The Autopian Has Reached 1 Million Pageviews In Its First Month. Thank You All So Much!

The Autopian didn’t exist 30 days ago. It was just a dream shared by two car-loving weirdo journalist buddies and an absolute badass of a car salesman. But the dream is becoming more real everyday thanks to you, our dear readers. We’re finishing up our first month of existence, and we’re delighted to say that we’ve reached 1 Million pageviews. Thank you!

What does this mean? I’m not really sure. But I do know that, if you’d asked me a month ago how many folks would be reading our site after 29 days, I wouldn’t have guessed a number anywhere close to seven-digits long. Nobody knew what an “Autopian” was, we had no background in launching sites, and we weren’t partnering with a media company — this has been a jump into the unknown. Scary, in some ways, but we’re just happy to have you, our amazing contributors, and our partner Beau by our side.

The Autopian has a long way to go before it’s the website Jason Torchinsky and I want it to be. He and I are the only two full-time staffers right now (Thomas Hundal has been crushing it, though), so we’re an incredibly small team, and there’s only so long we can continue at this pace before we wear out our cylinder walls (I’ve been pouring zinc additive into Jason’s Diet Cokes to get him to hold up a bit longer). That’s just one of the many things we need to figure out.  The user experience/commenting system could stand to be improved, I’d really like to build a stronger community, I think this place could stand to get even nerdier content-wise, and on and on.

But despite our growing pains, and despite the fact that we’re still a far cry from being anything close to profitable, we’re growing. Sure, we’re barely 5 percent of what the big-dog sites are size-wise, but our outlook — as engineers at my former company Chrysler often said — is “directionally correct,” and for that we thank you from the bottoms of our hearts (basically, our hearts’ oil pans).

P.S.: The Autopian has adopted the Toyota Manufacturing Process for article-production, so that means our team lives by “Kaizen,” or “continuous improvement.” So please keep sending in your feedback, either in the comments below or at tips@autopian.com

P.P.S.: Just a reminder that the two people in charge of running The Autopian are these two nutjobs — I mention this video so you’ll realize how much of a miracle all of this is:

From Torch:

David pretty much said what I’m thinking here as well: A month ago–actually, a leap year-February ago, not even a real month–there was no Autopian, and if you approached someone and asked if they were an Autopian, chances are they’d have sat you down and suggested you seek out your clergyperson, and likely requested that you let go of their arm because you’re gripping pretty tightly.

Now, though, everything is different! We live in a world where The Autopian exists, and I can see this amazing community of car dorks forming and somehow the world feels like a slightly better place.

We have so far to go still, and, sure, it’s a bit exhausting, but that could also be because my doctor said something about zinc poisoning? I guess I should look into that.

More importantly, thank you all for reading and supporting us and being the reason we do this. We can’t wait to do even more.