When I first came to the UK, I was desperate for a part-time job—bills don’t pay themselves, right? So, I found myself flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Let’s just say, after a month of that, I realized the fast-food life wasn’t for me. In the evenings, I’d hang out with fellow design students, and we’d dive into all the usual stuff—career plans, design problems, and the occasional "how do we survive this degree?" moment.

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One problem stood out though, especially from the automotive design students: visibility. Graphic designers had Dribbble, Behance was overflowing with visual design portfolios, and fashion designers? Well, they had the whole internet. But automotive designers? Nowhere to showcase their work, no dedicated platform, no love. It was the same for industrial designers too. This nagged at us.

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So, one random day, we just decided to start an Instagram page. We’d feature one automotive design student’s work each day. No grand plan, no business strategy—just "let’s see what happens." And guess what? It took off! In just 30 days, we hit over 10,000 followers, and our posts were reaching 100,000 people. I mean, it was insane—people actually started offering us money to feature their work! But here’s the catch: they didn’t just want their designs shown; they wanted their *story* told too.

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That’s when things got serious. We bought a WordPress subscription, launched a website, and started sharing the full design process—stories, images, everything. And from there, we just kept expanding. We added interviews with professionals, podcasts, guides, and even did in-house video productions—imagine a full studio tour showing how designs are made, all shot and edited by us.

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But, we weren’t satisfied. Inspired by platforms like ArtStation and DeviantArt, we decided to take our media site a step further and make it more like a social network for automotive designers. We rolled out custom profiles, usernames, cover photos—the works. Suddenly, we were a community hub, and with zero marketing (yes, you read that right), we had over 100 sign-ups in the first 24 hours. It felt like we were on cloud nine!

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With that momentum, we went big—custom algorithms, SEO protocols, and boom! We ranked #3 on Google for "automotive design." One of our stories even made it to Google News. We were everywhere! By the end of the first year, we had a community of over 50,000 people on Instagram, reaching a million users monthly, and had brought in £12,000. Not bad for something that started as an experiment, and definitely better than flipping burgers!

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But here’s the thing: we were in a niche, and it was hard to make it sustainable full-time. Like most media companies, our main revenue was from ads, but it wasn’t enough. We had bigger dreams—project uploads, user-generated blogs, but without funding, it was tough. So, in June 2024, we made the tough call to stop pursuing it full-time. Now, we’re a group of 16 passionate people running it part-time, all voluntary, with support from some of the biggest names in automotive design. I still write on weekends, and we keep the platform alive, promoting the discipline we love.

This journey taught me so much and made me a better UX designer. I learned how to listen to users—really listen—and shape a platform around their needs. Automotive designers wanted visibility and storytelling, and we gave it to them. From there, I gained hands-on experience designing features, iterating based on feedback, and scaling the platform. I also learned how to balance business goals with user needs—an essential skill in UX. And hey, if I can build a platform that reached 1 million people from scratch, I think I can handle a few tricky design challenges!