What does this mean? I’m not really sure. But I do know that, if you’d asked me a month ago how many folks would be reading our site after 29 days, I wouldn’t have guessed a number anywhere close to seven-digits long. Nobody knew what an “Autopian” was, we had no background in launching sites, and we weren’t partnering with a media company — this has been a jump into the unknown. Scary, in some ways, but we’re just happy to have you, our amazing contributors, and our partner Beau by our side. The Autopian has a long way to go before it’s the website Jason Torchinsky and I want it to be. He and I are the only two full-time staffers right now (Thomas Hundal has been crushing it, though), so we’re an incredibly small team, and there’s only so long we can continue at this pace before we wear out our cylinder walls (I’ve been pouring zinc additive into Jason’s Diet Cokes to get him to hold up a bit longer). That’s just one of the many things we need to figure out. The user experience/commenting system could stand to be improved, I’d really like to build a stronger community, I think this place could stand to get even nerdier content-wise, and on and on. But despite our growing pains, and despite the fact that we’re still a far cry from being anything close to profitable, we’re growing. Sure, we’re barely 5 percent of what the big-dog sites are size-wise, but our outlook — as engineers at my former company Chrysler often said — is “directionally correct,” and for that we thank you from the bottoms of our hearts (basically, our hearts’ oil pans). P.S.: The Autopian has adopted the Toyota Manufacturing Process for article-production, so that means our team lives by “Kaizen,” or “continuous improvement.” So please keep sending in your feedback, either in the comments below or at tips@autopian.com P.P.S.: Just a reminder that the two people in charge of running The Autopian are these two nutjobs — I mention this video so you’ll realize how much of a miracle all of this is:
From Torch:
David pretty much said what I’m thinking here as well: A month ago–actually, a leap year-February ago, not even a real month–there was no Autopian, and if you approached someone and asked if they were an Autopian, chances are they’d have sat you down and suggested you seek out your clergyperson, and likely requested that you let go of their arm because you’re gripping pretty tightly. Now, though, everything is different! We live in a world where The Autopian exists, and I can see this amazing community of car dorks forming and somehow the world feels like a slightly better place. We have so far to go still, and, sure, it’s a bit exhausting, but that could also be because my doctor said something about zinc poisoning? I guess I should look into that. More importantly, thank you all for reading and supporting us and being the reason we do this. We can’t wait to do even more. And honestly even with the comments needing some improvement the community is starting strong. Plus some of the contributors being an active part is really great – Adrian Clarke’s comments on his posts are absolutely fantastic. Sure, there are a few small issues, particularly with the commenting system, notifications and the like but those are fixable. The “kaizen” philosophy of continual improvement makes sense and I’m happy to give you the time to do it. I’m really enjoying the respectful commentariat and sad for the time when the inevitable trolls and stupid fights will come. Hopefully that won’t happen for as long as possible. As I’ve noted before and you know full well the economics have to be covered, so a simple banner ad from Optima is not going to cut it revenue-wise. The key is to keep things non-intrusive and tasteful. Please, no pop-ups and autoplay videos, especially when I’m in the middle of reading an article. No making the top banner ad expand so I have to scroll up and then back to get rid of it. No using slide shows simply to boost page views. No stupid huge ad interruptions deliberately placed before the last paragraph of an article. We love the site and know you need to pay the bills; we’re just looking for a little respect and consideration in the process. When you guys announced you were launching this site I initially thought this would double my car-blogging fun and I’d keep browsing both sites. However, business is picking up and I can’t waste as much time as I did before so I can’t really keep up with both. As a result, my personal traffic to that other site has diminished substantially. Part of me feels bad about that sometimes because I’ve wasted SOOOOOO many fun hours of the past decade on that other site, but, every time I go back I get slapped in the face with road blocks, accordion ads, autoplaying videos, on top of the typical Kinja glitchiness. Sure, the comments could be better here, notifications would be awesome!, but you guys are crushing it so far. Keep up the great work! In other good news, I got the Dauntless v6 in my CJ5 running the same day this article posted. Coincidence? I think not.
