What owning it gets you

Nothing Rented is a five-part series from Queen City Garage on how we built our own email and RSVP systems for NASCAR Sundays instead of renting them. Read the whole series.

The second post in this series showed that renting would not have been expensive. This one is about what owning our email and our RSVP system, Paddock, gets us that no plan on that list sells.

One person, one record. On a rented stack, the same fan lives separately at the email company and at the event company, and neither knows about the other. Ours is one database. So a question like whether the people who come to the parties also read the weekly email, or who keeps coming back, is one query instead of two exports and an afternoon of matching spreadsheets.

The data is ours. Every signup and every RSVP sits in our own database, in a shape we designed. We can move it, back it up and query it any way we like. No vendor can change its export rules, shut down, get acquired or raise its prices and take our audience with it. The risks that remain are ours, which is the last point here.

The brand is ours, all the way through. Every page is on nascarsundays.com. Every email comes from our address, in our design. No other company's logo sits on the RSVP form, nobody gets sent to a stranger's website, and there is no "powered by" line under the confirmation.

The event pages work for us. A party page on our own domain can be found in search, linked from our articles and promoted anywhere on our sites. On a rented service, that traffic builds someone else's website.

We build what we need. Our parties move every week, run in two cities, and sometimes need a waiver or a head count by person rather than by form. We did not wait for a vendor to add those features. We built them.

No platform fee. If we ever sell a ticket, no event company takes a cut of it.

We decide what is shared. Guest information goes nowhere we did not choose to send it, and no third party runs its own tracking on our fans.

There is one honest cost: when something breaks, nobody else fixes it. We own the uptime and the bugs along with the data. We think the trade is worth it.

What a person did: decided what we would never hand to a vendor. What the machine did: keeps it all in one place.