I Need Your Help to Do Something Great

You’ve seen me write an entire newsletter post on the fact that “following your passion” is terrible advice. But what if you could truly do it: Follow your passion and be useful to others?

[TL;DR – I’ve been in the racing world for years as an amateur and constructor for my son’s racing. I know how to solve big problem in the racing-world and I’ve built a technical MVP with really great momentum so far. Find it here.]

A History of Racing

For many of my YouTube subscribers, you’ve noticed that I’ve been posting daily shorts of my deeper engagement into the racing game. One of my very first posts years ago was about my son’s career into the racing world. Ever since then, we’ve only gotten more and more serious as a function of competence and success. He’s won series championships, a top performer both at the club and national level, and been growing and maturing in the sport of racing at noticeable speed.

I know the game of racing. I’ve traversed the ladder myself as an amateur. As an SCCA licensed driver, I enjoy my current position of being a ‘gentleman driver’ or ‘pay driver’ for teams that need an extra driver (or suddenly missing one). I’ve never claimed to be good. I won’t ruin a team’s race, and in most cases, I’m just good enough to keep average pace with the field. Sometimes I just tell the team that “I won’t make things worse. That’s all I can promise.”

Racing is Cost Prohibitive

Ask any Team Principal or driver what their biggest constraint or issue is, and they will respond with “we need more money to race.” Finding good drivers for a team is only secondary to the ability to support a team. Teams need sponsorship to support mechanics, coaching, travel, technology and the car itself (and everything is a consumable). Drivers need all of these same things. While the money aspect is a complicated problem to solve in that teams can (relatively) know what their costs will be to run a team for a season, the greater and more frustrating costs are time and relationships.

Racing is Psychologically Expensive

The amount of time drivers and teams spend wooing and working with sponsors to work out a sponsorship deal is a cost that deeply impacts the overall effectiveness of a team. When dog-fooding a team, all members of the team are playing an almost full-time role of a salesman and fundraiser as well as their functional duties. How frustrating it can be to work out the deals of a sponsor… and if we’re honest, most racecar drivers aren’t business people. Some of them are merely neanderthals who only know how to go fast. This is ok! But the tax imposed upon small teams is immense. They must be able to sell and service their sponsors in professional and mature ways. Details must be discussed and negotiated:

The short of it is: Drivers and teams must be able to successfully convince a sponsor that the money they give will give them the advertising value of the sponsor’s product, service, or company. This isn’t an easy task to measure by any means.

Oh, and it’s not only for racing drivers. Any athlete in motorsports on land, water, and air have the same constraints: Find money and perform well to keep money flowing. We are solving this problem.

There are More [Technical] Problems to Be Solved

I have seen MANY operational, management, and technology problems to be solved in the racing world. Many of those problems have been become personal, as my son completes his 3rd full season of racing. These problems aren’t merely frustrating, but constraining and sometimes hurtful to the trajectory of a driver or team. I’m struggling with it all now myself.

Team Principals and drivers are not often business people. This is why they hire engineers, sales, marketing, etc as the team grows in success and support.

Even more rare is deep technical knowledge. The deepest that (few) teams get to is hiring someone to build their website and (maybe) manage their social media channels. In many racing events, we’re literally still pen and paper. It’s 2023 my friends, time for an upgrade.

Personal Vested Interest to Solve Problems in Racing

I’ve found an intersection of my capabilities, passions, and invested interests… and I’ve been pulling on this string for almost a year now. Can it truly be possible to build, work, and be paid completely within your passion? I’d certainly like to try.

Some would ask whether I lived my passion in my past projects. The answer is yes. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to always work within my passions: agile, startups, Bitcoin, and venture investment. I’ve been blessed to be able to direct my life in this way and find amazing colleagues to help support my investments and focus.

But, never before has my work included a direct impact to my family and a sport I love.

Very rarely do people of industry get to build something that directly impacts the success of their family. In most cases, family is merely a receiving function of effort, they receive the output of work-effort to bring money in.

What if you could say that your work directly impacted the financial success of your son or daughter? What if you could say that every waking day your work was directly improving the career or life-path of your progeny? What if you could say that your work allows you to be working with your family every day? – This rare gem of a situation, a rare convergence of factors, could it actually be possible outside of running a family farm?

Time to Try Following My Family Passion

I have built a technical platform and solution for the automotive & motorsport world that has already been proven in our early alpha user testing.

Currently:

If I Could Make it Easier…

“If I could make it easier for you as a driver or team owner to get money in to race, would you use it?”

Every single answer we’ve received was “yes!”

So far, our early testers have validated that our platform and solution is exactly what they need.

The Old Way of Getting Sponsorship to Race

  1. Contact family, friends, network, and colleagues. This is best done in-person.
  2. Discuss the terms of the sponsorship: How many races, how much expected visibility, where branding will go (suit, car, etc), how social will be leveraged, events to be at, co-branding considerations, and more. This back and forth can take months and must be done year round.
  3. Contracts to write, agree on, and close. Financials shared and money-in schedule.
  4. Branding collateral created, put on livery, put on suit, first social media posts begin being pushed to communicate partnership and sponsorship. Servicing the sponsor begins now.
  5. Oh, and you have to actually perform well in races so your sponsor (actually) gets the visibility they paid for.

Aunt Jodie might love you, but she ain’t gunna send you $500 every month this year to pay for one set of tires. You’ll probably need 4-10 sets per month depending on racing schedule. She’s a one-off sponsor.

Racing is expensive. Drivers and teams must constantly be getting out there, fundraising, meeting people, building relationships, and somehow over time convince them to give them money to go fast. Don’t forget, the driver needs to be performant.

Performing well as a driver is hard enough of a job. It’s time to use technology to optimize and simplify the fundraising process.

The New Way

GarageID is the most elegant solution for any race team, driver, or aspiring speed-demon:

  1. Sign up and fill out a Driver Profile. Tell us your racing goals, costs, and what you need.
  2. Upload your machine to your digital garage. We give you all the racing category-specific fields to tell us all about your ride.
  3. Create one-time sponsorship packages to multi-tiered packages so sponsors know exactly what they are getting for their money.
  4. Connect a payment gateway and send your unique GarageID link to anyone in your network.
  5. Sponsors can easily send money knowing what they’re getting.

Don’t be deceived. A relationship still needs to get built, but creating a platform that reduces technology overhead isn’t just something that I personally need for my son’s racing career, it’s something that the industry needs as a whole.

The automotive and motorsport world is a $3.3+ trillion dollar industry:

*first lockdowns due to pandemic response, so numbers lower than expectations

And, these numbers are just the car world. If we are to include boating, motorcycles, ATVs, ATX, planes, drones, etc… If it’s in your garage, men like to race these things.

The full market potential is staggering. I’ve done the math.

Just the Beginning

Through our year of building in quick product development cycles getting amazing feedback, we’ve found that our driver sponsor platform can encompass the larger automotive world with ease, without diluting core usability and focus.

I’m excited to expand our platform beyond event organization and driver sponsorship, our two core functions right now. We have a long pipeline of needs from community feedback:

Here’s the First Ask – 3 Things

In 7 days, I’m going to launch my first ever Kickstarter campaign and try to crowdfund our project.

We have an amazing team that I’m ridiculously proud of. We’re just beginning!

All the best,
ps

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