Is This Anything?

12:42 PM on a Thursday, I dropped a comment on a live Bring a Trailer 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, the timeline had already been read in five cities: 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.

One reader came in from Paris at 3:37 and again at 4:03, midnight both times. Never left a comment, never sent an email, just read the timeline and went. That was the texture of the whole month: people showing up and not saying anything.

Is this anything?

"Is this anything?" is the question comedians ask each other about a new bit. (Seinfeld liked it enough to name a book after it.)

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, 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 1973 911T above, listed by the same guy. Nine cities in six hours, Phoenix in the mix.

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 convinced me that documentation is the whole point. He's made videos about 911s for years: what the records tell you, what good history looks like. Bordmappe's read on these cars is built partly on that thinking, so he's in a real sense part of the foundation.

When I came back to him with Bordmappe, his feedback was practical: gathering and scanning everything is real seller effort, old invoices bury names and financials that need redacting, and most dealers don't convey history anyway, so the audience is narrower than it looks. All fair. I wrote back with the counterarguments and mentioned I was local. "Let's meet sometime," he said. "Would be fun to do a car with an extensive file."

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 so we can verify and build out the profile, and nobody got that far. But they created 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 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 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, and the scene-literate guy on BaT writes back inside forty-eight.

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

Is this anything? Ask me again next week.