Yesterday we launched GoAskSam, and honestly, I didn't know what to expect. You never quite know if something you've spent a year building will land the way you hoped, or just sit there.

It landed. Genuinely more than we expected. Real cars, real sellers, real conversations, all day, starting within minutes of that email going out. Thank you for that, more than you probably realize.

And, right on schedule, you broke it. Beautifully.

I said in the launch email that if you wait until software is perfect, you never launch. I meant it, but I didn't expect just how quickly, and how well, this community would prove the point. Within hours, a lot of you had found things I'd genuinely missed, and every single one of them made the product better within the day.

A few of my favorites:

None of that is a flex. It's a thank you. Every one of those was found by someone in this community actually using the thing, not by us testing it in a lab. That's exactly what I hoped would happen, and I want to keep it going.

If you wrote in, whether here or to [email protected], I read it, and I replied. Keep them coming. Truly, this only gets better with your eyes on it.

So what's next?

The searches stay at three a day for now, that's not changing imminently, but we are looking at what a version for people who want more, more searches, more features, might look like down the line. Not today, but it's coming.

We've also had a real wave of interest from potential PowerSellers wanting to join the roster. I'm going through each one properly, same care as the original five, before adding anyone new.

And there will be more bugs. I can say that with total confidence, because there always are. So consider this me asking you to keep going, keep trying weird cars, keep clicking things, keep telling me when something looks off.

Click below to login automatically and use your 3 searches today.

One more thing. We'd love to know what you want next. A few ideas that have already been suggested by you:

Want to dive deeper into any of these listings? Just click on the car to take you directly to the listing.

For those who don't know AutoHunter, for the past five years it's been one of the many online auction platforms trying to grab a piece of the collector and enthusiast car market. The difference is that this one wasn't some small startup trying to take on the big boys. AutoHunter was part of Collector Car Network, which also owns ClassicCars.com, and Barrett-Jackson bought the whole business in 2021.

So one of the biggest names in the traditional auction world has effectively had its own online auction platform sitting alongside it for the past five years, and now AutoHunter, at least as we know it, is going away.

It's stopped accepting new listings, although Barrett-Jackson definitely isn't saying it's getting out of online auctions. Quite the opposite. This is what they're telling people:

Which obviously got me wondering what exactly they're going to build that's so different from what they already had.

A new name? Nicer website? Better cars? Different fees? Or perhaps the more interesting answer is staring them in the face: Barrett-Jackson Online.

That's not something they've announced, by the way. That's just where I've ended up after thinking about this, because the part I find fascinating about AutoHunter is that if anyone should have been able to make a separate online auction brand really fly, surely Barrett-Jackson had a decent head start.

They've got the name, buyers, sellers and decades of relationships with collectors. They've got ClassicCars.com, and they even have a year-round Collection Showroom in Scottsdale selling and consigning cars outside the big live events. You'd also imagine plenty of cars come across their desks that aren't quite right for one of the big Barrett-Jackson auctions, whether because of the car itself, the timing or simply because the seller doesn't want to wait for the next event.

I don't know that last bit, by the way, and maybe almost everything they're offered is suitable, but surely there must be plenty of sellers and cars for whom an online auction makes more sense. AutoHunter should, in theory, have been a pretty obvious place to send them.

Yet after five years, Barrett-Jackson has decided that whatever comes next isn't AutoHunter, and I think that's really interesting.

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that AutoHunter failed, we don't know that. I certainly haven't seen its P&L, and Barrett-Jackson could simply have decided that operating a separate brand no longer makes sense. But either way, one of the biggest and best-resourced names in this industry has decided its existing standalone online auction product isn't the platform it wants for the future.

Think about what happened in Monterey a couple of weeks ago. The major live auction houses collectively sold around $755 million worth of cars in a matter of days.

Barrett-Jackson wasn't one of them, but that's not really the point. The number shows just how much money can move through the traditional live-auction side of this industry, and yet I've always found it fascinating that some of the biggest names in that world, businesses capable of selling hundreds of millions of dollars of cars, don't have anything approaching the everyday online audience of the biggest digital auction platforms.

I think that's because Bring a Trailer and the other really successful online platforms have built something slightly different: habit.

People don't only visit when they need to buy a car. They look when they're bored, check what something sold for, send listings to friends and watch auctions they have absolutely no intention of bidding on. Some of you probably check them every morning, and creating that sort of behavior is incredibly valuable and incredibly difficult to manufacture.

Initially, that made me think Barrett-Jackson has a problem. You can put hundreds of online auctions on Barrett-Jackson's website, but that doesn't magically mean millions of people are suddenly going to start checking it every morning. A huge name doesn't automatically create a huge digital marketplace.

But while writing this, I started looking at it the other way around.

Maybe the online auctions aren't there to benefit from Barrett-Jackson's traffic. Maybe they're there to create it.

And now I've rather convinced myself that's what I'd do.

Barrett-Jackson is an enormous consumer brand, but much of the excitement naturally revolves around its big events. Scottsdale comes around and everyone's watching Barrett-Jackson, but then Scottsdale finishes.

Now imagine Barrett-Jackson also has 50, 100 or however many online auctions running every day of the year. Suddenly there's a reason to visit Barrett-Jackson in June, September or on some random Tuesday morning when Scottsdale is still months away.

And once people are there, they're not just seeing the online auctions. They're seeing Scottsdale, the next live event, consignments, the Collection Showroom and everything else Barrett-Jackson does.

That's where I think this gets really interesting, because instead of asking how can the Barrett-Jackson brand help us build an online auction business?, you can turn the whole question around:

How can an online auction business make Barrett-Jackson a place people visit every day?

That's a very different proposition.

It works on the seller side too. Someone comes to Barrett-Jackson with a car and perhaps it's perfect for Scottsdale. Great. Maybe it's better suited to another live event, perhaps the Collection Showroom makes more sense, or maybe the owner simply wants it sold next week.

Why send that person into a completely different branded experience? Keep them inside Barrett-Jackson and give them different ways to sell.

Interestingly, AutoHunter's own FAQ already hints at this thinking. Prospective sellers are now being directed to Barrett-Jackson, whose team can recommend whether a live auction or an upcoming digital opportunity is the better fit.

That line jumped out at me, because perhaps that's ultimately where this is heading. Rather than an owner deciding whether they should use AutoHunter or Barrett-Jackson, the proposition becomes much simpler:

I've got a car to sell. I'll take it to Barrett-Jackson.

Then Barrett-Jackson decides where it belongs.

If that's where they're heading, killing AutoHunter as a separate destination starts making quite a lot of sense. One brand, one seller relationship, potentially one bidder ecosystem, but multiple ways of selling a car.

There's also some serious muscle behind whatever they decide to do next. Barrett-Jackson is now majority owned by MARI, Ariel Emanuel's events and experiences company, alongside Craig Jackson, who remains CEO. So this isn't exactly a business without the resources to have a proper go at it.

Of course, I could be massively overthinking this. “Premium digital auction platform” could turn out to mean AutoHunter with a new design, a different name and some more expensive cars. (boring!!!)

But I hope it doesn't, because I think there's a much bigger opportunity sitting there.

Don't use Barrett-Jackson to build another online auction platform. Use online auctions to make Barrett-Jackson a year-round digital destination.

And the funny thing is, I started writing this wondering why a company as big as Barrett-Jackson hadn't managed to make AutoHunter a much bigger player.

I've finished it thinking perhaps AutoHunter wasn't the wrong idea at all. Maybe it was just under the wrong name and the wrong site.

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