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by: Lawson Bae, investor of Social Graph Ventures
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At Social Graph Ventures, we view founders like professional athletes. Each founder has a process and knows how to iterate to success — getting in their training reps. They know how to sprint and pick themselves off the ground. And, they are winners from a young age. Our new founder profile series gives you a behind the scenes look on how they do it.
Meeting Nick Confrey on our video call, I was greeted with his boyish grin and two curated bookshelves. Makes sense for the founder of the Tome Books, the recently ranked #1 Book App in the App Store for U.S. and Canada. The curly blonde locks and Harry Potter glasses convince anyone who missed the early cues that Nick is serious about books.
The glass of water he sipped and heavy electronic music he listens to while “running as fast as I possibly can down the block” to prepare for calls with VCs throws me for a pause though.
This SGV founder is not your sleepy book reader. Competitive, ritualistic but not superstitious, and clearly a salesman, Nick’s founder story starts with Lego figurines and quickly turns profitable. Like any athlete, Nick’s been training for this moment since childhood—his first reps weren’t on a court, but in marketplaces.
Every athlete remembers their first big win. For Nick, it wasn’t on a field—it was flipping Lego sets and learning the fundamentals of customer economics. Technically, Nick’s first sale occurred when his mom bought a pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! inspired cards aptly named Nick-i-Oh! for 25¢ in middle school. But it was his Bricklink storefront, Snazz Industries, that turned its first organic profit and introduced him to marketplace economics.
“It started small but anything that was Lego money was nice. If I made $50, that was crazy,” said Nick. The Web3 collectors reading this know where this is heading. “Some of these sealed sets can appreciate 1000%… I bought Market Street for $89 and flipped it for $1500.” These weren’t just transactions—they were training reps. Each sale taught him timing, market psychology, and execution under pressure.
Savvy collecting eventually turned towards Lego arbitrage. While a mom is just clearing out the toy room, there’s a collector out there hunting for a minifigure. Running scripts to connect sellers on marketplaces with buyers on Amazon and elsewhere scaled profit into the “five figures” by the end of high school.
BBC picks up Nick’s Lego investor story from here (link below).
¿Quiere invertir? Compre unas cajas de juguetes Lego - BBC News Mundo
While the money was nice, he quickly learned “you can’t just script a human out of the process.” Where he took mailing instructions from a buyer on one site and automated the purchase and mailing instructions for the seller on another site – dropshipping 101 – not all sales went well.
One lost shipment led to buyer and seller both pointing fingers and “they ended up pointing at me,” said Nick. Spending the money and time to make it right for the customers became a key lesson for his early entrepreneurial career. Like any rookie mistake, the lost shipment became a foundational lesson: you can’t automate trust in people. Nick paid for the error out of pocket and logged it as the kind of loss that makes you sharper.
Back on our call, Nick tells me he reads 50 books a year and the New York Times paper on the left side of his desk. Preferring paper over digital, Nick’s training regimen starts hours before his team arrives at his desk with breakfast and the paper delivered to his front door in Brooklyn. The ritual is non-negotiable. Like a runner who won’t skip stretches, Nick won’t skip his morning read. It’s how he stays sharp.
One might think the first app Nick built was a reading app but his founder path was just as storied as the books he loves to read.
Early in his career he built up muscle memory launching social apps at scale as part of Facebook (now Meta’s) incubator team. After integrating music into stories, Nick was recruited to the team “building the next Instagram” inside of Facebook. He built and launched two new apps at Facebook including Whale, a meme creation app aimed at college students, and Collab, a music remixing platform meant to compete with TikTok. Building Whale and Collab was like playing on a stacked team—you learn the playbook, but you don’t own the ball.
“I learned how to take projects [like Collab] from zero to one really during Covid. But it was almost impossible to scale a new social app inside of Facebook.”
As his interest grew in crypto and NFTs, Nick thought it was time to build an app with the community, something only possible in Web3, citing Joy’s Law “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
This idea led to the founding of Seam, a social app built off of community created mini-apps – a bit like MySpace for Web3.
From daily stand-ups and Friday 1:1’s, he built the startup from the ground up with routines. It was their Monday traction review that told the real story. The wide breadth of mini-apps use cases was hurting overall engagement and their ability to reach critical mass. Relentlessly reviewing the numbers eventually led to one key insight – users loved checking in daily with the community-built mini-app for book readers.
The idea for Tome Books was born. The Monday traction reviews were like watching game tape. Week after week, one signal kept flashing: book readers showed up daily. That’s when Nick called the audible and pivoted to Tome.
The team got to work creating a brand new app focusing on book lovers’ desire to track the books they read and find new books through their friends.
As they raced to launch the app earlier this year, the TikTok ban set up the perfect storm. The BookTok community was afraid of losing each other and there rose Tome Books like the savior on the mountain fantasy book readers needed. Offering to sync your TikTok connections when creating your account, led to Tome hitting #1 book app in the App Store in the US and Canada.
Tome became the #1 book app! - Tome: app for fantasy readers
Timing met preparation. The TikTok ban was the perfect storm, and Tome was ready to execute. Reaching #1 in the App Store—the kind of highlight reel moment that validates every training rep.
Going viral on TikTok was just the beginning though. Nick hosts weekly live streams on TikTok for their community to go over app updates and talk books – a ritual of connecting.
Naturally as I open the app to grab content for this article, it’s Tome Team Appreciation Day, a holiday ritual of sorts.
Getting #1 in the app store is only the beginning for great teams. The real test is staying there.
Tome is rolling out weekly reading wraps for book readers to share out to Instagram and TikTok in addition to a [super secret TikTok social graph project]. These aren’t just features—they’re like a training cycle or new play. Weekly reading wraps, deeper social graph integrations—each one designed to compound daily engagement.
Download Tome Books on the App Store
Download Tome Books on the Play Store
But that’s only part of what’s on Nick’s mind. It’s fall in New York City so I asked for his must reads this season.
For those looking for a cozy book, read Travis Baldree’s “Legends & Lattes” (322 posts on Tome), a fantasy book about… you guessed it, a mage opening a coffee shop.
Looking for something more challenging for the fall? Read M. L. Wang’s “Blood Over Bright Haven” (627 posts on Tome), a darker book about a world where typewriters are used to code magic and influence society.
Between thoughts, I hear the rustling of papers. It’s unclear if it’s the NYT or scratch notes for what he’s building next.
Thanks for reading. Read long form, fellow followers. And, try posting about it, too.
P.S. For those pre-VC-call sprints? Nick recommends Oliver Heldens’ DJ sets.
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