Out The Door Auto [2022-2024]

What was OutTheDoor auto supposed to be:

The pitch for OutTheDoor auto was a Car sales website that showed the Out The Door Price for every listing. Concept being you see the price you have to pay to get the vehicle "Out The Door". In essence this includes stuff like sales tax, title fees, registration fees, and everything else you have to pay to actually get the vehicle. CarEdge.com has a calculator for it here.

That's still a great concept. Hopefully someone with a brain can give a shot at it instead of my old bosses.

What I did there

While working at OTD Auto I created a fully functional, ready to ship rails-based website featuring:

  • A system to create and manage listings on the site
  • A robust, well optimized search engine capable of handling millions of listings across the US
  • Dynamic, inventory based monthly subscriptions via Stripe
  • AI chatbot integrated with database providing relevant information helpful to the user

My experience working there

This role started with me working as an unpaid intern in December of 2022. At that time the project was basically just a concept in 2 people's heads who had tried implementing it and gave up half-way through.

I started the project from scratch using Ruby on Rails. After getting the website to a functional proof of concept I signed a (in retrospect horrible) contract for me to get paid for my work. I would track my hours and get paid for them retrospectively after they had gotten investment.

I worked diligently from then on, sometimes waiting weeks to get feedback from my bosses. I watched as they brought in other unpaid interns who never contributed anything to the project.

I alone brought the site to a nearly feature-complete state, the only things left to do being as follows:

  • integrate with DealerCenter to improve the experience of large dealerships using the site
  • switch image storage from a temp SQL solution to AWS S3

Throughout the entire 2 years I have "worked" at OTD, I have been waiting on my bosses to establish a single FTP server that DealerCenter can send data to. This december I asked for AWS credentials so I can implement S3 image storage. It has been a month since that message and I have gotten no reply since.

I would've left last year but sunk-cost fallacy made me stay because they technically owe me tens of thousands and all thats left is "just a couple things" before investment and me getting paid.