In Episode 43 of Tales From The Brick, Jon (8 Bit Bricks) sits down with Greg Avola, creator of Brickd, a social app designed to help LEGO fans track their collections, share their building experiences, and connect with other builders. Greg shares how his childhood love of LEGO Pirates and underwater themes eventually gave way to a dark age, until receiving the LEGO Disney Up house brought him back into the hobby. Now, he’s sharing that passion with his own children while building a growing community of LEGO enthusiasts.

Greg takes us through the story behind Brickd, from his experience creating the popular beer-tracking app Untappd to realizing that LEGO fans could benefit from a similar way to document and share their experiences. Inspired while building the LEGO Home Alone house, Greg wanted to create something that captured the entire building process, including the hidden details and Easter eggs that often get overlooked once a set is finished. Since launching in February 2024, Brickd has grown to more than 35,000 users worldwide.

The conversation explores Brickd’s features, including collection management, wishlists, build progress tracking, community discussions, set ratings, and the ability to share custom MOCs. Greg explains how users can document their builds bag by bag, discover other builders with similar interests, import existing collections from spreadsheets and other services, and even use AI-powered image recognition to identify LEGO sets. He also discusses the app’s leaderboards, achievement badges, privacy controls, and why he wants Brickd to complement the building experience rather than keep people glued to their phones.

Greg also shares some of the latest additions to Brickd, including the ability to photograph an entire LEGO collection and automatically identify multiple sets, estimate collection values, and search for sets using natural language. Along the way, he talks about the generosity of the LEGO community, the challenges of keeping up with an ever-growing number of new releases, and what it’s like developing an app as a one-person operation while listening to feedback from thousands of users.

Find Greg Avola & Brickd:

• App: Brickd, available on iOS and Android
• Website: http://brickd.app

To find the best LEGO deals, check out the Bargain Bricks app.

View the video version of this podcast at https://youtu.be/_G2u4TSeb6M

For more Tales From The Brick, visit https://talesfromthebrick.com

Until next time… play well.