Hep Greg said:
damnnn... gonna be weird starting over.
If all goes well, we won't have to... at least on the forum end of things. All the news page content might be lost though. I will do my best to save what I can.
Also, Steven, to address a number of issues. Nothing that I do is spontaneous or "sudden" these are all things that have been in the works for months or even years and have been EXTREMELY pre-calculated but everything I do takes time and money... neither of which I have ever had an abundance of at the right times but the pieces are slowly coming together.
In 2005 I moved to Louisiana, worked for 6 months on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, saved $10,000, designed a library of scooter parts (that I spent all the money I saved on doing R&D and getting the SR store started and legitimized) and made a list of goals to set in the following 5 years after I moved home with the end 2010 being the deadline. The list is as follows:
1) Register SR as a legitimate business in the state of CA.
2) Open a web store.
3) Develop web content. (news, articles, reviews, interviews, etc.)
4) Start a clothing company.
5) Start a scooter company.
6) Start a freestyle scooter association.
7) Start a scooter based media company.
8) Get scooters in the X-Games.
As you can see some of the goals have already been reached while others are still in the works and they have not necessarily happened in the order I planned but I don't mind. I had a lot of hold backs in 2007-08 when I opened the new SR Store because the Yahoo system basically highjacked SR from me which was when the entire site had to be transferred to andrewbroussard.com. At the time I didn't have enough knowledge to resolve the problem myself nor did I have enough money to pay someone to do it for me so I just left it the way it was and focused on my store and my scooter parts/company to make some money to get the site fixed which is why the content and the clothing company both got put on hold. I needed to make money (off of scooter parts) to fix the site and I didn't want to add content to a site if I didn't know what the future was going to be for it and if it would all be lost when repairs were made. I had also wanted to get some advertisers on SR when the new store debuted but I was not about to have them advertising on "andrewbroussard.com" so that too got put on hold for over a year. Last summer I started looking around for a web person to fix the site (since I had a small income and savings from SR forks and BUFF bars) which is also when I talked to Chris and John about getting content going again... they flaked so I put the content on hold again because it is not the kind of project I am going to take on without a dedicated team to insure regular updates which is impossible for me to do on my own with everything else I have going on. I found a web guy in September and he fixed the domain issue and got everything back on scooterresource.com then the site started running out of bandwidth for 3-4 months if you recall. Each time the site went down more and more of the operating files corrupted which is what caused the ridiculous amount of errors towards the end of last year so I had the web guy switch servers and do a clean sweep of the whole site. Again I put all my web based projects on hold because of the inconsistent and poor website performance and focused on the projects I had real control over which is when I released PROTO. A lot of hours and money later the site seems to be working OK at best. The errors are gone for the most part but it now requires constant maintenance and it still runs slow as hell and I am not confident it can really perform under a serious user load... a user load which I am expecting by the end of the year... if not within the next few months because I have a lot of plans for this year and a lot of publicity which is going to generate a lot of traffic... like a lot.
The way I see it is I have been spending the last few years keeping this community patched together on a microscopic budget on a free shitty CMS and now it is time to do it right, now that I can (hopefully) afford it and get this sport a more legitimate image. First thing is to upgrade the forums, the front page and the content then I can focus on the rest of my goals since I have less than 20 months to accomplish them. With the new theme/layout we are dedicating ad space for companies to purchase to also help fund the community and the new costs of the improvements which has always been my plan. When I said that I do not want companies advertising on SR I mean I do not want companies whoring the forums. Until ad space is provided I allow most companies to have their own threads in the website section but nowhere else. Even if you are doing Inside Scooters you are more than welcome to help with SR too unless you see it as a conflict. In fact I would love that since I had talked to you about that before anyways. If I was trying to compete with you guys I would not have posted a link to your blog for the last 2 months on my frontpage. I think it is only going to help the sport by having multiple sources of reliable information. Regardless if Inside Scooters ever existed or not I would still be doing what I'm doing on the same time frame I am doing it because those are my goals and I'm not changing them for anyone. It is nothing personal and has nothing to do with anyone elses projects because I support anyone who shows me a mutual respect which you guys have and I support what IS is doing just like I support RAD and Inward. There are other kids and companies who do not show any mutual respect who I do not support and they have no business anywhere near the community that I created and support. Even though I do not agree with everything everyone does in the sport I can still acknowledge that it is expanding the sport one way or another. If I had listened to every naysayer I would not have accomplished anything so I'm sticking to my plan. The clothing company will drop by summer and I am nearly certain I have secured sponsors for my first officially sanctioned competition series this year through my freestyle scooter association so all that will really be left to do is keep promoting and doing whatever I can to improve the image of the site and the sport and gain media exposure then get it in the X-Games. You guys can work with me, against me or simply do your own thing and watch but I can guarantee no one out there has goals, a time line as ambitious as mine and is in the position to really make it happen as I have positioned myself to be so I am not wasting anymore time.
That is SHORT version of my business history and plan for anyone who actually took the time to read it all. The end.
