Is This Anything?

12:42 PM on a Thursday, I dropped the comment on a live auction for a 1973 911T.

"I put this handsome devil's service history into a searchable timeline. For those who like to go deep."

I stepped away for a Peloton class. When I came back, five cities had already read the timeline — Warrenton, Dallas, Denver, Bothell, Portland — and the afternoon was just getting started. By the time it was over: Matthews, North Carolina. Honolulu. New York. Cave Creek, Arizona, which came through three times with the last visit after six o'clock. The car is listed by @911r, a high-volume BaT seller with locations in Portland and Phoenix, and Cave Creek is twenty minutes north of Phoenix. Make of that what you will.

Paris came in at 3:37 and was back at 4:03 — midnight both times. Never left a comment, never sent an email, just read the timeline and disappeared. That's been the texture of the whole month, honestly — people showing up and not saying anything.

Is this anything?

"Is this anything?" is what comedians ask each other when they're trying out something new. Seinfeld made it the title of his book. Every great bit started as someone nervously asking that question in a green room.

I've been asking that about Bordmappe. It's a new project — not in the logbook until now. Digital service history for enthusiast cars, starting with Porsche air-cooled. Every car gets a page. Every caretaker adds to its story.

Thirty-plus years ago I sold a 1972 914 to my uncle. I've wanted a 911 ever since. The working theory: the service records of a forty-year-old Porsche tell a better story than the listing does. A BaT auction is marketing. A service timeline is evidence.

Three drops

The testing method isn't clever. Find a Porsche on BaT, build its full service timeline from the documents already uploaded, drop the link in the comments.

First drop: a 1970 911T that had just closed, sold for $68,000. Three thumbs, a handful of click-throughs. I thought: okay, maybe.

Second drop: a 1987 Carrera 3.2, mid-auction with two days left. I spent half a day wondering if I'd come off desperate. Then a commenter called moneymaz replied: "Super helpful." Based on his BaT profile, he is exactly the person I was trying to impress. Small fist pump. Car sold at $109,000. And while that auction was running, someone signed up through the homepage form — a high-volume BaT consignor with storefronts in Portland and Phoenix. I emailed him and he replied in three minutes.

Third drop: the 911T above, listed by the same guy. Nine cities in six hours, Phoenix in the mix, and Paris at the end.

The quiet build

After the second drop, people were landing on car pages with nowhere to go — no account, no way to follow a car, no way to claim the one that was actually yours.

So I spent three days building. By Monday night: accounts, sign-in, public profiles, a followable-car model, a claim-a-car flow, vanity URLs. By Tuesday: a redesigned chassis page with a callout section you can copy back into a BaT comment thread. By Wednesday: a unified claim-and-add flow for owners whose car isn't in the database yet, plus view counts on every page.

None of it was for anyone in particular. It was the backlog of "what would a real user need" translated into code as fast as we could manage. Three days, and then the third link went out.

Nathan

Nathan Merz is the person who convinced me that documentation is the whole point. He's made YouTube videos about 911s for years — what the records tell you, what good history looks like, how to read a car from its paper trail. We downloaded the transcripts and used them to help build Bordmappe's understanding of these cars. He is, in a meaningful sense, part of the foundation.

I first emailed Nathan almost a year ago with a stunt. I'd asked ChatGPT to assess a 1981 SC the way Nathan Merz would, then sent him the output and asked how the AI did. He replied four days later: "I think AI has some work to do." The car was overpriced given how it presented. He was right.

He has since made a video in which he mentions that customers keep doing this — asking AI to assess a car the way Nathan Merz would and then emailing him the result — and that he'd prefer people didn't. I watched it today. I'm choosing to believe he meant the others.

Now I'm back, this time with Bordmappe. His feedback was practical: significant seller effort to gather and scan everything, a redaction problem with names and financials buried in old invoices, and most dealers don't actually convey history — so the audience is narrower than it looks. All fair points, and I wrote back with the counterarguments and mentioned I was local.

"I didn't realize you were local," he said. "Let's meet sometime. Would be fun to do a car with an extensive file."

The whole time, I'd been twenty minutes up the road. He probably doesn't remember the first email.

Who's reading

Five people created accounts from the test #3 traffic. One of them is emojicowboy. The others have handles in the same spirit. None of them completed the next step — adding your own car requires uploading documents and a VIN for us to verify and build out the profile — but they got as far as creating an account, which is not nothing. The CTA landed, and the follow-through is a product problem, not an audience problem.

The consignor who signed up during the second drop said the timelines add a lot of value for buyers and that he was definitely interested, which was the reply I'd been looking for.

A couple of funds have also come through. I'm keeping this deliberately light because I genuinely don't know if they're reading this right now. What I'll say: the site is working as a calling card in ways I didn't specifically engineer, and an inbound is always more interesting than an outbound.

Am I about to get kicked off BaT?

BaT doesn't, as a rule, love third parties in their comment threads, and I am doing exactly that. So far the comments have been polite, specific, and well-received — no moderator has taken one down, nobody has emailed.

But the math is simple. If this keeps working, somebody is going to say something. My hedge is to make every page on Bordmappe link back to the auction — the Bid button routes back to BaT, the platform is credited on every card — so if my traffic sends people back to them, I'm useful rather than parasitic. That's the theory, anyway.

I'll find out when someone from BaT tells me.

A postcard from Buffalo

In Episode 8 we put Tasuki on digital screens across San Francisco for two hours. The creative was a URL on a white background, and nobody typed it — zero conversions.

Two weeks later, someone in Buffalo typed `tasuki.co/hello-world`, answered the question correctly, and appeared in our Telegram log at 3:45 PM on a Wednesday.

That's not a conversion rate, it's a postcard, but I needed the postcard.

Like your customers

Seth Godin has the line. You have to like your customers.

After two months of outbound with podcast hosts that mostly didn't pull, I've been doing a different kind of outreach with a different kind of audience. The comment threads fill up, a high-volume seller signs up mid-auction and replies to the email in three minutes, the scene-literate guy on BaT writes back inside forty-eight, and Paris comes in twice on a Thursday night and still doesn't say anything.

I don't know what Bordmappe is yet. But I know who's paying attention.

Is this anything? Ask me again next week.