

After a year in stealth, CarWoo (YC S09) launches today - tommy_mcclung
http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/13/carwoo-launch/
After a year in stealth, we finally launched our company today.  CarWoo! is an online new car buying market place, where buyers can come and say what they want and get dealers to compete for their business.  Essentially this is a reverse auction for car buying.  We waited over a year to launch so we could build our dealer network to over 3000 dealers nationwide.<p>Let us know what you think... lots of posts coming about our YC experience and how we stayed under the radar for over a year, how we raised money, all the good stuff.
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parfe
Closed your website the second I saw I needed an account to continue.

edit: I'll expand so you don't get confused by my comment. I drop by auto
sites every now and again and customize a car to my liking, as a game. The
idea of getting a car is playful. Most of the time I'm not seriously thinking
of buying the vehicle.

Now on your site, I can't customize a car. I can't even see what your site
does. I could see myself playing around with models and brands and see a
button at the end "We'll have 5 auto dealers bid on your dream car, $50.
You'll save way more than $50 thanks to our competitive bidding process."

Or you can alienate all the random drop-ins forcing them to sign in, or
associate their real life facebook profiles with some random site on the nets.

The value of your site appears to be in the bidding process. Not the
customization process.

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guynamedloren
I will admit that I did not do any research beyond reading the article, but
have you thought about how you will tackle the problem of the customer not
test-driving the vehicle before purchase?

The article makes me think the entire streamlined process can result in a
signed contract in a relatively short period of time, without the customer
ever seeing the vehicle that s/he had already into a legally binding agreement
for. This could obviously result in all kinds of problems. Perhaps the article
has simply left out a few steps...?

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fletchowns
Maybe it's supposed to be like buying snowboard boots online - go try on a few
pairs, figure out exactly what you want, and then go and find the best price
for it.

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WesleyJohnson
Seems like a pretty cool service and the intro video was pretty informative.
I'd use it to buy my next car, because I'm terrible at negotiating face to
face. A minor nitpick on the intro: I found it odd that they said "Follow us
on twitter dot com slash carwoo". If the end user is savy enough to know what
twitter is and want to use it, is the "dot com" necessary? It seems the phrase
"follow us on twitter at [company name]" is used almost universally.

Congrats to the CarWoo team for launching!

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aidenn0
A couple of comments:

1) I know there are other companies that do something somewhat like this. My
auto insurance company has a car buying service and I'm pretty sure it is run
by a 3rd party. The business model is presumably different though (sell to
auto clubs, etc).

2) The dealers it lists for me are mostly _really_ far away. And I mean "I've
never heard of that town, let's google maps it, wow, it's 5 hours of driving
away!" far away.

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jonpaul
Your other CarWoo business partner already submitted a link about CarWoo to
HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1787451>

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hussong
FWIW, I don't think that was a Carwoo business partner.

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karzeem
I've never bought a car, but why do dealers keep inventory at all? Seems like
it's the cause of all their headaches. Just have one of each model for test
drives, then let people custom-order. I know people like to be able to drive
off the lot with a new car, but we're talking about the biggest non-home
purchase of their life. They're not willing to wait a few weeks to optimize
it? Especially if the inventoryless dealer's lower costs mean they get a much
better deal?

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brc
There are many people who need to buy a car there - now, that day or the next.
Maybe their old one just died, maybe they are about to go away for work,
whatever. Some people just want things right away.

Spend some time around a car dealership and you'll find buyer behaviour that
seems very unrational to a careful person, but then the spread of car buyer is
pretty much the spread of the population. As such, dealers need a certain
amount of inventory to keep the showroom full and satisfy buyer demands.

Finally, you'd be surprised how many people can be upsold on expensive
features (sunroof, leather, alloy wheels) with high margins because the car
they are intending to buy is sitting right there, on the floor, ready to go,
with just a teensy-weensy few more features on it. You wouldn't get upsold at
McDonalds if you had to wait for the bigger fries, the same at dealers. Having
the up-sell sitting right there, in front of the buyer, sometimes works with
getting them to buy more.

The flip side of this is that certain franchised dealers are forced to carry
inventory by the manufacturer. The manufacturer helps out with the inventory
costs by giving better finance on the inventory, but as a flip side they
basically force-feed the dealer with stock. It's up to the dealer to move that
stock. I guess from the manufacturers point of view, it gives them a certain
level of predictability with their month-to-month sales and keeps the dealers
working hard to move cars.

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scottkrager
Neat service. Something I would use. Has some similarities to
<http://truecar.com>

I'd like to see the specific options package listed (checkbox form maybe?) vs.
having to write the features I'd like. That way there is really no negotiation
that could go on.

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ja27
It certainly seems like an easy to understand value prop. I've done ok on
negotiating cars, but only after a lot of research and through a lot of
frustration. I've told a friend of mine (an aggressive attorney) that I'd
gladly pay her to go negotiate a car for me.

One of my worst experiences was trying to play the "let dealers compete" game
online. I'd get 4 to 24 hour turnaround times on emails, which just wasn't
going to work. As a bonus, I still get several emails a week from dealers
still trying to get my business. (Thankfully on my semi-throwaway account.)

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jonknee
It's like CarsDirect, but paid for by the buyer instead of seller. Hard to
judge its usefulness without buying a car, but there's room for a lot of
players in this space.

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mc32
The team pictures have obvious heavy shadows from a single flash. Otherwise,
looks promising, I might give them a try next time round.

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tickle_me_elmo
If the site has been running for over a year, how can it be said to "launch"
today?

