Three homes: what Home shows when you own 0, 9, or 40 cards

Three homes: what Home shows when you own 0, 9, or 40 cards

47% of the people who leave Binderdex do it on day zero. That number is from a retention doc dated October 10, and it reframed the question about our first screen. The problem was never that Home lacked features. It was that a brand-new collector opened the app and got handed a suggestion deck, a trending rail, a free-plan card, binder recommendations, and a scan hero all at once. Which one do you tap? Most people apparently answered: none, then uninstalled.

The fix that went out today is a stage system: Home looks different depending on how many cards you own, and each stage permits exactly one main action. The whole thing is one lookup table, so the component reads the table instead of branching everywhere:

"first-card": { hero: true, collectrStatus: true,
                deck: false, trending: false, /* rest off */ },
  "first-ten":  { overview: true, progress: true, mostValuable: true },
  "full":       { /* everything on */ },

Hidden sections do not merely stop rendering; they stop asking. The Worth Grading and binder-recommendation queries are disabled by stage, the trending rail and the suggestion deck never mount, so they never fire a request at all. Fewer requests, less jank, smaller first paint. And the stage is known at first paint with no extra request: the remembered collection hint answers synchronously while the portfolio overview is still loading.

The same one-action logic ran through two more commits the same evening. The Binders tab now shows one featured binder with a single filled Open button instead of four filter chips and a wall of ideas. And the "Import from Collectr" control on the zero-card Home had been a muted text link that read like a footnote; it is a real outlined button now, sitting right under the scan prompt. The fastest way to fill a collection should look like the fastest way.

None of this is native. It is all JavaScript, so it ships over the air and I will watch the day-0 curve. If the theory holds, the next question is whether ten is the right stage-two cutoff or just the round number we picked first.