News & updates
This is CLZ Alwin and I am turning 50 today, the big FIVE OH! To celebrate my birthday with our loyal Collectorz.com customers, we’re doing a CLZ Merch Pack GiveAway:
We’ll be giving away FIFTY CLZ Merch Packs, containing the famous Collectorz.com mousepad *and* the ultra-cool Collectorz.com black beanie!
Here’s how to participate in the CLZ Merch Pack giveaway:
This giveaway is all about your CLZ story. Here’s how to participate:
- Send me a message through the CLZ Help Center here.
- In your message, tell me your CLZ story.
Tell me about your specific collection, about how you use the Collectorz software and why you like our software, our support, etc…I will then get back to you with a special Trustpilot link. Then:
- Use that special link to post your story as a review on the global Trustpilot review site.
Make sure to send us your stories BEFORE Monday October 8, because on Monday, we will select the FIFTY best stories, the funniest, the most interesting, the happiest, etc… and these users will all receive a CLZ “Mousepad + Beanie” Merch Pack!
BTW: the best stories will also be posted on our website, under Reviews.
Okay, I’ll start: this is my own CLZ Story:
Back in 1996, while learning a new programming language, I needed a demo project to test my skills on. Being a music lover, I decided to create a database program for my own CD collection (around 300 CDs back then).
The Windows program, called Keep it Compact at the time, turned out quite nicely (if I may say so myself), so in May 1996 I decided to release it as “shareware”. And a few weeks later, the first person ever purchased my program (thank you, Neil!). In the years following, more and more people purchased it and I kept releasing updates with improvements and new features, all in my spare time.
Up until October 2000… when I decided to quit my day job and start doing Keep it Compact full-time, together with my friend Mark-Jan. The program was renamed to “Music Collector” and re-released as the first product of our new company “Collectorz.com”. A 2nd program for Windows, called Movie Collector, soon followed (by that time I had started collecting DVDs myself, so makes sense right?).
A few years later, we started hiring people to help us grow our product line-up and start on our own online media databases, first Bernard, then my wife Sytske, then AJ (all 3 still members of the CLZ Team!).
Fast forward to 2018: my personal collecting is now focussed on movies and video games. I currently own over 3,000 Blu-rays, HD-DVDs and UMDs (sorry, I love dead formats) and over 800 video games.
Collectorz.com is now ran by my wife and me, with 10 employees and hundreds of thousands of customers. Right now we offer cataloging solutions for music, movies, books, comics and video games, on 5 platforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Connect (web-based). All using our own CLZ Core online media databases and all connected through our home-grown CLZ Cloud solution.
And, we’re still having loads of fun continuously improving our cataloging tools!
Your turn: tell me *your* CLZ story!
I am looking forward to reading it!
Alwin
