For no other reason than that it’s been a while, I thought I’d take the opportunity afforded by a few hours at 40,000ft just to provide you, our brilliant subscribers, with a quick update about a few things concerning Ti.
Dan and I actually had the pleasure of meeting many of you when you came to see us in the Bonhams tent at the Goodwood Revival and it was both instructive and heartening to have a chat and find out how you think we’re doing.
It seems bizarre to us that we have grown from a single idea – to do proper motoring journalism on Instagram – to what Ti is today. Four years on, over 54,000 people now follow our little Instagram account and we have recorded and broadcast nearly 130 podcasts. These days they all top out somewhere in the top three of the UK automotive podcast charts despite the opposition numbering in the hundreds.
Even if you expand the search to the massive catch-all category that is ‘leisure’, we’re almost always in the top 20, regularly in the top ten. Our app continues to hold unimprovable 5.0 star ratings on both Apple and Google app stores, while we know direct from you how well regarded is our all new website.
So job done, then? Not remotely. Recently we launched our Last Blast podcast, the full version of which is available only to you subscribers, but even the 15-minute extract we make public has put us in the bizarre position of producing two out of the country’s top three automotive podcast episodes. We hope you are enjoying listening to Last Blast as much as we enjoy recording them.
But we want to do more and, particularly, want to spend more time talking to you. So we are thinking about everything from having a presence at events hosted by others, to inviting you to our own. Does it need to be a track day? We did one last year at Thruxton and it went better than we could have hoped, but perhaps you’d be just as happy – not to mention less out of pocket – meeting up at a location indelibly associated with cars but not careening around a circuit? Please let us know what you think in the comments.
Because what we want to do more than anything else is hone the Ti offering. We know the idea of producing the best motoring journalism from the finest team of writers unpolluted by advertisements really resonates with you, but that’s still quite a broad picture. And one of very many reasons we created our website is to fill in those details.
It shouldn’t matter to you whether you subscribe through our website or app because whichever you use the other is free and the price is the same. However, if you subscribe (or re-subscribe) through the website, we not only earn a little more money because there’s no third party taking a commission, far more important for us is that we can then see exactly what’s working and what’s not.
The data provided by the website is so astonishingly rich and varied we actually employ someone to tell us what it means. But in its simplest form we can tell how many of you look at which stories and for how long. So we can start to understand what you want. And the more of you who subscribe through the website, the more data we can gather, and the better at understanding what works for you we become. So between us, we can all help polish what we still consider to be the rather rough diamond that is Ti.
The other way you can help is simply to talk to us through the comments on the app or website, or by mailing us at info@the-intercooler.com. What are we doing well, what are we doing less well? We know your comments will be constructive and well thought through because they always are, and we genuinely want to know.
For example, right now and with Christmas already not that far away, we wonder if you have any interest in buying Ti merchandise. It’s something we’ve thought of doing from the earliest days but have steered clear of until now because it’s time consuming and expensive if you misjudge your market. But we are thinking of producing a few items in strictly limited quantities (and we will tell you what that number is) if the idea was of interest to you. And if it is, what sort of things would interest you? Polo shirts, jackets, mugs, stickers or more eclectic items? Please let us know and if enough of you think it’s a good idea, we’ll try to figure out a way to make it happen.
In the meantime, thanks so much for being part of the Ti community and supporting us with your subscription to help us do more of what you enjoy. If you want to help even more without needing to shell out more money, just tell your mates about us. Because we devote all our efforts into making the product as good as we possibly can, word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool we possess.
Thanks to all that clever data we’re now starting to gather, we know that when people find us, overwhelmingly they stay with us; the challenge is finding them in the first place. But the more we do, the better Ti will become because there so much more we want to do both on our existing platforms and beyond. With your help we can get it there. Because so far as Dan and I are concerned, we’re just getting started.
