A Proposal for Out the Door
You built the shortest route between a driver and a dealership. This is the work of making a stranger find it, believe it, and tell somebody.
You did not build this from the outside. You asked the question nobody was saying out loud, which was why anyone is still calling dealers one at a time, and Matt answered it in code. What runs now is a live auction. A person names the car, picks a window, and watches dealers compete in the open for an out-the-door number. Their name is held back until they pick a winner. The store pays nothing to be in the room.
Delivered sells a person. You built a system. That is the whole difference, and almost nobody can see it yet, because a system arrives with no face, no voice, and nothing for a stranger to trust in the four seconds they give it. Supplying those is the work. We find the language and the look that make what you built obvious on sight, then run the engine that puts it in front of people until the market knows the name.
Your words, on our call
This is that answer, in two pathways. The first builds the ground. The second fills it.
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Roughly eighty million cars will be bought this year, and almost every buyer will take the long way, because it is the only route they know exists. You built the short one. Everything in this proposal exists to shorten the distance between that fact and a stranger knowing it.
Seventeen years on the floor and in the general manager's chair. An audience in the automotive community that shows up for what you have to say. A read on where the money in a store actually sits, and the rarer half of that, which is a willingness to say it out loud with a camera running.
Quick Technologies, and a string of home services companies he rebuilt around his own software. Real time data is his specialty, which is exactly what a live auction is. He built the dealer side to work the way a dealer already does, so nobody needs retraining. Another developer quoted a couple of million. It came in under three thousand.
Twenty two years in automotive across the vendor side, the agency side, and contract work with General Motors. Dealer side digital, and the numbers under it. She knows what a store will actually sign, and why most of what reaches a dealer dies on the desk. That is the difference between a list of stores and a network of them.
The product is built, the industry is known, and the numbers are covered. What is left is a different craft entirely: earning a stranger's trust before a single one of you gets to speak to them.
Speed and care is the product. Trust is the reason anyone tries it.
Outer Presence
Everything a stranger meets before they reach the tunnel. The brand, the words, the website, and the work that decides all three.
Out the Door is three businesses sharing one name. People buying, people selling, and dealers competing for both. A site built for any one of them needs rebuilding the moment the other two start to matter, and all three matter on day one.
So we start a long way upstream of design. Nothing gets drawn until we can say in one sentence what this is, who it is for, and why a person should believe it. Most agencies decide the look first and reverse engineer a reason for it afterward, which is why most brands cannot survive their founder leaving the room.
Everything past that point is execution of a decision already made, written down, and defensible by anyone on the team.
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Each station settles something the next one needs. The site is not a separate project at the end. It is where all of it becomes visible at once, which is why by the time a page is designed it already knows what it has to say.
Long working calls, not check-ins. We go into the business the way you would go into a store you were about to take over. After each one you get a written framework and a set of questions built for you and nobody else. You sit with them, the next session goes deeper, and we keep going until it is clear. Clients regularly say this part alone was worth the engagement.
The part almost nobody writes down. What Out the Door believes about dealers, about speed, and about what it will never do to win a deal. Not a poster in a break room. A short, hard document that decides how you talk on camera, how the site is written, and how your next hire behaves before anyone tells them.
Everything the sessions surface, in one living document: positioning, audience, story, voice, offers, objections, the words you use and the words you avoid. Every later deliverable draws from it, and it is what lets a copywriter, a new hire, or an AI sound like you on day one.
Delivered sells an advocate. One person negotiating for you, backed by testimonials, because a person is what you are being asked to trust. That works, and it ends at the edge of one man's calendar. You sell a market. We write that difference so it lands in a sentence, without anybody being attacked, which is the stance you already take.
The four or five territories you speak from, defined specifically enough that you never open the camera wondering what to say. Built from what already performs, what dealers argue about, and what a person searches at eleven at night before walking into a store.
The honest sequence, drawn out so all three of you are looking at one plan: which audience gets attention first, the lever at each stage, and what has to be true before paid spend earns its place.
A primary wordmark and a standalone symbol, drawn for this business rather than picked from a page of options. It has to hold at favicon size, on a dealer's monitor, and in the corner of a video somebody is watching on a phone.
Letterforms chosen and tuned for Out the Door, with a type scale defined across the product, the site, and the content. Type is the part of a brand people feel before they read a word.
A palette with roles assigned rather than a row of swatches: product, marketing, dealer facing, customer facing, and the states an auction needs, which are live, closed, and won. Contrast checked so it holds on a phone in daylight.
The icon set, the illustration language, the motion signature, the texture and geometry the brand is allowed to use. These are the pieces that make a screenshot recognizably yours before anyone has seen the logo.
The one line, the thirty second version, the dealer version, the customer version, the objections, and the proof points. So anybody who speaks for the company says the same thing without sounding like they are reading it.
How Out the Door sounds: plain, fast, no filter, never at a dealer's expense. Written down with examples of what is on voice and what is not, because voice is the first thing that drifts once other people start writing.
The half of a brand kit most agencies leave out: caption styling, lower thirds, thumbnail and cover templates, end cards, story frames, the app icon, the favicon. So a video posted next year is still recognizably yours with the sound off.
All of it as one document with the working files: lockups, type, palette values, spacing rules, and the do and do-not pairs. Anyone who ever builds for you builds it right, whether or not we are still in the room.
Never a template. Home, how it works, buying, selling, for dealers, the blog, contact. Each page paced differently, each doing one job, all carrying the same signature. Page names get decided in the sessions, not here.
A dealer arrives with a different question than a driver. Dealers want to know what it costs them and what it disrupts. Drivers want to know if it is real and whether their information is safe. Two entrances, one brand behind both.
Every word written out of the context layer rather than poured into a layout at the end. The structure does the persuading, so nothing on the page has to raise its voice.
Interaction and animation written for this site and no other. Someone who has just spent an afternoon on dealer websites should feel the difference before reading a word, and still feel it on the second visit.
The tool stays exactly as Matt built it. What we design is the seam: where a person crosses from the site into a live auction, what carries over, and how that moment feels on both sides. We build back end systems in code ourselves, so this is engineer to engineer rather than a spec thrown over a wall.
Architecture, schema, metadata, speed, and a blog built to rank from day one instead of retrofitted in six months. The target: somebody searching how to buy a car without setting foot in a dealership finds Out the Door first.
You were circling this on the call: somebody asks an assistant where to get an oil change and books it in the same breath. We structure the site, the entity data, and the content so that when the question is where to get out-the-door pricing from several dealers at once, Out the Door is the answer.
Events and funnels instrumented so you can see where people stop rather than only how many arrived. Handed over with a video walkthrough, so changing a line and publishing it takes under a minute. Anything structural comes to us.
A following is rented. An email list is owned. This runs end to end, from what you say on camera to the person who starts an auction.
Organic first, always, and not out of principle. We have taken an account from two thousand followers to two hundred and ten thousand in under two months and sold out a six figure offering while it happened. It works because of data, not reach. A thousand organic views tell you which hook and which topic move people. Paid spend applied to that is a multiplier. Paid spend applied without it is tuition.
And it is cheap to be early here. Most of your competition is still treating social as a place to post inventory.
Scroll to see both lanes
Two different shapes, because they are two different problems. The top lane is a funnel because the audience is infinite and cold. The bottom lane is a list, because the dealers are a countable set of people who can be reached by name.
You asked for a read on this and the call ran out first. Dealers are a sales problem, and you already own that channel. A finite list of named stores, Lisa's twenty two years, and an automotive audience that is largely dealers already. That side needs a page, a deck, and phone calls, and it is Lisa's corner rather than ours.
Drivers are a brand problem, and nothing you have today touches it. There is no list of them and they cannot be called. They arrive through search, through an assistant, through the feed, or not at all, and the only thing deciding which is whether the work is good enough to travel. It compounds slowly, so it starts now rather than the month you need it.
You never sit down to film wondering what to film. Every cycle we bring topics pulled from the pillars, from what is moving that week, from your comments, and from what performed last time. You add the ones only seventeen years would surface.
As much or as little as you want. Full scripts where the topic is technical, a hook and three beats where it is not, nothing at all on the days you would rather just talk. We always bring the first line, because the first line is most of the job.
A corner at home so filming costs nothing but time: lighting, a camera, a lapel mic. We spec it, you buy it once, and it is the only hardware this needs. Press record, say your lines, drop the file in Drive. That is the whole ask on your side.
Every piece cut, graded, captioned, and sound treated. The first week is style, iterating until it is unmistakably yours. Then volume, with turnaround in days, so a take about something happening this week still lands this week.
Each caption written twice over: once for the person reading it, once for the index. In your voice, so a piece keeps surfacing months after it posted rather than dying the day the feed moves on.
Nothing gets shelved. Your personal account keeps the opinion and the face people already trust, and it will stay the faster of the two, because every platform here quietly favors a person over a logo. The company account keeps the mechanism and the proof. One session feeds both, cut differently. Authority on your name travels to whatever you build next. Authority on a company name stays there.
Cadence, format mix, hook structure, and how each piece sets up the next. Instagram leads for this audience. TikTok, Shorts, and X get the same work repositioned for how each platform behaves, not one file dropped in four places.
Hooks, openings, lengths, covers, and posting windows run against each other continuously, and what wins feeds the next batch instead of a report nobody opens. Four platforms means four sets of learnings, not one average.
Guides built from what you already know: what an out-the-door number actually contains, how to read a dealer's first offer, what a trade is really worth. Designed to the standard of something you would charge for, so the thought lands on its own: if this is the free version, what is the service like.
Keyword, copy, branching logic, and A/B tests on each branch. Somebody comments, and seconds later they are in a conversation that reads like a person. It ends with them holding something worth having and you holding their email.
Every address arrives tagged by the piece and topic that brought it in. Behind each automation sits a sequence that keeps giving, so by the time there is a reason to start an auction they have already received more than they gave.
Landing pages, campaign pages, dealer pages, and magnet pages designed and built as the strategy calls for them. The site keeps growing after launch rather than freezing on handover day.
A Notion workspace built to run this: content from idea to scripted to filmed to dropped, the task board, the magnet library, the automation map, the performance log. Walked through on video, and yours to keep.
Retention curves, follower to email conversion, magnet claim rate, sequence opens and clicks, and the number that outranks them all, which is how many people started an auction. Reviewed on a standing call, not mailed over as a dashboard.
Both pathways can run at the same time, and eventually they should. The order they start in is the single most consequential decision in this engagement, and it is not a matter of preference. Attention is the expensive part. Everything else is arithmetic that follows from where you send it.
On timing, the honest answer is that the sessions run weekly and the build follows them, so the schedule is set by how fast the decisions get made rather than by how fast anyone can draw. We map the whole thing out with dates in the first session, once we know what we are building.
What it asks of you is small and specific: time in the sessions from all three of you where it makes sense, access to what already exists including the tool so we are designing against the real thing, and once the signal starts, one filming block every two weeks.
Sessions, culture, positioning, identity, copy, site, SEO, AI search. Nothing is publicly visible in this stretch and everything is being decided. It is the one part with no compressed version, because a brand decision made in a hurry gets paid for every month afterward.
A thousand people in front of a site that has not decided what it is convert like a hundred. The same thousand in front of a site built to receive them convert like several thousand, and the search work underneath keeps paying after the post that sent them has gone quiet.
Accounts set up properly, the room built, the first filming cycle, and the style locked inside a week. Both accounts running from one shoot, with dealer outreach in parallel through the channels already open to you, because supply has to exist before demand arrives.
Magnets designed, ManyChat live and tested, email tagged from the first address. From this point every piece of content stops being a view and starts being an asset, and the audience accumulates instead of scattering.
Testing never stops. When the organic data says clearly which hook, topic, and format move people, paid spend becomes a multiplier on a known number rather than an experiment. That is the moment ads earn their place, and not before it.
Different industries, the same discipline underneath. Best opened on a computer for the full experience.
Strategy intensives, company culture, the master context layer, content pillars, the growth map, the full brand kit, and the custom website with copywriting, SEO, and AI search built in.
Payable in full, or split across two payments over the build. I would rather find the shape that lets you begin from a grounded place than have the number be the reason this does not happen.
Secure the FoundationTopics, scripting, filming setup, editing, captions, posting, testing, lead magnets, ManyChat, email marketing, ongoing design, and the second brain.
The right monthly number depends on volume, on how many accounts we run, and on what makes sense while the foundation is still being built. That is a conversation to have with all three of you, not a figure printed here that is wrong in one direction or the other.
The foundation is the priority, and I want to be direct about why. Getting the brand, the front end, and the search position dialed all the way in is what makes scale worth having. Once that ground is solid, everything the growth engine drives lands on infrastructure that can take advantage of it. Reversed, the same spend leaks.
Bank transfer by ACH is preferred wherever possible, because card processing takes a percentage that is better spent on the work. If a card is the right call, that is completely fine, just let me know first so we can handle it properly.
There is a better way to do this. You already built it.
Take it to the three of you. When you are ready, say the word and the first session goes in the calendar. Everything in here starts in that room.