collect the most coins, while moms, students, and people looking for extra income use the app to find coins they can resell on marketplaces like eBay and Etsy. University students use it for research and study, and we even have grandparents using Buck to teach their grandchildren about the history behind the coins they find.

We were also truly creative with our marketing: we pretended to be homeless outside Lidl, conducted interviews, went into supermarkets to scan loose change, dug a hole in the backyard to pretend we’d found an ancient coin, and much more.


What we learned

One of the biggest things we learned is how intense the usage can be once someone starts scanning. Some users scan 250 to 300 coins in a single day.

We also discovered that Buck has an incredibly strong conversion rate. In Italy, a single organic video with just 200K to 300K views can generate anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 in revenue. On top of that, the app has very strong retention. Even with a hard paywall, many users come back weeks later and subscribe only when they finally have coins ready to scan.

What's next for Buck

Now that my co-founder and I have identified the content formats that consistently work on TikTok and Instagram, our next step is to scale them aggressively through UGC, slideshows, and a network of clippers.

So far, we’ve been focusing primarily on Italy and the Netherlands. Next, we want to expand much more heavily into the U.S., one of the largest markets for coin collecting and a market with strong purchasing power and high adoption of digital payments.

We already have dozens of new content formats and distribution strategies we want to test. Based on what we’ve seen so far, we believe there is a clear path to taking Buck from its current size to $100K+ MRR and potentially much further as we expand into larger markets.

But distribution is only one part of the plan.

Once we reach around $30K MRR, we want to start building a marketplace directly into Buck. Users won’t just be able to scan a coin or banknote and understand what it’s worth, they’ll also be able to sell it.

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