100,000 Unicorns

Randy Nonnenberg was born a hunter. But not the kind with a freezer full of venison or a closet full of camouflage. The kind with a mailbox of magazine subscriptions, a desk drawer of red pens, and the fastest dial-up connection that money can buy.

See, Randy doesn’t hunt fowl, boar, or big game. He hunts cars for sale. Not just any cars. He specializes in the rare, the bespoke, and the extraordinary. The kinds of cars that make pedestrians freeze, enthusiasts swoon, and auctioneers sweat.

Randy hunts unicorns.

What Makes a Car a Unicorn?

Unicorns are storied, sought-after, often one-of-a-kind automobiles that might as well have “priceless” on the tag. No two people have precisely the same definition of a unicorn, and that’s kind of the beauty of it. What we do have in common, though, is the shared belief that, taste aside, cars aren’t just cars. They’re not purely utilitarian, inanimate objects without life or soul, or spirit. There’s something else to them. Something quite special.

Ingredients of a Unicorn

Personal Connection - Personal connection is a key ingredient to any unicorn; that sense of connection can come from just about anywhere.

Rarity - An ingredient in many personal unicorns is a vehicle produced as a part of a very small manufacturing run.

Obscurity - Similar to rarity, vehicles that are little-known by the average driver come with a special sheen of ‘cool.’

Nostalgia - Many car enthusiasts are driven to recapture a feeling that a specific car gave them at a specific age.

Destiny - Sometimes a vehicle enters an enthusiast’s life at the right time and place, giving it a sense of fate and now-or-never urgency.

Capability - Purpose-built vehicles that are designed to perform tasks at elite levels are always cause for potential unicorn status.

History - A vehicle’s story or connection to historic events — from car history or simply human history — have the power to make an otherwise mundane vehicle a total unicorn.

Vision - Highly-fabricated, bespoke vehicles that are clearly the execution of a builder’s vision are nearly universally considered unicorns.

The “Art-Factor” - Cars are a lot like art: everyone has their own unique taste. People like what they like, and it’s not always easy to put into words why a certain work is considered the masterpiece of a generation.

“There are so many elements to nabbing a unicorn. For me, it’s a mix of nostalgia and achievement. I grew up in the Bay Area, and off-road Jeeps and trucks were totally the thing. So were BFGoodrich Tires. But back then, I couldn’t afford them. But today, my dream truck is in the garage, and it’s got BFGs on it. And every time I drive that truck, I feel like I've arrived.” – Randy Nonnenberg, Bring a Trailer Co-Founder

After years of hunting unicorns as a hobby, Randy Nonnenberg — with help and encouragement from his friend Gentry Underwood — made it his full-time job after launching Bring a Trailer. This spring, they listed unicorn #100,000 for auction on the site — a Lime Yellow 1973 Datsun 240Z that was already special to the brand’s history.

The Datsun, and the dozens of other active vehicles on the site each day, enjoy the attention of over 900,000 active users — a white-hot spotlight coveted by everyone hoping to sell a cool car. Over the 16 years since its humble beginnings as a personal blog, that Bring a Trailer spotlight has become a cultural institution for anyone interested in automobiles of the mythic variety.

But Bring a Trailer didn’t start out as a cultural institution.

It began as a child’s private morning ritual.

The Red Pen Ritual

When Randy was a kid growing up in California, each morning he would spring out of bed and run down his driveway to grab his family’s copy of the San Jose Mercury News. Bounding inside to the kitchen table, he’d tear open the paper, flipping to the back. But Randy wasn’t flipping to the funny pages like most kids; he was headed to the classified section.

It was the late 80s, and if you wanted to sell your vehicle, you did so via the classified ads in your local newspaper. The ads were different every day, offering an assortment of unique makes, models, and deals. And while young Randy had no money and no driver’s license, he did have an imagination. And a precocious appetite for engines, descriptions, and prices.

“It became a ritual for me, to start my day with the newspaper. Something about it inspired me. By the time I was old enough to get my license, I was already well-versed in the car world. I began working on cars and going to events at the local track with my dad, and things snowballed from there. Later, I went off to college, but my ritual persisted thanks to the internet. Suddenly. I could look at classifieds from every part of the country. My appetite only grew.”

At that point, the Internet was still a very fragmented place. Car dealers and manufacturers had terrible websites. Craigslist existed, but the pictures people included were taken on a tiny flip phone and the search filters were weak. eBay was getting there if you knew how to look. Randy made it his business (well, technically at this point it was his hobby) to know how to look.

Even after graduation, and the beginning of his professional life, Randy’s ritual didn’t go anywhere. He became the guy in his friend group that anyone would go to if they needed help buying a car, or if they just had a question about cars. It felt good to put his years of knowledge to use. Inspired by this feeling, and at the encouragement of a good friend from college, Randy decided to start a blog. He’d take the best classified ad he found each day, and do a short write-up about it. They came up with the name ‘Bring a Trailer’ and turned the site on January 7th, 2007.

As it turned out, putting all the good cars in one place was a pretty revolutionary act on the then-still-quite-fragmented Internet. After profiling one car a day for a while, Randy and his co-founder Gentry Underwood built a system that sent a mailing list a “deal of the day” to their inbox each morning.

Soon enough, Randy’s daily ritual became thousands of followers’ daily ritual, too.

From Passion to Profession

For years, Bring a Trailer was just a passion project. They had no grander plans. No business model. It was just a place to put the energy Randy was already spending on his hobby of researching cars — and a great excuse for two old college friends to hang out and work on a project together.

Eventually, the requests started pouring in: ‘Hey, I don't want you to link to a Craigslist ad; can I just put the car on your website?’ Once the site started actually facilitating transactions, then Randy’s personal-ritual-turned-passion-project began evolving again into a viable business. In 2010, after turning the blog into a marketplace, both Randy and his co-founder Gentry quit their day jobs.

As a marketplace, Bring a Trailer solved a lot of issues for car buyers and sellers alike. For sellers, the site brought many eyeballs to listings. Even if you had an absolute gem to offer, putting a vehicle on Craigslist or a similar large website would not guarantee healthy traffic to your listing. But on Bring a Trailer, just about every listing garnered a few hundred emails in the first few days. It was a way to gauge interest and meet potential buyers fast.

For the buyers, the site provided a sense of trust. Each vehicle that appeared on the site was curated by enthusiasts for enthusiasts — so you had a pretty good sense that what you saw was what you’d get. There’s an intentional lack of sales-i-ness in the vehicle descriptions as well — Bring a Trailer has a goal to underpromise and over-deliver when it comes to claims, straightening out what has been a notoriously crooked market for decades.

“We don’t think it’s our role to be salesy. These cars and trucks are awesome, and they speak for themselves. They don’t need help from white lies and a shiny-shoed salesman to find new homes.”

The Trouble with Modern Car Shopping

Before the internet, to buy a special car, you had to get lucky. You had to be at the right car show on the right Saturday, see the right sign in the right window, read the right ad in the right newspaper, or subscribe to the right magazine and be the right caller. Your options were highly, highly curated — mostly just by circumstances of life.

Then came the Internet and Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and others. Options! So many options! Arguably, too many. To properly hunt for unicorns on these entirely uncurated user-generated sites involved sifting through a lot of duds, as well as speculating on a lot of seller claims. We’ve all heard a story or two about a Craigslist sale gone sideways.

When it first launched a marketplace back in 2010, Bring a Trailer had these issues in mind and more. A staff of experts vets each listing for credible claims and features, but even more intensive is the comments section. And the browsers at Bring a Trailer love to let the world know what they know about a given make, model, era of car history, or particular build. This community pressure test ensures that the seller has what he says he has. Period.

“The used car market has a well-earned terrible reputation for there being sharks and crocodiles in the water. On Bring a Trailer, you’re never walking into a car sale vulnerable and alone; you’re walking in with 10,000 knowledgeable friends who are excited to help you vet a vehicle. Some of our listings boast hundreds of comments beneath them! Intense discussions and debates unfold. And it levels the playing field for the buyer.”

10,000 Knowledgeable Friends

Today, Bring a Trailer isn’t just every car enthusiast’s favorite website to check each morning. It’s a community of buyers, sellers, and fans who love to get together and admire great vehicles. At events around the country, Bring a Trailer contacts their extended family of past buyers and sellers to come together and show off their unicorns, while getting to browse active listings in the shiny, metallic flesh. It’s their way of making sure that what started as a blog isn’t only a digital experience, but a vibrant, lively, real good time.

The brand also runs a podcast, hosted by Randy himself, that gives Bring a Trailer’s power users the mic, to share their passion for vehicles on another channel. It is these passionate and outspoken commenters that give Bring a Trailer its power. For buyers, they serve as an army of vehicle vetters. And for the casual browser, they’re the faculty of Bring a Trailer University.

Bring a Trailer University? Figuratively! Over the years, the site has become a sizeable resource of information, all neatly organized under specific vehicle makes and models. These days, most Bring a Trailer listing comment sections eventually become a high-value Q&A session, with experts from all over the industry chiming in to share their knowledge. As a result, the Bring a Trailer website is also an archive of model-specific forums. A veritable Wikipedia of peer-reviewed car knowledge.

“One thing I’ve found is that those with information about cars are always keen to share it. My favorite comments, and it’s always humbling when it happens, are those from serious experts. Nothing brings me more joy than when a lead engineer at Porsche or an Indy 500 racing icon enters the chat to set the record straight about a car. Jay Leno will also chime in on listing from time to time, and that always tickles me as well.”

The Science of Specialness

100,000 listings deep, and every vehicle listed on Bring a Trailer still feels special. It’s something that has always stayed top-of-mind for Randy as his little personal blog ballooned into a billion-dollar business. As the platform continues to scale, Randy’s challenge is to make sure that the Bring a Trailer spotlight — and the attention of thousands of valuable active commenters that come with it — is never spread too thin.

Because that’s what everything Bring a Trailer stands for boils down to: specialness. What began as a sacred childhood ritual, and later became an online curation by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, was always in search of that core principal ingredient, present in everyone's definition of “unicorn.”

“Cars are tools, but like tools, they’re not all built alike Certain cars enable a special kind of freedom that people today are really clamoring for. When you log onto Bring a Trailer, you’re not just anticipating a material purchase, you're imagining a new kind of life for yourself.”

One last definition of a unicorn:

The car out there with the power to change your life.

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