Hello, loyal reader.

This past month was tough (emotionally).

I found myself avoiding making more cold calls because (a) it sucks, and (b) I didn't know what the end looks like (i.e., 10 more calls? 100 more calls?? 1000 more calls??? Fuck that!).

Anyway, I got stuck again.

I didn't want to continue coding because I wasn't going to build something people didn't want. And I didn't want to continue cold calling because I didn't want this to be my life forever.

These rather exaggerated feelings trapped me in-place. I was basically just running out the clock each day, until it was time for my freelance work.

Some things did happen though (no thanks to me). I received a relatively huge spike in new user signups:

I'm getting an unusual amount of traffic to my car website for a Thursday morning.

Something is happening, but I'm not sure why 🤔 pic.twitter.com/olJ2T9mCkW

— Jason Wallace (@jdeanwallace) September 4, 2025

Embarrassingly, the thing that caused this spike was a seemingly sarcastic X post that went viral:

Essentially, my car website's retail estimates on high-end (i.e., rare) cars get skewed in either direction because I have much less pricing data available on them. This has been a known issue from the beginning, but in the context of the website making money, this is unfortunately not a top-priority.

Despite this subjectively negative exposure, I got a shit ton of new email subscribers and, secondarily, new leads of people wanting to sell their car:

At some point during the month, I did make a handful of calls to car dealerships. The most notable being to one of the people that spawned the original idea of me "selling cars". My conversation with him helped me shed some light on my overarching question of "How many more calls do I need to make to sell a car?".

Before the call, my understanding was that the car dealerships were just too damn picky and didn't want to buy the good leads I had.

After the call, it seemed to be that most leads are garbage and only about 10% of leads (limited to a specific area) convert into a successful sale.

So based on that logic, my leads are too few and too geographically scattered (i.e., I'm barely getting 10 leads per area) to make a successful sale.

Conclusion

This new insight shifts my focus, from onboarding more car dealerships, to getting more leads in a limited area. And the only way I know how to do this is with paid-ads. If this sounds familiar, then you're not going crazy because this is what I suggested last time, but for onboarding more car dealerships (which I didn't do).

The funny thing is that my car website is not even a factor in this new strategy. It's a completely different business! A business where I run leadgen ads for local car dealerships and make money when they successfully purchase a car. No car website required.

The good news is that my car website is more of a long-term, organic strategy to not keep paying for ads. That's still valuable and exciting.

Anyway, I'd love to sell a car and move forward with my life.

If you're interested in what happens next, I'll email it to you next month.