What Do We Want?

When do we want it?

Everything. And now would be nice, right?

Last week was heavy. I mean, really heavy. Family and friends’ health issues. The first week of first grade at a new school. Family in town for less than 48 hours. And at least two nights where I stayed up stupid late—which hurt the next morning, now that we have to get up an hour earlier for the new school.

The good news is, those late nights accomplished much on the TGP front, if not necessarily much on the blog front. Fortunately Phil’s been hustling with the JDM adventures. If you missed them, they’re worth reading.

Meanwhile, Todd and I have been laying the foundation in the forum. Fast and furious, if not as fast and furious as we might like. You see, this is going to change everything. We know not everyone’s going to get it right away, but those who do and get in early are going to ride the wave with us.

It’s going to be awesome. I can hardly wait.

We’re over the moon with excitement, but like the saying goes—you never get a second chance at a first impression. We are looking at every detail, looking for every opportunity to make the user experience memorable—especially during onboarding. Here’s the plan.

Phase 1: Foundations

• How are people going to use the forum?
• How do we humanize the rules to make things easy?
• What features and functionalities do we need to set up?

Todd and I are currently getting the most basic of basics setup. We’re defining the rules, figuring out how things should work when people sign up, making sure we’ve got all the cornerstones laid and whatnot. Total forum membership: 2

Phase 2: Team Building

• How does the forum feel?
• What features should we prioritize?
• How do we want things to look at launch?

Once the foundation is laid—hopefully within the next couple weeks—we’ll be bringing the entire TGP team in to help frame things up. We’re going to put our heads together and build out all the spaces we want to have ready to go for launch. Total forum membership: 5-6

Phase 3: The Super Beta

• How can we make things better?
• What’s missing?

When it feels like we’ve got everything ready to go, we’re going to invite everyone in the super issue (it’s still moving, albeit slowly) in as beta testers. Their feedback on the signup and onboarding experience is going to be crucial in making sure we deliver a highly polished, meaningful experience to our club members when the forum officially launches. Total forum membership: 35-50

The Timeline

While we’re thinking all of the above might be done in two or three months, there’s a good chance we might not open things up until the end of the year. Suffice to say Todd and I have spent a couple weeks in the forum so far and are getting really close to Phase 2. Assuming a month for the team to get things framed and another month of beta tester polish, there’s a chance this might be ready to go sometime in November.

We’ll see. First impressions and whatnot.

For now, we’ve got a basic forum index and some basic rules in place. It’s pretty sweet.

Things might appear slow on the surface, but we’re paddling like mad just below.

If you’d like to spend more time online hanging out with gearheads like us, in a forum that was designed to work on mobile touch screens first, with none of the usual social media BS, you should probably be subscribed to this channel. (There’s a form below this post if you scroll down.) Something tells me we’ll be offering ground floor, before-it’s-open-to-the-public invites to the people on this list.

Keep going fast with class.