Motorfile
Everything about the car sitting outside your house, from the number plate and nothing else. No account, no forms, no trawling through paperwork.
The whole thing turns on one idea: you already know your plate, so that should be the only thing it ever asks you for. Everything else it can go and find.
- What I did
- Product · Design · Build · Launch · Running it live
- What it is
- iPhone app · Vehicle data · Reminders · Marketing site
- Who it is for
- Software product, nothing to something
- Status
- Live
Published on
Motorfile
Built for a phone first, because that is what is in your hand when the reminder letter turns up.
The problem
Nobody knows when their MOT is.
Owning a car in this country means keeping track of about six different dates, none of which anybody reminds you about until you have already missed one.
The MOT. The tax. The service. What the last tester wrote down as an advisory, which is the thing that quietly becomes a fail next year. The mileage, if you ever want to sell it. What it is actually costing you to run.
All of that exists somewhere. Some of it is public, some of it is in a folder in a drawer, and some of it is on a piece of paper a garage handed you eleven months ago. There is no single place that has it, which is daft, because every one of those things is attached to the same car.
What I built
Type the plate once.
You put the registration in and the app fills itself in. The make, the model, the year, the engine, the MOT history including everything a tester has ever flagged on it, and what is due next. That is the whole sign-up.
After that it stays useful rather than becoming another app you deleted. It tells you what is coming up before it is a problem. You add fuel and mileage as you go, and it works out what the car is really costing you, which is usually more interesting and slightly more depressing than people expect.
You can keep more than one car in it, which matters more than I thought. Plenty of households have two, and someone in that house is currently the person who remembers both.
What it covers
- Everything about a car from its plate alone
- MOT history, including every advisory ever written
- What is due next, and when
- Reminders before the date, not after it
- Fuel and mileage, with the real running cost
- More than one car, for a household that has two
- Check a car you do not own yet
- No account to make
What it taught me
Shipping it was the easy half.
It is on the App Store, it works, and it does what the listing says it does. What I underestimated was everything after that. Getting an app in front of people who would actually want it is a completely different skill from building one, and I had quietly assumed the second would take care of the first.
It does not. That is worth saying plainly on a page meant to win work, because it is the single most useful thing I have learned from running my own products, and it is the reason I treat the launch as part of the job on client work rather than the bit that happens afterwards.
Where it is
Live, and still being added to.
It has been through several releases since it first went out, each one small and each one because something irritated me or somebody told me it was missing. There is a site alongside it that explains what it does before you download anything.
Want something like this
If the Motorfile story sounds like your business, tell me about it.
No pitch and no obligation. Tell me what you’re running on now and what’s going wrong with it, and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s worth doing.