The Beginning of a Car Community Platform

Hi! This is my first post on IH.

Years ago I bought a domain name I keep re-registering. The plan was to host a car club forum. Occasionally I kept starting and stopping the project, it's been one of those things that I wanted to do, it just never got the time it deserved.

I even lost the domain name at one point and then bought it back. I've thought about hosting a forum maybe discord, phpBB, or something else, but it never felt right. Nothing against them. Part of the fun for me is working on the app itself. That's how cars are too, working on the car is the fun of having an old car.

Sometime in late 2019, the last days of the old norm, I started on a fresh version but once again it stalled out. Further along this time but stalled none the less. I have other projects, like motorift.com I'm working on as well, so it is what it is.

Until now! The day after Thanksgiving 2020 I decided to dive in.

I had the beginnings of a basic social media app. You could post, upload and hashtag. Not much, and there weren't any labels or icons or anything, but it was a decent start so I took it and ran with it. There was a sorta functional web app but most of my time had been spent in the Android side of things making a Java app.

Since then I've made some good progress on it. It's 2020, really no other reason needed. I have the start to a usable interface and the basics like @ mentions, uploads (it was functional not perfect), profile photos, information about your car, and status post comments. Pretty basic so far. I need things like featured hashtags, spam moderation, better profiles, community standards, moderators who know about these cars and just about anything else you can think of.

It's a start but I have a long way to go.

It's gonna be a place for Mustang and classic Ford owners to hangout which means I have to make sure the quality is far above and beyond what you might see in a Camaro forum.

Car jokes aside (Camaros are ok), I've never hosted a community or grown one or made software to host one or any of that. Just like anything else, getting started is only part of the battle, to say the least.

I have a million questions to answer like what are the goals? why start with the software? what is a kpi for a successful car community? and 999,997 more.

I know I'm not building anything completely new as far as the app goes, just trying to do it in a way that I think works. I know the car community is out there because I'm part of it, I'm just inviting some people to hangout.

As far as validating the idea goes, there are already Mustang communities and the topic of how Facebook groups aren't as useful as the old forums comes up from time to time. The new-school car community apps don't have enough focus on one specific type of car to be as useful as they could be. I believe in the idea and that's enough for me for this project. I'm not hinging all my future financial success on it or anything wild like that.

It's probably not the "best" idea to start with spending a bunch of time on the app when so many great products exist for a community. I'm not building a product for communities, just a platform for a community.

Some say the tools for the community don't matter, yet those old school car forums are largely broken because of the tools used in 1999 or 2004 when they were first starting so I'm not completely convinced tools don't matter.

I was inspired by places like IH, dev, the original dribbble even though I couldn't get in, and the old school car forums.

It's nice to work on something with less pressure. I like to spend the last month or so of the year working on a side project. At the end of 2019 I made a blog platform and page builder I use for motorift.com and it turned out to be one of the best choices I made.

I'm officially launching motorift in early 2021 so I thought this would be a good time to get started on something before the final motorift pre-launch sprint. Motorift is a motorcycle/motorsport data logger and analysis platform (+more), I'll probably write something about motorift here in a day or two and screenshots of the social app.

If I weren't making it custom I'd lean towards the Forem/dev.to platform.

So far the best community resources I've found are:

YEN.FM https://yen.fm/ by John Saddington @8bit

The Community Club https://the.community.club/

https://cmxhub.com/the-7ps-of-community/

That's all I got, thanks for reading! If you have any useful links/thoughts on community building please share.