For those of you keeping tabs, I’m still alive, yes. Woohoo!
It might not still be so if not for the wild and wise character, John Stryker, of Strykermotors.com.
A couple months before the point of scraping my last pennies together, John approached me about potentially working together in the future. He told me how his successful Jeep parts side business was getting raped in eBay fees – as much as $1,500 per month.
My response: “Woah, wait, hold up. If that’s how much you’re paying in fees, you must be making some substantial profits. This is your side business, you say?!”
“Yeah. Yep. That’s right,” was something like his response.
John told me he’d like to get a snazzier website up and running where he could sell products directly and bypass most of the middle man fees. He knew I dicked around with random website building stuff and he’d guessed I could figure out how to make him an eCommerce site. Turns out he guessed correctly! We chatted and agreed it sounded like a good idea.
It was March at the time, and I was in the Florida Keys hoping the sun would somehow help me regain some strength after the latest battle in the war for my health. We talked about this work happening sometime in the hazy future.
Then I got back to New York City, and the reality of my dwindling bank account came closing in at an accelerated pace. I would soon have absolutely nothing left. Not very little left – absolutely nothing. I pinged John Stryker.
“Oh hey, so . . . about the stuff and things you wanted me to do for you. How’s about now? Now would be good for me.”
We chatted more. On the phone, we discussed all his annoyances with the systems he has to work with now, and what his ideal working world was like. He told me what he envisioned and hoped for with the new website. As John has a lot of work to do on the back end of the business – including buying Jeeps, ripping Jeeps apart and creating new, individual listings for each used part for sale – a key focus of the new site’s capabilities would be automation. Automate, automate, automate everything we could.
So, everything from shipping label creation to social media posts would be connected and automated as much as possible. We would put a lot of extra work into the site up front so that machines could make life much easier for John and his workers in the future. We talked about Tim Ferriss and my love for Four Hour Work Week. . . multiple times. Like a good groupie, I suggested he read the book . . . multiple times. (Incidentally, if you haven’t read the book . . . check it out!)
I drew up a proposal encompassing all John’s needs and desires and estimated (with some padding included) that the site would take me about 2-3 weeks to build.
Of course, scope creep happened. But it was completely on my side. I added in a lot of apps and functionality and redid some things to make sure they were as spiffy as possible. Damnit, this thing was gonna work and work well! I also decided to import John’s used parts in addition to the new parts he sells and underestimated what a pain in the ass that would be. The guy’s got over 400 parts for sale! They’re all fucking different! Which, aside from being annoying for a web developer type person, is pretty astounding considering John and his team carefully procured each piece by hand!
Something like 2 months later, we’re finally finished!
Best of all (for me) each payment from John was super prompt and saved me from bankruptcy in the nick of time! It’s been a really wild last couple of months. Part terrifying. Part thrilling in a good way. And 100% elated that things are up and running!
By the way, I can’t take credit for the amazing Stryker Motors logo. That’s all John and his lovely lady who created that! It may not win a prize in modern art — and really, who would want one of those anyway — but it’s cute as hell and without a doubt, memorable, which is way more important.
If you’re a Jeep lover, driver, mudder, or love someone who is, check out:
www.strykermotors.com
P.S. John Stryker (who is also an engineer by trade) is starting to create How-To content in blog and video format. If you have any requests on learning how to repair or replace something on your Jeep, send a message to John here:
https://strykermotors.com/pages/contact
P.S.S. If you want to learn about the steps and hardware you need to install a 1997-2006 Jeep Wrangler TJ soft top, John shows you how here:
https://strykermotors.com/blogs/news/how-to-install-1997-2006-jeep-wrangler-tj-oem-soft-top-hardware
Happy Jeeping!