StreetFire has been long overdue for a freshening and today we start the slow process of updating the site beginning with the main page. I always get a little nostalgic when I do an update to StreetFire so I this might be a good time to recap for those of you that are new to this site. Originally we started StreetFire in 1999 with big ideas of making it into a "CNET" for the automotive aftermarket. Well as is often the case with projects, we got it started and never brought the idea fruition. So from 1999 to 2003 StreetFire was pretty dormant until Jeremy and I had the idea of using StreetFire as a testbed for some cool web-services we wanted to write for the online-automotive community.
We started with a free web-mail service that quickly expanded into a full-blown office application on the web. Email, Contacts, Calendars and File Sharing... honestly it was a bit too ambitious and too buggy. But Google stole our thunder as we launched our 2GB service right when they launched GMail. So of course they got all the buzz. The one thing that did get some traction was file sharing with videos. Users were uploading videos and sharing them with their friends. So in 2004 Chris stepped up and helped us reformat and overhaul our Version 1 system into the Version 2 video sharing system you see today.
Focusing the system on just doing video sharing proved to be exactly what was needed and by early 2005 StreetFire went from a few thousand visitors a day to where we are today streaming more than a million videos daily to 4 million car enthusiasts a month across the entire world.
Being gear heads, running a car-video web site was pretty easy for Chris, Jeremy and I, but why not a skate-boarding web site? How about a video game web site, or even a paint ball web site? So in early 2005 we started
Vidiac.com as a spin off company that would handle the videos and let people create their own StreetFire in an area of their own interest. This proved to be a great idea and today Vidiac powers 600 free video sharing web sites just like StreetFire.
So, three gear heads in their spare time built a pretty successful video service, 100% self-funded and mainly in our spare time. Since we launched in 2004 there has been dozens of rival services that have cropped up like YouTube & Google backed with millions of dollars of VC. Despite our small company size we've managed to stay independent and become profitable on our own. Now all that said, I sort of feel like I've spent so much time focusing on Vidiac that StreetFire has been neglected and at the end of the day the only reason we're in this industry is because we love our cars and sharing our hobby with other car enthusiasts. So, over the next few months we're going to spend more time on StreetFire add some services and update the usability of the site. So keep coming back! We're working hard and have a lot of cool features that we're going to release over the next few months. It's our way of saying "Thank You" for making us so successful at this in spite of ourselves.
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