About Filthbomb Breaks
Filthbomb Breaks is a sports card breaking business operating primarily on Fanatics Live, one of the top live-selling platforms in the hobby. Card breaking is a highly competitive, entertainment-driven experience where sellers open packs of sports cards on camera, assigning cards to buyers by team or slot. Filthbomb runs breaks across MLB, NBA, and NFL products, as well as single cards and other genres like Pokemon.
The Challenge
Filthbomb had built its audience primarily through Facebook groups (roughly 70% of engagement), Instagram, and Discord. While Facebook provided scale at around 12,000 group members, it offered no direct or reliable way to notify subscribers when a live break started or to send targeted messages throughout a session. Discord presented similar problems: useful for communities that live entirely within the platform, but difficult to use as an outbound channel to drive people somewhere else.
The core gap was notification control. Platforms like Fanatics Live offer a PIN feature that pushes a seller to the top of the app and can drive viewers from 30 to 100 during an active window. But Filthbomb goes live for hours at a time. Without a way to send secondary notifications once the PIN window closes, they were effectively a sitting duck for the rest of the day, relying on organic discovery. They knew they needed a way to get in front of audience members in a more direct and timely way.
“(We) Needed the advantage to notify our people. It's a very direct way to message people and that's what propelled us to look at it.”
The Solution: Community
Filthbomb recognized that texting their audience meant direct and timely access. They chose Community to give them a direct, owned channel to their audience via SMS. The decision was driven by the platform's ability to do what social media couldn't: send a text that lands directly in a subscriber's messages, independent of any algorithm, with a response capability built in.
Building their audience was the first order of business. Sharing their phone number in their social bios, as well as announcing their number during breaks.
Then, the team approached the platform more strategically. Rather than treating it as a simple broadcast tool, Filthbomb built a segmentation architecture designed to reduce noise and increase relevance for every subscriber.
Features and Functionality
Subcommunities and Audience Segmentation
Filthbomb built approximately 120 subcommunities within the platform, organized around the sports each subscriber actually collects. After recognizing that baseball collectors rarely overlap with NBA or NFL buyers (while football and basketball show about a 20% crossover), Filthbomb began sending targeted prompts asking subscribers which sports they follow. Responses automatically route members into the appropriate subcommunity. The result: three separate message streams per day, each relevant to its specific audience, rather than one blast that annoys baseball collectors with football content.
Team-Level Targeting
The segmentation goes a level deeper. After sorting subscribers by sport, an automated follow-up asks for their favorite team. This enables hyper-targeted messages for specific break inventory. If Filthbomb has two unsold spots in a break and one of them is the Houston Astros, they can text only Astros fans directly, rather than pushing that message to 5,000 people who may not care.
Automation and Welcome Flows
New subscribers enter an automated onboarding sequence that immediately asks about their collecting preferences and begins placing them into the right subcommunities. This ensures that audience segmentation compounds over time with every new sign-up, without requiring manual effort from the team.
Live Stream Notifications
The primary use case driving the Community adoption remains stream notifications. Filthbomb uses SMS to alert subscribers when they go live and, critically, to send secondary notifications throughout the day to re-engage viewers who may have dropped off. The team is actively refining the timing of these sends, having identified that broadcasting during the PIN window is less effective than sending after it ends, when organic discovery drops off and a direct text can restore momentum.
Branded Sender Number
Filthbomb migrated to a custom number ending in FILTH, a brand-forward move that makes texts immediately recognizable, along with the image saved to the contact card, to subscribers and reinforces identity at the point of contact.
Results and ROI
Filthbomb's most recent campaigns delivered an 18% click-through rate. The company's current conversion rate sits between 17-19%. The goal is 30% by the end of the year. Breaking is a highly competitive market. So driving the conversion means that people are going to their breaks, rather than their competitors. There are a few different competitive advantages like the talent in chair and customer service, so the top driver is can you message your audience with information they care about without adding to the noise? And that's exactly what the platform's subcommunity and segmentation capabilities are able to do.
.png?width=720)