Steve Balistreri knows a lot about cars, but the auto engineer and car wonk had a problem: there was no centralized place to find particular information about a variety of vehicles.
For instance, if he wanted to find out how to change the spark plugs in a 1969 Mustang, he knew he could find it if he putzed around on a search engine long enough. Same thing if he wanted to know the bumps specs on a 1976 Ford F-150.
"It would take 20 minutes clicking on sites, shifting through conflicting data," Balistreri says.
That's what motivated him to create
DIYautoFTW, a website that catalogues the details about vehicles and centralizes that data.
Think of it as a sort of Wikipedia of car information. Today car enthusiasts have donated information to 400 different vehicles, and the list is growing as Balistreri cultivates his online car community.
"Our goal is to cover all vehicles," Balistreri says.
To make that possible, Balistreri participated in
BUILD, D:hive’s entrepreneurial class, last fall. Now he is launching a crowd funding campaign so he can further build out his site to host all of the data. Balistreri wants to raise $40,000 by early July. Check out the campaign
here.
"[The improved website] will be easier to manager and a more collaborative environment," Balistreri says.
Source: Steve Balistreri, president of DIYuutoFTW
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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