Fuelly ownership change

[mathowie]

I wanted to formally announce that several months ago, Fuelly changed ownership, and has been in good hands since last November. Details follow.

Paul and I founded Fuelly in 2008 with a pretty simple idea, a fuel logging app we could use but that also anyone else could use. Making the app available to others meant it would allow us to understand the fuel costs of not just our vehicles, but provide insight into how the same vehicle is performing for others. Back then we had spare time to dream up ideas like Fuelly and make them a reality, it was a blast. Over the last 5 years a lot has changed in our lives, our jobs and families have taken a priority over side development projects and we just don't have as much time as we once did.

A few years ago Andy Robinowitz contacted me about acquiring Fuelly, we had a nice chat, he seemed very passionate but the timing wasn't right. Last fall he contacted us again and we felt it was time to talk more seriously about the future of Fuelly. Paul and I have noticed all the feature requests for Fuelly and the various directions the app could grow. Without time we were not able to keep fostering Fuelly without adversely taking precious time away from our other work on Metafilter.com. After chatting with Andy we felt the timing was right and sold Fuelly to him.

The actual ownership change took place last fall and the transition of managing the site, support request, etc were completed by Q1 of this year. It's been a smooth transition with very few issues reported, it's "business as usual". Recently Andy reminded me that we still hadn't posted an official announcement so we felt it was best to let everyone know ASAP.

Andy's got the time and resources to take Fuelly to the next level. He's been listening by viewing the support communications, discussions in the Fuelly forums, Fuelly on Twitter and monitoring mentions of Fuelly across the internet. I feel confident his vision lines up with many of our members who have been asking for native smart phone apps, more cost of ownership data, better ways to organize the data, etc. Andy has been working with online communities and car-related sites since 2002. He's very passionate about communities and that's what attracted him to Fuelly. We feel confident he will embrace the Fuelly community and work together with the members to push Fuelly into the future.

So thanks for being part of our project for the last 5 years, it's been a lot of fun. We look forward to being Fuelly users for many years to come. I'll send Andy an email and ask him to post an introduction here for you all to meet him.

[andyrobo]

First off I just want to thank Matt & Paul for entrusting me with Fuelly, it's an honor. I first heard of Fuelly when members of my forums were proudly displaying their Fuelly badges in their forum signatures. I founded my first forum in 2002 (www.AIRForums.com) and through a random set of events ended up adopting a couple forums that were going to be shut down due to the cost to run them in 2004. Like the guy in the movie Office Space, I got sick of my job and decided to start a small business focused on fostering online forum communities. It meant taking a huge pay cut, so to make the economics work, I packed up all my belongings and moved abroad. I spent 4.5 years living in countries where I could stretch a dollar and met my lovely wife along the way.

I own a 2009 Prius and love it. It's been a great car and worked flawlessly since I bought it. To be honest, I don't drive consciously trying to hyper-mile, I just drive how I like to drive which is probably a tiny bit on the aggressive side (sounds kind of funny coming from a Prius owner). I'm only averaging in the low 40s for my MPG but I'm very happy with those results. Great gas mileage, low maintenance costs, depreciates slowly, and comfortable made it a great choice.

I posted some details about our plans for Fuelly moving forward in this other forum post. We're working on some communication tools to help us organize our communication with you all about how Fuelly will evolve. First off we are planning to setup an Idea system where members can vote for their favorite ideas and thus help us understand what features have the highest demand. One thing that is obvious, Fuelly has some amazingly smart users who have made some great suggestions in the past. We plan to discuss these ideas with you all and together we should be able to make sure Fuelly continues as THE fuel logging app.

I'm going to post another exciting announcement later today about our iOS efforts. We're looking forward to getting native IOS and Android apps available for users ASAP. We want them to be offline compatible so if you are using Fuelly without a data connection your fuel-ups will store locally and sync when you have a data connection. We think we have a winning strategy defined here and will share that with you very soon.

I'm an open book and know that we'll have to earn your trust through our actions, we're ready. If you have any questions for me, please post them here.

[waterboysh]

To start, a real forum would be nice. One to where when a reply is made that post goes back to the top. Fuelly's current "forum" is pretty bad. You can't even edit a post once you've made it.

On that same topic, an "official announcement" on a forum to where all it would take is 4 new topics to be made and then people stop seeing it is not very smart. Why not display something on the dashboard?

[andyrobo]

Yeah, bump to the top on reply is definitely needed. We're going to use one of the main forum scripts so we'll have all the normal features you find on other "normal" forum sites.

I like your idea of pushing important announcements over to the Dashboard page. We'll try to get that added as well.

[bates]

Thank you to Matt and Paul for all you've done to create and maintain this site over the years, I truly appreciate all your hard work.

Welcome Andy, you've got some big shoes to fill but with Matt's endorsement, I'm sure you're up to the job.