August 19th, 2022…. An arbitrary launch date I set with our COO. Yesterday was that day! It didn’t happen. Our Carcade platform is still under wraps with the dev team plugging away and I have nothing for anyone to start joining the community with. Except this line of thinking was wrong… so wrong in fact. Our mission “Connecting people over the common theme of cars” is what the community has been doing for a long time and this app is just an extension of that. It’s not some novel product with some crazy new tech behind it. No. It’s taking what already exists and framing it up nicely so more people can get in with success and enthusiasm.
Back to the day. It’s Friday morning. I think it’s launch day; which is, for me, the day the app is ready for people to start signing up. It is not the day we start shouting about it from the mountain tops. So, I’m in the car, out the drive way and headed down my street towards the main highway. I turn the last corner before the stop sign at the entrance of the highway and to my surprise ( I really like surprises too), a 1991 Toyota Soarer passes me in the oncoming traffic lane and is going in REVERSE. Not quickly I must add. So confused I turn and look back and they have stopped in the street. At this point they are facing the wrong way in the opposite lane as me and I am full of curiosity. I pull over, walk to the car, and discover not only are they going backwards in the opposite lane, the car is right hand drive!!! I think I said the most obvious troubleshooting hypothesis possible, “Having some trouble getting it to go forward?” I could see frustration, concern, and a hint of embarrassment as they looked up at me. “Yeah, it stopped going forward, I have another transmission at home, I’m going nurse it backwards there, it’s ok, its going to be ok.” This was a familiar feeling to me, not as the person standing in the road asking if they needed help, but the feeling of sitting in the driver seat of a machine that wouldn’t perform. Oof. It is rough. It’s like sitting in the spotlight and having no talent to show. I explained to them how I pulled over because they had a sweet car and its not everyday you see someone going backwards to get somewhere on a main street. They said it had been really hard to find someone to work on and it was wearing them out. BOOM! Hit me like a transmission dropping out the bottom when you dump the clutch a little too hard a little too late. (I’m figuring these auto metaphors out). The moment I was experiencing this morning of the Carcade launch was what Carcade was really about.
“Connecting people over the common theme of cars. Putting people at the front of the mission brings success, enthusiasm, and trust to all aspects of the automotive community.”
That is the full mission I had revised just days before. Here was someone having a pretty hard time getting the help they needed from the automotive community. So what would this Carcade app do if it were actually working??? It would help them identify THE BEST way to get their vehicle taken care of. Since the app wasn’t there yet, I was going to do the mechanical turk thing and be the app for this person. We exchanged info and I promised to ask around and figure out where would be the best place to take this unique vehicle. They reversed away as I headed back towards the vehicle.
Now I am at the office making calls around town, searching for anyone who not only knew about the car, but also how to work on them well. Google searches, Instagram DM’s, and a trail of phone calls later I had no success in finding anyone in Austin to work on such a vehicle. Out of the nearly 1 million people in Austin, I am confident someone knows how to work on it and will do it for money. My challenge was getting that person and the person I met connected. I called this car person back to tell them where I was at with the search and…well.. in short we talked for almost 30 minutes. I hadn’t found the answer to their transmission troubles, but what they did find was connection. At the end of the call I got a “Thank you for this. Seriously. I was feeling pretty down about the state of my transportation situation and was starting to slump, but now we know each other and got to talk. This was cool!” I was just trying to be my car app on a Friday. That was it though. Carcade was alive for a moment. No app necessary. Just people connecting in real life because the car theme got the conversation started.
Back to the app launch. It didn’t happen. I’m not going to build your anticipation any more on that subject. COO texts me at 4:00PM with a “What’s the word?” and my response was “It’s not done. Still at the office.” My turse response was frustration. I made the call to completely redesign a feature set that derailed the whole timeline. However, at 5:30PM I remembered that Carcade had happened on August 19th, 2022 and that was what we were driving for. Frustration gone. With freedom regained, we met at the local pub and celebrated a little.