A Software Engineer Leveraging LEGO as an Investment Opportunity

Hello! My name is Chris and I'm a Software Engineer living in Suffolk, UK. Growing up, my house was always full of computers, so it was probably only natural that I embarked on a career in Software Engineering.

I'm currently in full time employment but outside of the day job you can always find me tinkering away on a side project or working on my YouTube channel. I actually feel really fortunate that I get paid for essentially doing my hobby, but my ultimate ambition is to work for myself.

My main side project is Brick Ranker, a website featuring LEGO investing news and price trackers. In the last year I’ve released a new feature, a LEGO investment portfolio. This allows you to track the value of your LEGO collections and build your holdings to help increase your profits.

Ever since my childhood I've always been massively into LEGO but as I've gotten older, I'm now also seeing it as an investment. I found there weren't really many resources for LEGO investors, so I wanted to create a site that tracks the value of sets and minifigures.

I also wanted to build a platform that allows me to share my knowledge of LEGO and give something back to the LEGO community.

At the start of 2023 I launched a feature where you can catalogue your LEGO collection and track its value over time. This was important for the growth of the site because it now creates a reason for users to keep coming back. 

The feature allows you to visualise your LEGO collection similarly to how you would with stocks on the stock market. It showcases each of your sets and minifigures in a visual catalogue. There’s also a price graph showing the growth in value over time and a ‘theme allocation’ which allows you to see which themes have grown the most over time.

I have a few pieces of advice I always give out to people thinking about building their own product.

The first is to simply build something you're passionate about. Like I said I've always loved LEGO and it's a lot easier getting up in the morning to work on something you're genuinely interested in. 

Secondly, I'd say always leverage your competitive advantage. Over the years I've built up a Rain Man-type knowledge of LEGO that only a few people can replicate, just give me a set number and 99 times out of 100 I can name it! If you have knowledge of a subject that many others don't have, you've just narrowed down the number of people that can compete with you.

The goal from the start has always been to build the biggest LEGO fan site in the world. Honestly my to-do list has enough on it to keep me busy for years but the one that stands out is I'd love to create a marketplace for buying new and used LEGO, it's a massive task but if I can get it to take off it will put me in a great position.

Firstly, my website, Brick Ranker is where you can go to start tracking your collection.

As mentioned earlier, I also have a YouTube channel.

Finally, if you’d like to connect with me, you can find me on Twitter/X.