Dear Custodians,
Firstly, please let me thank you for participating in Custodian. We greatly value your patronage of the platform and sincerely hope you are finding it both useful and engaging.
We are delighted to see the number of Custodians grow and the extraordinary variety of specialist and classic cars on the platform. To that end, as our membership passes 5,000 I wanted to outline the future of Custodian and how it will benefit you, our members, as well as the next generation of car enthusiasts.
OUR VISION FOR CUSTODIAN
It is our vision for Custodian to become the central repository of accurate, authoritative and trustworthy information for the classic, specialist and enthusiast car world, and provide a means to organise it for the benefit of passionate car enthusiasts.
This is in line with a founding philosophy to ensure the long-term preservation of car enthusiasm by removing the friction associated with the ownership of classic, specialist and enthusiast cars. The requirement for this service is evidenced by sustained user growth.
We are thrilled to see you using the Custodian platform to upload details about your cars, enabling you to keep your vehicle’s important documents, photographs and history in one place that is easily searchable and at your fingertips, which can also be shared with prospective buyers.
We hope you have found that the process of digitising the information not only provides a seamless and enjoyable ownership experience but is also vital to ensuring that years of knowledge are not lost with the passing of the generation that currently owns and cherishes these remarkable cars.
To enable the future accessibility and organisation of this knowledge, Custodian has developed a highly secure and instantly accessible digital repository augmented by sophisticated knowledge graph technology.
Uniquely, the information that will form this essential knowledge source for car enthusiasts goes beyond scanned documentation, photographs and invoices. In the months to come, you will be able to upload details of any experience related to your car, however abstract:
Of course, your privacy is absolutely paramount to us, and any information you submit will be stored securely using the very latest and most robust encryption software.
SECURING THE FUTURE OF CLASSIC CARS
As this community of members builds, Custodian will become the essential platform for prospective and existing classic, specialist and enthusiast car owners to research, plan and ultimately manage their ownership experience. The collective mindshare of the Custodian community will create and organise an unprecedented pool of reliable, up-to-date classic and specialist car information.
By bringing together and preserving the vast wealth of disparate records and knowledge currently held on paper in files and logbooks, and kept in individual owners’ memories, we aim to provide you with unbiased insights that will prove invaluable to buyers, sellers and the classic and specialist car industry at large to organise and secure the generational transfer of this critical knowledge.
The key to preserving this knowledge and making it accessible is Custodian’s knowledge engine. Both my co-founders Nathalia Rus and Jeremy Hindle (Forbes 30 Under 30 & Y Combinator Alumni) have built a world class in-house engineering team while drawing from their experience in neuroscience, equities trading and artificial intelligence. The engine is able to search and analyse the highly complex information stored in a knowledge graph to present clear, near-instant results. These can be specific factual details, or broader, more contextual snapshots of how a car has been used over its lifetime.
This unique software platform will enable Custodian to provide robust, unbiased information for the benefit of its members and the car enthusiast community, anchored by the metrics that matter to you - be it boosting the value of your car, making it more reliable or simply finding the best specialist to undertake a job.
CHANGING OWNERSHIP FOR THE BETTER
As this unprecedented community-sourced library of knowledge grows, so will its use for everyone concerned with the preservation of classic and specialist cars. Existing owners and the next generation of car enthusiasts alike will be able to identify restoration companies whose work attracts the highest onward sale prices for a particular marque, specific models whose value has risen above the market rate, common faults among certain model variants, suppliers able to undertake highly specialised work, the best pricepoint to market your car, ways to increase that pricepoint, the best events to attend to increase a car’s profile and value and even the most popular roads to drive on depending on a specific make, model and variant.
As a lifelong car enthusiast, I know that the collective information that exists within the community has been largely subjective, anecdotal, disparate and unstructured. With our proprietary software, we are applying the very latest data science and technology to make it objective, peer-reviewed, centrally held and organised. Using our platform, all that priceless knowledge and insight that’s currently scattered across the classic car world could be untangled and organised; safe, secure, transparent and accessible, helping everyone make more informed buying and care decisions - and, we hope, prevent people from making the costly mistakes nearly every classic or specialist car enthusiast has made along the way.
As our community grows, so does the library of knowledge that previously risked being lost forever. Our work now will ensure the cars we love are enjoyed, cherished and driven for many generations to come. I want to empower this community, built on a shared passion for the preservation of these cars, by using the latest digital archiving technologies to make this critical information instantly and effortlessly accessible. This is to the enormous benefit of existing and prospective owners, buyers and sellers, restorers and parts suppliers - the entire classic car community.
As ever, we welcome your feedback and suggestions - our platform is for you, the classic and specialist community, and we hope you share in our excitement in bringing this vision to life.
Yours sincerely,
Charles Clegg
CEO of Custodian
