Convince me there is a reason to save my fledgling motorsport website

"TrackRatMk1" (trackratmk1) 12/08/2015 at 16:17 • Filed to: None

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So I’ll make this really simple. I own !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , which used to be a not-very-popular site for finding motorsport events. This is a eulogy for my life’s biggest project. Unless someone else wants it.

The site is real, check it out. The only caveat is if you look now there is pretty much no content on the site.

And I’m truly sorry about that, but it’s hard work, loading events on there one at a time, hour after hour, day after day... and I don’t get anything in return for it. The 2015 events have elapsed, meaning I need to get busy on 2016 if I want to have a website at all next year.

It’s supposed to look sorta like this (this is a mockup from wireframe design, not an actual screenshot, but you get the idea...).

And truthfully, I’m in a bit of a dilemma. I’ve realized that I enjoy building websites about as much as someone would enjoy eating pickle sandwiches every day for the rest of their life. I can’t stand pickles.

Of course like all bad decisions, this endeavor was based on an idealistic goal - that car enthusiasts of the world would socially contribute to the site by posting their own pictures of events, and having conversations about drivers, tracks, cars, and all sorts of fun stuff.

Three years ago, this is what you would have heard me say for an elevator pitch (roughly):

“Imagine if we had a one stop resource that you could simply plug in your zip code and find every automotive event in a 200 mile radius! Sort the list by Pro racing, and go buy some tickets to a race. Or check out Amateur racing of all different kinds. Sure you can go to MotorsportReg and find an autoX or a track day, but the user interface isn’t pretty and if you don’t race yourself this is pretty much a dead end. And that’s why there is a catch-all category for Non-Racing, so all the local car clubs and regional events could transcend their mom & pop websites and expand their reach to more people!”

Using a logical leap, I reasoned if that elusive critical mass was reached, the little venues and clubs would jump on board and eventually the big ones would follow suit. Each venue’s task would be simple... if you own a racetrack or run a car club, you post your yearly schedule on PaddockScene to get more eyeballs on your events. Job done.

The formula was sort of like this:

Step 1: Build a motorsport database with some events in it

Step 2: Market it till it becomes popular and enthusiasts contribute pics/posts

Step 3: UGC (user gen content) grows; venues can’t ignore the audience

....................

Step 4: Profit.

Yeah... that all never happened. It was me, myself, and I, slogging through manual data entry for hundreds of hours a month, just to keep what little traffic I had returning.

The audience never showed up for a variety of reasons which I won’t get into here... some were my fault, others were way out of my control.

I dumped my life savings into the design and development, all starting about 3 years ago. This was well into the 5-figure range if you’re wondering, mostly because I hired an agency to do what I cannot... code and develop and design.

If you’re thinking, “hey, that’s a terrible idea! You have no idea what you’re doing building websites” you’d be right. BUT I had to try. For a couple of years I had been building spreadsheets cataloging every racing event I could find globally, and I built a really slick Google Calendar that my friends desperately wanted me to share with them. If it worked on a small scale, why not on a big one?

Anyway, PaddockScene is supposed to be populated with the full worldly landscape of motoring events, spanning literally every category of racing in every corner of the globe... let’s call it “LeMons to LeMans”, and everything in between.

I have built categories for Pro Racing, which includes F1, Indy, NASCAR, Australian V8 Supercars, DTM, British Touring Car, etc etc ad infinitum.

I built categories for Amateur Racing, which had various options for rallying, road course, run-what-you-brung drag days, motoX, snowmobiling, and included pretty much any weird ass motorsport out there.

There were non-racing categories for Cars & Coffees, all the national Auto Shows, manufacturer ride & drives, and much more.

Anytime I learned of a new racing series or event, I built it into the taxonomy of the site and added the schedule myself.

From a technical side, there are a lot of really interesting ways to administrate and monitor the site. Flexible levels of user permissions, modules that can be added or removed, notifications for all kinds of submissions. It’s a really cool system that needs somebody a lot more capable than me at the wheel.

At this point, I’m almost three years into the site and wondering if it’s even worth putting the many weeks worth of effort into compiling the events for 2016. It’s basically abandoned already but I can’t just let it go without seeing who might have a good idea for it.

And whoever wants it, CAN HAVE IT. At least, with a good reason. I’m not looking for money to sell it because I know it’s not worth anything without revenues. But if I found the right person/team/company to use it, I would like to see the idea live on in capable hands if it can be used for the good of the automotive community.

So, Jalops. Tell me why I shouldn’t just pull the plug. Help me think of ways this can be re-used, rebranded or re-imagined. Maybe there is a digital prodigy in our midst who can save PaddockScene from eternal anonymity. Or perhaps there is a good creative-commons sort of use for this website here on Jalopnik.

Or maybe it’s time to just move on.

PS: In the off chance anyone cares at all about this, I would be glad to privately share with you detailed history, timelines, business plans, scope of work docs, agency briefs, administrative privileges (if interested), and my professional credentials.

I’ll answer any questions in the comments. You can always email me directly through the contact info on the site as well... at least until I stop paying my hosting bills.

zeontestpilot > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 16:23

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Wasnt even aware there was a site like this. I feel like I missed out, :/.

MontegoMan562 is a Capri RS Owner > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 16:24

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I’m interested. I’ll hit the contact section of the site.

Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast. > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 16:25

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That “....................” step between 3 and 4 will get you every time. Best of luck to you though.

As a second thought, you may be able to sell this directly to one of the racing groups. NHRA etc...

SnapUndersteer, Italian Spiderman > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 16:34

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I knew about your site and I honestly only used it twice. Once as a user, another as a poster.

#nothelping

Flavien Vidal > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 16:34

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My own 2cts here...

To get traffic in this field of work, you need partnerships. You shouldn’t have dumped all this money into the website itself. A good ratio would have been 1/3 into building the site 2/3 into paying popular websites to promote your website and its content regulary (could be Jalopnik, but also R&T, pistonheads...etc or also some sport website that could target older readers who enjoy racing but only visit sites referenced on Aol.com (ie: 90% of racing afficionados over 40 years old :) )

Promotion is everything and unless your content is AWESOME, you won’t get traffic without paying other websites to promote yours... And even content is awesome you would pretty much have to go through that.

As far as pulling the plug goes, I don’t know. It depends if you can afford it or not.

Sam > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 16:40

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If you want to try to make it work into 2016, I’d be glad to come on board and help you out with some cheap (read: free) labor. My mother is also a pro graphic designer, so I could probably pull some favors.

It seems like you could turn this into an indie-Racer mag with small articles and interviews with drivers about the specific events. How they drive the track, how they prepare, what the biggest challenge is going to be, etc.

I live in Indianapolis, so I have easy access to the drivers and team principals for a lot of the big racing teams(I have a friend who’s dad is an engineer at Ganassi and Sarah Fisher lives down the road from me).

Now that I’ve pitched myself, here’s so normal advice: I’d say some integration and social media push is also important. Tweets, RSS feeds, Facebook, and even just basic calendar syncing can go a long way.

Protip: Squarespace is a great way to make a really fancy website for cheap. You can even get fancy if you want to get fancy, but otherwise you can modify a default template to make it look real nice.

Also, never forget that getting yourself high on search engines is very important. When someone searches “2016 Indy Lights Schedule”, you want to be on the first page.

TrackRatMk1 > Flavien Vidal 12/08/2015 at 16:43

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Yeah lots of hard learnings for sure. I went in looking for partnerships with some venues I had connections with, namely LRP and VIR. But you’ve got to strike it big and make it enticing enough for more venues to join, and keep posting their schedules. Getting users was tough, trying to promote the site through social media and start-up conferences didn’t really help.

Can I afford $100/year on hosting? Sure... but can I sink a couple hundred hours into self-populating the content every year? No way!

Thanks for your feedback.

Bman76 (no it doesn't need a WS6 hood) M. Arch > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 16:45

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I love the idea, wish I’d known about it. If tracks could post/use this to promote their events themselves that’d cut down on your work. Ultimately, do what’s right for you.

TrackRatMk1 > Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast. 12/08/2015 at 16:46

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Haha yeah obviously I never looked at it from such a casual mindset when I was so heavily invested, but figured a quick sum up for everyone looked something like that.

Would love to sell it to a sanctioning body, or donate the platform if it could prove useful. There are a lot of really impressive capabilities designed into this that are unique to motorsport.

thebigbossyboss > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 16:47

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Wow. A cautionary tale if there was one. Hind sight is 20/20 as they say. I don’t really have much to contribute other than in hindsight perhaps it would have been a good idea to learn how to do some of the things you paid others to do. But that’s easy for me to say over here in my self righteousness.

Perhaps you can sell it to someone if you’re truly sick and tired of it. You won’t make your money back but you might get a bit more than a kick in the teeth.

That aside I admire your entrepreneurial spirit. It is your type of people who have founded big and small companies that make America great.

Best of luck!

TrackRatMk1 > zeontestpilot 12/08/2015 at 16:48

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For the record, I would have loved to have done this as an app instead of a website. There is a guy now doing exactly that with a MUCH more substantial budget than I had and a team of people working for him. His app is called Tracktivity and we’ve been talking quite a bit about this concept and how to monetize it. Very cool and I’m hoping just because I love the idea so much that it works out for him.

RWS Motorsport > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 16:56

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I wouldn’t give up yet. You’ll always regret it if you do and see another site doing the same thing better in 5 years time. As others have said, speak to sites like R&T or Jalopnik. I am a proper motorsport nerd and some weekends when I’m not already at a track having a resource that linked to events nearby and their site would be a great resource. I would focus more on the obscure events. Everyone knows when and where the F1 will be this weekend, but who knows that there are 14 autoX events happening within 3 blocks of your house (i may have made up those numbers).

Its definitely all about getting your/the site name out there.

Stop paying any more money other than the hosting, and see if you can get anyone on board as a commercial partner, or just to link to you. Jalopnik do a weekend motorsports round-up. Could you tie in with that?

Sorry, that was slightly rambly, I may have been drinking this evening ha.

TrackRatMk1 > SnapUndersteer, Italian Spiderman 12/08/2015 at 17:00

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That’s cool I’m not offended! I wonder if what turned you off from it was one of the things I had on the to-do list... obviously, money became an issue and I didn’t get to do the several iterations of UX I intended.

TrackRatMk1 > thebigbossyboss 12/08/2015 at 17:04

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Appreciate the comment. This won’t be my last company :)

Have you looked up what websites sell for that don’t have a revenue stream? Anybody with two fingers can build a templated e-commerce store and have at least a tiny revenue stream in a matter of months... doesn’t quite work that way with my revenue model unfortunately.

MarquetteLa > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 17:05

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What CMS is it built on?

TrackRatMk1 > Bman76 (no it doesn't need a WS6 hood) M. Arch 12/08/2015 at 17:08

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So that was actually the entire goal. You’d be surprised how dated and backwoods the management is at many tracks around the country though. It’s a tougher sell than anyone would think.

Plus there’s the chicken and egg problem. How do you convince venues to add events when there aren’t many users? Likewise, how do you convince users to join when there aren’t many events?

So you can see how it ends up with me plugging in all the events, across the board, for days on end... to try to amass the users!

Bman76 (no it doesn't need a WS6 hood) M. Arch > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 17:11

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I registered, trying to add some Missouri events, not that it’ll necessarily help.

thebigbossyboss > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 17:12

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Not really I don’t know much about websites but if you’re sick of the effort and hemorrhaging money even a hundred bucks might be worth it to rid you of the thing and stop the bleeding.

TrackRatMk1 > Sam 12/08/2015 at 17:14

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Right, I’ve built other websites on Wix and Wordpress... honestly this was far too custom to be well suited to a template site.

The SEO was actually pretty good... when an event gets posted the “owner” of that events can put keywords in for Google to search from. It worked really well. I was also really strategic with my titles for events.

Would have loved to have expanded into a bit of an e-zine with exclusive content but as a one man show, it was hard enough to keep the lights on focusing on the original concept.

As a business person you have to focus on getting the minimum viable product to market successfully before you expand.

I’ll let you know if I keep things going into 2016, appreciate the offer!

TrackRatMk1 > MarquetteLa 12/08/2015 at 17:15

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It’s built in Drupal using a completely custom theme, in conjunction with a couple of modified modules, and other straight out of the box modules.

Brian, The Life of > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 17:17

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Really? Nobody yet? I am disappoint ...

BECAUSE RACE CAR!

TrackRatMk1 > Bman76 (no it doesn't need a WS6 hood) M. Arch 12/08/2015 at 17:18

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Cool! The user uploaded events go through an approval process to ensure they are categorized appropriately, so you’ll see them pop up on the main page once they are approved.

jariten1781 > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 17:19

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Won’t try to convince you to keep it.

I’ve done the donating time crap to the internet too many times to be that cruel. I’ve owned websites & forums, moderated forums/groups/listservs/IRC networks and rooms, and done backend stuff for e-commerce.

You’ve got a built in bank of passion, but eventually those passion hours are all cashed out and it becomes a job. If you’re not making money it’s a piss poor job and you’re probably right about handing over the reins or shutting the doors.

Sucks it hasn’t work out, seems like a great idea, but best of luck either way.

TrackRatMk1 > Brian, The Life of 12/08/2015 at 17:20

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This one seems the most relevant.

TrackRatMk1 > Bman76 (no it doesn't need a WS6 hood) M. Arch 12/08/2015 at 17:23

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Published.

deekster_caddy > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 17:33

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Don’t give up on that! It’s a nice looking site. I’d never heard of it, perhaps that’s part of the problem. Spread it around! What will really take a long time is hitting all the different racing forums and finding people willing to submit their events. But if it’s empty... nobody will be submitting.

Note from my first visit - after entering my zip code, I should be able to expand the search radius or time window to find more events.

TrackRatMk1 > jariten1781 12/08/2015 at 17:35

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You said it. Trouble is it almost felt like a calling. And I’ll be honest, the vision I had for it isn’t even 10% realized in what actually got built. So it’s an empty feeling to own something and not at least meet the potential you had in mind for it. That said, it won’t be my last business.

TrackRatMk1 > deekster_caddy 12/08/2015 at 17:37

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That, my friend, is called the chicken and the egg problem. Two years ago I populated thousands of events and marketed this everywhere. Hooniverse actually covered it.

Bman76 (no it doesn't need a WS6 hood) M. Arch > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 17:44

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Awesome, I’ll do what little I can. Most tracks don’t have 2016 schedules yet anyway.

davedave1111 > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 17:51

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“Can I afford $100/year on hosting? Sure... but can I sink a couple hundred hours into self-populating the content every year?”

What if you can turn that last item into maybe a dozen hours managing outsourcing to overseas, and something like another couple of hundred bucks of contract data entry?

soFreshAndsoClean > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 18:14

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Two things I’d like to add.

1. I’ve tried making and promoting a website (twice now) from scratch and I’ve given up both times so I definitely feel you. Eventually the lack of progress (activity-wise) and the amount of work adds up and becomes a crushing weight on your soul. Once you get to that point, you should give up or put the website on hold. There is no point in constantly hitting your head against the wall. Just take your licks, learn from your mistakes and move on.

2. I’ve also had some success (in a different business venture) and I know for a fact that success breeds more success. When something starts gaining momentum, you get more excited and start to put in more time and it gains even more momentum. If you want to keep this website going, I would suggest taking a step back, refocusing your vision and trying to find traction somewhere else(maybe on a smaller or different scale). Maybe have people post Cars and Coffee pictures on twitter and use hashtags to link to your website. Or offer a service to C&Cs/racetracks/car shows/etc. Once you get some momentum going, that’ll help propel you forward to reach your grander vision.

Good luck!

TrackRatMk1 > davedave1111 12/08/2015 at 18:14

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Great suggestion, and I may try it. Seems to be working for my friend building an app with the same concept.

The copout answer would be that outsourcing the data entry will result in bad descriptions for the events, but truth is the descriptions were already short or non-existent for prob 90% of the events anyway.

Actually, I think that I learned from the first two years (when the events were populated) that the site needs some more fundamental changes. The analytics showed that people weren’t usually going past the first page. The bounce rate was nuts. I inferred that the search tools or filters were too difficult to use, but also too complex and expensive to change.

This is why going over budget too soon in a project is an absolute killer - had I been able to learn some of the things from analytics, I would have made several revisions to future iterations of the site. As it was, I would have to settle basically on the minimum “viable” product as my final product.

TrackRatMk1 > soFreshAndsoClean 12/08/2015 at 18:22

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Great advice.

Kailand09 > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 18:29

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How popular is the mobile app that is similar you were talking about?

I think the idea is great and wish i knew about it.

Someone mentioned contracting out the work, which is viable. Another option would be to automate race populating by parsing track websites. Skip over human dependence.

I’ll have to look over the site more but i wouldn't mind giving a hand if i could be any useful.

TrackRatMk1 > Kailand09 12/08/2015 at 18:46

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I desperately wanted to automate the data processes. I tried to build a scraping tool to dig the info out of various websites, but it comes in too many forms. Some sites have their dates on the front pages, some buried many clicks in. Some sites have their schedules uploaded as PDFs, others as pictures. It’s a mess out there believe me.

Tracktivity just got off the ground this year I think. I have to imagine they have a pretty good user base because they are pay-promoting all the time on FB and Twitter. Not sure how much retention they are getting. Good guy behind it.

Kailand09 > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 19:00

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Yeah i suppose you’re talking a custom parse for each site. Which you could spend better money to contract that out for each track or series website.

I can imagine many ways to try and target first time users...

Won’t the app face the same issues though that you had?

deekster_caddy > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 20:00

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Damn. I see. Well, remember that in websites without that ‘critical mass’ or constant marketing the traffic falls off to ... well you know. That sucks, good luck with the decision, I don’t know what advice to give.

Danny Gross > TrackRatMk1 12/08/2015 at 21:42

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I don’t have anything to say moving forward, because I have no idea what it takes and just thinking about what you’ve described is a bit daunting. But my words of wisdom are to never look back on it with regret, take it as an awesome learning experience and try again with a different tactic or just remind yourself you would have never known what it takes or the difficulty without being where you are. Cheers to you though the site looks awesome, I wish I had known about it before today.

TrackRatMk1 > Danny Gross 12/09/2015 at 11:20

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Thanks!

LimitedSlipDiff > TrackRatMk1 01/04/2016 at 20:19

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Hey can you send me an email ewc[nine][three][nine][nine]@gmail? I’m interesting in talking more in detail about all of the work you put into this.

TrackRatMk1 > LimitedSlipDiff 01/05/2016 at 07:40

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Sure will do.