Family entrepreneurship, Building & exiting two startups, Simplifying consumer car search | Pat Ryan
发布时间 2023-06-16 08:00:10 来源
摘要
In this episode, I'm speaking with Pat Ryan, founder and CEO of CoPilot.
00:00 - Intro
01:13 - Pat's background
10:33 - Family entrepreneurship
14:22 - Building & selling two companies
20:26 - Founding CoPilot
25:47 - How CoPilot makes money
31:05 - Breaking into a competitive market
39:41 - Who is CoPilot for?
48:13 - Trends that Pat's observing
54:00 - Evolving with AI
57:09 - Wrapping up
Follow Pat:
Twitter (https://twitter.com/patryanchicago)
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pat-ryan-b98a1b)
CoPilot (https://cdgpod.com/CoPilot)
Check out the website for more (https://dealershipguy.com) and follow me on Twitter! (https://twitter.com/GuyDealership)
Interested in advertising with CarDealershipGuy? Join the sponsor waitlist here: https://cdgpartner.com
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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中英文字稿
I want to add in typical provocative car dealership guy nature. I want to say this very bluntly. Do car dealers hate you? Co-pilot or me personally? Maybe we can focus on Co-pilot.
我想加入典型的挑衅性汽车经销商的品质。我想直截了当地说。汽车经销商讨厌你吗?是副驾驶员还是我个人?也许我们可以专注于副驾驶员。
What's up everyone? This is car dealership guy. You're listening to the car dealership guy podcast, which is my effort to give you access to the most unbiased and transparent insights into the car market. Let's get into today's episode.
大家好!我是汽车销售店的人。您正在收听的是我的汽车销售店播客,这是我努力为您提供对汽车市场最公正、透明的见解。让我们进入今天的节目吧。
Pat Ryan is founder and CEO of Co-pilot, an AI-powered car buying app that's helping consumers navigate their car bridges. Prior to Co-pilot, Pat co-founded and sold two auto tech startups to ACV auctions.
Pat Ryan是Co-pilot的创始人兼CEO,Co-pilot是一款由人工智能驱动的汽车购买应用程序,有助于消费者在汽车市场中导航。在创办Co-pilot之前,Pat曾与人合伙创立并将两个汽车科技创业公司卖给ACV拍卖行。
In this conversation, we spoke about the dynamics of family entrepreneurship, building and exiting two startups to the same company, simplifying car search for consumers, innovating with AI, and how to leverage Co-pilot to find a great cardio.
在这次谈话中,我们讨论了家族企业的动态、将两个创业公司建设并退出到同一家公司、为消费者简化汽车搜索、创新人工智能技术以及如何利用“副驾驶”来找到一款出色的有氧运动。
But before we get into the show, please take two seconds to subscribe or follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. It's completely free and will help ensure that you never miss an episode.
在我们开始节目之前,请花两秒钟在您最喜欢的收听平台上订阅或关注这个播客。这是完全免费的,可以确保您不会错过任何一集节目。
All right, let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Pat Ryan.
好的,让我们开始吧。这是我和帕特·瑞安的对话。
All views of car dealership guy and guests on this podcast are solely their opinions. None of the views expressed should be treated as financial advice. This podcast is for informational purposes only.
这个播客中汽车经销商和嘉宾的所有观点均代表他们个人的意见。不应将所表达的任何观点视为财务建议。本播客仅供信息参考。
All right, we got Pat Ryan on the pod. Pat, welcome. Good to hear.
好的,我们请来了Pat Ryan参加这个节目。欢迎,很高兴听到你的声音。
I got to ask you, the first thing I noticed when I was, I did some research on you in your background, Chicago. I mean, what are they putting the water in Chicago? What's the deal with everyone in automotive, all these powerhouses coming from Chicago? Give us your background in story.
我想问你,当我第一次注意到你的时候,我研究了一下你的背景,发现你来自芝加哥。我的意思是,芝加哥的水里都放了什么?为什么这么多汽车界的强者都来自芝加哥?可以给我们讲讲你的成长经历吗?
Well, I was working in more traditional industry in the early 2000s. And we were working a lot with data and analytics. And we saw what an impact that had. One of the stories we used to tell was that the folks at Walmart were so good with data and analytics that on a Memorial Day weekend, based on how hot it was, they could tell you how much purple Gatorade they needed to stock or of every flavor of Gatorade. You know, if you went to a 7-Eleven back then, it was all the junkie flavors you didn't like were the only ones left. But they had every single flavor and color perfectly predicted based on the weather and everything that was happening.
我在2000年代早期在一个传统行业工作。我们与数据和分析打交道很多,看到了它们的巨大影响。我们经常讲的一个故事是沃尔玛的员工非常擅长运用数据和分析,根据万圣节周末的天气预测他们需要多少紫色鲨鱼力量饮料或者每种口味的鲨鱼力量饮料需要备多少库存。你知道吗,在那时去7-Eleven买饮料,只有那些没人喜欢的口味剩下了。但是沃尔玛完美地准确预测出了每种口味和颜色,基于天气和一切的因素。
We were trying to bring that to business. And one of the things that we looked at was, so we said, you know, the largest retail vertical is automotive. But no one's ever really done what Sam Walton did. And one of the things that we always loved was, you know, people think of Sam Walton and Walmart, obviously his big box retail and all this.
我们一直试图将这种思维方式引入商业中。我们考虑过的其中一件事是:我们知道最大的零售垂直领域是汽车销售。但是没有人能像山姆·沃尔顿一样做到。我们一直很欣赏的一点是,人们一般会想到山姆·沃尔顿和沃尔玛这样的大型零售商,但其实还有很多潜力可以挖掘。
But he's actually, when he was originally inducted into the business Hall of Fame, was for the use of data analytics and logistics. And so we always thought that was really interesting, that ability to predict all the Walmart stores, used to have satellite dishes.
但实际上,当他最初被引入商业名人堂时,是因为他运用数据分析和物流方面的成就。因此,我们一直认为这非常有趣,因为他能够预测所有沃尔玛商店,曾经使用过卫星天线。
So they could have this real-time data transfer. And so our thought was, how do you bring that to other industries? And I'd been around the auto business a little bit, but I wasn't an insider. And we started a company called First Look. And the idea was to bring data-driven analytics, kind of what Walmart did, but for the auto industry. And when we started it, I actually went to go try to sell car max. I went to Austin, Liggett.
所以他们就能进行实时数据传输。于是我们的想法是,如何将这种技术带到其他行业?我曾经有过一些汽车界的经验,但并不算内部人员。于是我们创建了一个叫做First Look的公司。我们的想法是为汽车行业带来数据驱动的分析,就像沃尔玛所做的那样。当我们刚开始尝试时,我实际上去尝试向卡玛克斯销售。我去了奥斯汀,利格特。
And it was an early SaaS product. And I said to Austin, I showed him everything. And it was a great conversation. He's going on and on. He's asking all his great questions. He's almost finishing my sentences. And I'm like, this could be the greatest, first major customer ever. Because he completely gets it. And I said at the end, I'm a...I know sales training. So I ended with a terrible closing question which is, what do you think? And he looks at me and he says, I hate it.
这是一个早期的SaaS产品。我向奥斯汀展示了一切,并且我们进行了很棒的对话。奥斯汀提出了很多棒的问题,几乎能猜出我的意思。我想这可能是最伟大的第一个重要客户,因为他完全理解了产品。最后我问了一个很糟糕的销售问题:“你觉得怎么样?”他看了我一眼说:“我不喜欢它。”
And I said, what do you mean you hate it? We've been talking for two hours. This has been great. You totally get this. He said, I've had circuits city city spend 10 years and $25 million building this for us. And you're going to sell it to my competitors for $1,000 a month. That's not good for me.
我说,什么意思,你讨厌这个?我们已经谈了两个小时了。这很棒。你完全懂这个。他说,赛电城花了10年时间和2500万美元为我们建造这个东西。而你要以每月1000美元的价格把它卖给我的竞争对手。这对我不利。
And so that was kind of my induction to the business. But then I never, it took me years to meet somebody else like Austin Liggett. It took me years to find because the industry, what Austin understood, was this ready. And so being my first experience in the industry was trying to introduce something at a time when people is the mid 2000s, when people were still trying to think of everything as gut. I know what a car is. I know what a car is worth. I know what a car should be priced at. And so we were ahead of the curve, which sounds like a self-congratulatory thing, but it's actually purgatory.
所以,那是我入行的开始。但是,我花了好几年时间才遇到像奥斯汀·利格特这样的人。由于奥斯汀所理解的行业是准备好的,所以我在行业的第一次经历是,当时人们仍然试图将一切视为直觉。我知道什么是汽车,我知道汽车的价值。我知道汽车应该定价多少。因此,我们领先于潮流,这听起来像是在夸耀自己,但实际上是煎熬。
It's not hell because you're trying to sell something that people aren't ready to adopt yet. And so you've got to search for those early adopters. And we eventually got there, but it was really hard because nobody wanted to be Walmart of a car business back then. Of course, it's evolved a lot since then, but that was my introduction to the car business was trying to sell something that people was like, it worked. They made a lot more money. But it was like, tell them to eat right an exercise. It's not popular to say no ice cream, no pizza. Like I was selling kale.
这不是地狱,因为你试图销售人们还没有准备好接受的东西。因此,你必须寻找那些早期用户。我们最终到了那里,但当时真的很难,因为当时没有人想成为汽车业务的沃尔玛。当然,自那时以来它已经发展了很多,但那是我的介入汽车业务的方式,试图销售人们像工作一样的东西。他们挣了更多的钱。但是,就像告诉他们要吃得健康、锻炼身体一样,这样的销售策略并不流行。就像我在销售甘蓝菜一样。
What was the initial product for you? So you mentioned you spoke on automotive, huge vertical. Was it just data and analytics and assisting? Yeah. So it was called first look.
对于你来说,最初的产品是什么?你提到了汽车行业这个大垂直领域。是仅仅关于数据分析和辅助吗?是的。它被称为“First Look”。
And it was basically the original idea was that we brought in the same kind of inventory management car max did or Walmart did. It was stocking. It was appraising and it was pricing. And then it also helped you figure out what to sell. And the original idea, so the original launch of the business was actually the morning was in Washington DC because we were going to, our early monetization model wasn't fast.
最初的想法基本上是我们引进了像卡玛克斯或沃尔玛那样的库存管理。它包括进货、评估以及定价。然后它还帮助你找出要出售的物品。最初的想法,也就是公司最初的推出,实际上是在华盛顿特区的早晨,因为我们的早期盈利模式不够快速。
Our early monetization model was going to be getting dealers to trade cars to each other. It was going to be like a dealer round table watch. Where we would have all the data, we would know what they needed to stock, what they needed to sell. We would say, okay, our dealership guy needs to pick up three accords and this guy needs two BMWs and we'll put you guys together and facilitate that.
我们早期的盈利模式是让经销商之间进行汽车交易。这就像是一个经销商圆桌会议。我们拥有所有数据,了解他们需要的库存和销售情况。我们会说,好的,我们的经销商需要拿走三辆雅阁,而那个人需要两辆宝马,我们将把你们放在一起,并促进这个过程。
So we did it actually in a conference center in suburban Washington DC and it was scheduled start at 10 a.m. on September the 11th, 2001. Well, by the time 10 o'clock game, they shut down DC. They were shutting down. They all got in a van and drove back to Chicago over, you know, basically straight. And it was very tough.
我们其实是在华盛顿DC郊区的一个会议中心举办的,定于2001年9月11日上午10点开始。然而,当到了10点的时候,华盛顿DC已经被关闭了。他们乘坐一辆面包车直接回到了芝加哥。这非常艰难。
And then eventually we had dropped that revenue model and we, that's when I'm done with Austin. And eventually we got Hendrick was our first big client. But it was a very hard thing to sell data driven insights to dealers at that moment in time because that wasn't the culture of the business.
后来,我们最终放弃了那种收入模式,这也是我与奥斯汀结束的时候。最终,亨德里克成为我们的第一个大客户。但在当时,向经销商销售数据驱动的见解是非常困难的,因为这不是商业文化的一部分。
I got to tell you one thing I noticed about you as I was preparing for this episode is, it seems like you keep a very low profile. And look, as an outsider, you have a very impressive track record and background. You've exited two companies to the same company, which we'll get into in a bit. You sat on the board of Penske, I believe, you know, up until recently, you know, you've been around in some really great rooms. And I'm sure you've just been exposed to a lot in the business.
在为这一集节目做准备时,我发现你有一个很明显的特点,就是似乎一直保持着低调。作为一个外部人士,你已经取得了很不错的成绩和背景。你已经成功退出了两个公司,加入了同一家公司,我们后面会详细探讨。你曾经在Penske担任董事,我想你已经接触到了一些非常棒的机会。我相信你已经在业务中获得了很多的经验。
Tell us a bit about, you know, getting to that position. And also, you know, I'm really interested to hear about these two acquisitions to ACV auctions. So, let's start there. Yeah, so the first thing is, is so interestingly, my dad is an entrepreneur. So I come from an entrepreneurial family. He actually, his first business was called Pat Ryan Associates, eventually Ryan insurance. And he was credited with creating what is sort of, he's in the automotive insurance, all the things, he's in the automotive hall of fame for inviting the F&I office.
告诉我们一些,你是如何达到那个位置的。我也很想听听ACV拍卖会这两个收购交易的情况。让我们从这里开始。首先,有趣的是,我的父亲是一位企业家。所以我来自一个企业家族。他的第一家企业叫做Pat Ryan Associates,最终演变成了Ryan Insurance。他被认为在汽车保险等领域创造了F&I办公室,并进入了汽车名人堂。
And I was going to say, I think it's an understatement to call him an entrepreneur. As far as I read the founder of AOD, is that right? Undervan. That's unbelievable. Now he's got a new 73 founder, new public company, which he took public last year called Ryan Specialty. When we went to the New York stats change for the IPO, I said, the chairman of the stocks change was there.
我想说,把他称为企业家可能有些轻描淡写。就我所知,他是AOD的创始人,对吗?Undervan。这太不可思议了。现在他又有了一个新的73个创始人、去年上市的新上市公司,叫做Ryan Specialty。当我们去参加在纽约的股票交易所IPO上市时,我说,股票交易所的主席就在那里。
And I said, my dad's 86 right now. And I said, do you get many 84 year olds? He said, Pat, we don't give any 64 year olds, let alone 84 year olds, let alone, someone has done it two, three times like this. So he knew the auto business, but I was too young by the time he really started moving into what became man, I was really what I was old enough to really understand what's going on. So I didn't know the automotive side of the business much, but in 1968, he gave a talk and a 20 group in Montreal, Canada, and it was Pat Ryan's associates.
我说,我爸现在86岁了。我问他,你们有很多84岁的人吗?他说,帕特,我们甚至不给64岁的人,更别说84岁的人了,更何况像这样做了两三次的人。所以他了解汽车业,但是在他真正开始进入那个领域时,我还太年轻,还不够懂事。所以我对汽车业的了解并不深,但是在1968年,他在加拿大蒙特利尔的一个20人小组中发表了讲话,这个小组是帕特·瑞恩的合伙人。
And he had a handful of associates. And it was early in the business and the sky walks up from Philly area. And he says, hi, I'm the general manager and part owner of a Chevy store in Philly. I love what you said, can we go and go drink or get some weed? I'd love to talk to you more about it. And that guy was Roger Penske.
他有一些合作伙伴,当时他们的生意刚刚开始,他们从费城地区进军。有一天,一个名叫罗杰·彭斯克的人走了过来,自称是菲利汽车商店的总经理和部分所有者。他对你说:“嗨,我喜欢你说的话,我们可以一起喝酒或者抽点大麻吗?我很想更多地与你聊聊。”而他的确就是罗杰·彭斯克。
And so my dad and Roger are these two guys who've gone on to create these large public companies, the global companies, but they knew each other when they were nobody. And they invested in each other. And so it was a great, so it's a kind of a great story that these guys grew up together. And they're still doing it. They're three months apart in age. And so in the 90s, when I was starting to work, I got out of grad school and I was starting to work.
我的父亲和罗杰是这两个人,他们已经创造了这些大型公共公司和全球公司,但他们在成为名人之前就已经相识,他们互相投资,这是一个很棒的故事,这两个人一起成长并仍在不断发展,他们相差三个月的年龄,90年代,当我开始工作,从研究生毕业后开始工作。
I had done some work before on automotive supply. We had been an investor. My dad wasn't able to do it at war because Ann was global. It's 150 countries. So he was traveling all the time. So Roger invited me to join the board to represent us. And the privilege of getting to sit around a table, learn from a guy like Roger Penske has been unbelievable. I spent 25 years doing it. I have the greatest respect for him for his organization. And I tried to be a sponge because there are only so many iconic people in any industry that are probably a handful in any industry like Roger Penske. And maybe he's Elon Musk is of our generation kind of thing. That's it. And so that was just, it was incredible. And you learn about how does the guy build what's there. And you also learn they don't get everything right. Yet they go on to incredible success. And so you learn from both what they get right and what they learn from. And it was fantastic. Happy to talk more about it. But it was incredible.
我之前在汽车供应领域做过一些工作,我们是一家投资者。因为安是全球性的公司,所以我父亲无法在战争时进行此项工作。它涵盖了150个国家,因此他一直在旅行。所以罗杰邀请我加入董事会代表我们。能够围坐在桌子旁学习像罗杰·彭斯克这样的人所具备的特权是难以置信的。我花了25年时间做这件事。我非常尊重他的组织,他也让我试着像一个海绵一样吸收知识,因为每个行业都只有那么少的标志性人物,像罗杰·彭斯克这样的人只有寥寥数人。也许他和埃隆·马斯克在我们这一代人中是同级的。这就是他的不可思议之处。你会学习到一个人如何建立事业,也会了解到他们并不会做对每一件事情,尽管如此,他们依然可以获得成功。因此,你会从他们所做对的和所学到的错误中学习。这真的是太好了。我很愿意进一步谈论这件事,但这是一段难忘的经历。
It sounds like an incredible story. And I want to break the normal flow of my podcast for one second because typically I'll start with background going to more B2B and with consumer. But I would ask you a more personal question. What's it like to grow up at a household like that with a father that is so incredibly successful? And you yourself obviously have been just tremendously successful. What has that been like? What was it like to be raised in that type of household?
听起来像是一个不可思议的故事。我想暂且打破我的播客的正常流程,因为通常我会先介绍背景,然后讨论一些关于企业和消费者的问题。但我想问你一个更个人化的问题。在这样一个家庭中成长,有如此成功的父亲,你自己也显然非常成功。那是什么感觉?在那样的家庭中成长是什么感觉?
You know, it's funny because it's different than people expect because wealth is a former celebrity. So people see my dad on the Forbes list or these kinds of things. And everybody focuses on, you know, is it like some TV show? And it's not really because he's an entrepreneur. So when I was young, you know, he wasn't what he is today. And so you're sort of there along for the journey. And so you have this, it was different each decade of my life, you know. When I was in high school college, nobody ever heard of my dad, you know, in the general public. But were the core values the same at all times?
你知道,有趣的是,这跟人们的期望有所不同,因为财富是一个曾经的名人。所以人们看到我爸爸在福布斯榜单上或者其他类似的事情时,大家都关注的是,这像某个电视节目吗?其实不是,因为他是一个企业家。当我年轻的时候,他不是今天这个样子。所以你有跟着他一起经历这个过程。每个阶段的生活都不同,你知道,当我在高中大学的时候,公众一般都没听说过我爸爸。但是这些核心价值观在每个阶段都保持一致吗?
That's the thing is it's really, I think there are three big things. One is, you know, as a father, he's been a great father and a great mentor. But as a businessman, he also is always, you know, we I grew up around the table talking about what his strategy was, what he was doing, why he was doing it. We still do that today. And one of the things that's really interesting for my dad is is that, you know, I went to grad school, but I've learned a thousand X from him as he goes through these things, you know, kind of getting a ride shotgun and see what he's doing and learn from what he's doing. And it's been, you know, it's been an incredible journey.
这件事情,我觉得有三个大点。其中一个是他作为父亲,做得非常好,是一位伟大的父亲和导师。但作为商人,他总是在思考自己的战略、行动以及原因。我从小就坐在他旁边听他讨论这些事情,现在还是一样。而对我父亲最有意思的事情之一是,尽管我去读了研究生,但从他的身上学到了比学校教的多得多,因为我有机会跟在他身边,看着他做一些事情、从中学习。这是一段难以置信的旅程。
But it's also the kind of journey where, you know, he really is happy to share. And I would say I've never been able to buy a stock because I always have some information that, you know, it wouldn't be appropriate. So for me, it's if you look at my dad and growing up there, one seeing his values have always been the same no matter how much he had, no matter how well known he was, you know, the financial none of that really mattered. He was always a family guy first, family mattered first and foremost. He was always very committed, you know, my dad as a view, which is think no impure of thoughts and you won't get yourself in trouble. Like don't even entertain the idea and don't be around people who would entertain the idea of being in any way doing things across lines and boundaries that you've never been comfortable with.
这也是一种他非常乐意分享的旅程。我想说,我从来没有能够买股票,因为我总是有一些信息,不太合适。对我而言,如果你看看我的父亲和成长过程中的经历,你会发现他的价值观始终如一,不管他有多少财富,多么出名,金钱等等都不是最重要的,最重要的是家庭。他总是非常忠诚,我的父亲有一个观点,就是不要有不纯的想法,这样就不会惹麻烦。不要甚至想象或跟身边那些可能想跨越界限做事情的人在一起,这种事情你从来没有舒适过。
So I see him do that and I've seen others who cut corners who were, you know, maybe less willing to do so and really see people talk about playing the long game. But you have to be willing to ride the ups and the downs and there are times where things aren't going well and you could try to spin it, but his view was always be candid, take your lumps, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and come back and that's the nature of being a public company CEO for decades. You're gonna have ups, you're gonna have downs and you know, they lost almost 200 people in 9-11. They were the top floor of World Trade Center too. He was supposed to be there that morning and he was actually over the Atlantic and you know, you look at how he handled that and you know, people first, they did more further people than almost anybody. College scholarships take care of the family's lifetime health insurance for anybody who died and then they were really committed to that and then Wall Street punished them for having high expenses and they say, okay, well, this is right by our people. We got to do right by our people. You know, we want to do right by our shareholders, but our shareholders get what they get, get the benefits they get because of our people. We always got to stand by our people first and foremost.
我看到他这样做,并且我见过其他人在做事上走捷径,但他们可能不太愿意这样做,人们会谈论长远计划,但你必须愿意接受时起时落,有时事情并不顺利,你可以尝试掩盖它,但他总是建议坦诚面对,接受失败,重新振作,这就是作为一位上市公司CEO数十年来的天性。你会有成功,也会有失败,他们在9-11事件中失去了近200人,是世贸中心二号大楼的顶楼,他当时本应在那里,但他实际上在大西洋上。你可以看看他如何处理这件事,他们以人为本,比其他任何人都更关心员工,提供大学奖学金并为死者的家属提供终身医疗保险,这是他们真正承诺的事情,然后华尔街因为高开销而惩罚他们,但他们说:“这是对我们人民最正确的做法。我们要先立足于我们的人民。我们想要为我们的股东做好事,但我们的股东得到他们的利益正是因为我们的人民。我们始终要优先考虑我们的人民。”
So it's been a journey like that of a hundred of those things, maybe not all is big and profound, but a hundred of them. Absolutely and very commendable.
这是一段像那种经历了一百件事情的旅程,也许并不全是重要而深刻的事情,但总共有一百个。绝对值得称赞。
I want to go back to, you mentioned earlier, just you know, riding the ups and downs and I found it incredible that you managed to have, you know, you launched an incubator, which I'd love to hear more about, you know, the startup studios really, you know, found and built companies, but you sold two companies to ACV auctions. Can you tell us about that journey getting to that point?
我想回到你之前提到的,你知道的,经历高低起伏的时期。我发现你成功地启动了一个孵化器,这让我觉得非常惊讶,因为你真的创办并发展了不少公司,而且你已经成功地将两个公司出售给ACV拍卖公司。你能跟我们分享一下这段旅程吗?同时我也很想听听更多有关你的创业工作室的事情。
Yeah, you know, I think there's always the thought that, I think there's always the thought that, as you get to a certain scale and size, like how far can you take this? And you know, lots of people. And what I learned is that we have very good products. So when our products at Henrik and Lithia, which were our two biggest customers, go ahead and get challenged by competitors, I was always very proud of the fact that our dealerships outperformed the ones using our competitor software. Because you feel ultimately you want the people who are loyal to you, your customers will have loyalty to be successful and to be more successful. You want them to really, you know, feel the benefit of the loyalty. And I really felt good about that.
嗯,你知道,我认为人们总会想到,当企业达到一定规模和大小时,如何才能将其发展多远呢?很多人都有这个想法。但我学到的是,我们有非常优秀的产品。当我们的两个最大客户 Henrik 和 Lithia 的产品受到竞争对手的挑战时,我总是为我们的经销商在使用我们的竞争对手软件的经销商中表现出色而感到自豪。因为最终你想要忠诚于你的人,你的客户拥有忠诚度,并且能获得成功和更大的成功。你希望他们真正感受到忠诚度的好处。我为此感觉很好。
I really liked our first look business and we had our max business, which is sort of digital retailing, digital marketing. And it was really focused on that consumer dealer experience. So like we had a BMW and GM endorsements and we would do a sales tool that salespeople could use to be more consumer friendly. You know, a lot of times on new cars, they might be well trained, but every use car is different. They didn't know how to tell the difference in the cars. We gave them an app in their pocket that told them everything from across the internet about that car. And so seeing that, you know, we loved our products and we were proud of what our customers achieved.
我非常喜欢我们的首个业务方向,而我们拥有我们的主要业务,即数字零售和数字营销。我们的重点真的在于消费者和经销商的体验。我们获得了BMW和GM的认可,并为销售人员准备了一种销售工具,以更加亲和地与消费者交流。您知道,很多时候,针对新车的培训可能很充分,但使用过的车就不同了。他们不知道如何区分不同的车辆。我们为他们提供了一款便携应用程序,可以通过互联网了解有关该车辆的一切信息。因此,看到这一点,我们喜欢我们的产品,并为我们的客户所取得的成就感到自豪。
That being said, you know, there's a time the industry's been consolidating significantly. We were with some of the biggest players like Hendrik and Lithia. But at the same time, what I also learned is that it was harder for us to grow as a mid-sized company. And so one of the reasons I decided to sell them was you wanted the business to have the right home. And so I sold the businesses to ACV because ACV is a very hot growing business. It really is trying to expand its set of offerings. And so for our team.
话说,我们知道,在某个时刻,这个行业正在显著巩固。我们与亨德里克和利西亚等一些最大的参与者在一起。但同时,我也了解到作为一家中型公司,我们很难实现增长。因此,我决定将业务出售给ACV,原因之一是我希望业务到达合适的归宿。ACV是一家快速增长的业务,正努力扩展其产品组合。因此,对于我们的团队来说,这是一个非常好的选择。
Which business was this? Which business are you referring to? I sold both of them. I sold to it. I sold both first look and max for them.
这是哪家公司?你指的是哪个公司?我把它们都卖掉了。我卖给了它。我为他们把First Look和Max都卖了。
And what was the difference from first look to max digital? We sold them around the same time. We sold them around the same time. But in terms of the actual product, the product itself, what was the difference?
第一眼看到和最终数字版之间有什么区别?我们大约在同一时间出售它们。但是就产品本身而言,实际产品有什么不同呢?
Oh, so first look was the inventory management. And max digital was the digital retailing, like, you know, the everything in your pocket for a salesperson to be an expert. We also made their ads better on places like cars.com and AutoTrader and that sort of thing. So it was all about building consumer-centric ads and sales processes.
首先,我们看了库存管理。而Max Digital则是数字零售,就像你知道的,是销售人员变成专家的口袋里的一切。我们还改善了他们在cars.com和AutoTrader等地方的广告。因此,一切都是关于建立以消费者为中心的广告和销售过程的。
And now these companies that you founded, are you pulling off a Jack Dorsey Elon Musk as CoCo? Or are you just the chairman? How is the structure of this actually work? How do you run two companies?
现在你创立的这些公司,你是像杰克·多尔西、伊隆·马斯克那样成为“CoCo”,还是只是董事长?这些公司的结构如何运作?你是如何同时经营两个公司的?
Yeah, it's a great question. So I started the first one and I had a deal to sell it. And it was too restricted. It was actually had a deal back then to sell it to deal a track in 2010. And I didn't. But I really wanted to go do something else, start something new. So I brought it as CEO to run it. And then in 2011, we started Max because we saw sales enablement is really the category. And we saw that salespeople, you know, often didn't have to do the research they needed to do to be knowledgeable on every car.
是啊,这是一个很好的问题。我开始第一家公司,有一个要卖掉的协议。但是它太受限制了,实际上我在2010年有一个协议要将它卖掉,但我并没有这么做。但我真的想做些其他的事情,开始一些新的尝试。因此,我将其作为首席执行官来运营。然后在2011年,我们开始Max,因为我们看到了销售推动这一类别。我们发现销售人员通常无需做他们需要做的每辆车的研究来变得更有知识。
We would have people who worked for us. A lot of our people used to be car max buyers, where the people would not work with dealers. And they'd go to buy a car to dealership and someone would tell, oh, this is X trim. And the guy, our guy would say, I know it's not X trim. Like the guy would be making up stuff. You'd see salespeople making stuff up all the time. And we thought they're only making it up because they don't know. They're not trying to deceive the customer. They just, it's a lot of homework to have 100 cars and a lot.
我们会有一些为我们工作的员工。我们的很多员工曾经是汽车购买者,他们不愿意与经销商打交道。他们去经销商那里买车时,会有人告诉他们,“这是X型号”。我们的员工会说,“我知道它不是X型号”。因为那个人说的都是捏造的,销售人员总是在编造事情。我们认为他们只是因为不知道而编造这些话,他们并不是想欺骗客户。他们只是有很多工作要做,他们要处理一百辆车的问题。
I know the story of every car, particularly when it's outside of your franchise. You know, because not your franchise, how well do you know the trim is on the packages of other brands. And so that's where we got into this idea of sales and able. So 2011, I started max. It grew really fast, much faster than first look. And then what happened to me is, is I got it to a certain scale. I was on the board, but I had also been involved in founding a venture firm called Chicago Ventures and an incubator in Chicago called 1871. And I really felt like helping other entrepreneurs was something that I wanted to do. So I took some of the people who worked for us and they ran the businesses. Did a good job with it. But for me, I really liked the idea of, you know, I spent 10, 15 years at this point learning the startup world.
我知道每辆车的故事,特别是那些不属于你特许经营范围的车辆。因为它们不属于你的特许经营,你不可能完全了解其他品牌的款式和包装。所以,我们想到了销售和能力的概念。2011年,我开始创建Max,它的增长非常快,比First Look还要快得多。然后,当它达到了一定规模时,我也加入了董事会,同时也参与创办了一家名为芝加哥风险投资和一个名为1871的孵化器。我真的觉得帮助其他的企业家是我想做的事情。于是我带着我们的员工,让他们经营企业。他们做得很好。但对我来说,我真的很喜欢那种学习创业世界的感觉,我花了10年甚至15年的时间。
And so helping our ecosystem in Chicago, helping entrepreneurs, both through funding, being on boards, but also these incubators was something I spent a lot of time on, let's call it between 2013 and 2018. And I really love doing that. And so that became kind of a third, if you will, founding for me. And it was probably the right thing at the right time. I was probably burned out. I mean, being on the road calling on, you know, selling is a, it takes a lot out of you. And so we had people with fresh energy, it's like in football, they put a fresh line in and they needed somebody fresh in the game.
在芝加哥帮助我们的生态系统、帮助创业者,通过资金支持、担任董事会成员,还有这些孵化器,是我在2013年至2018年期间花费了很多时间的事情。我真的很喜欢这样做。因此,这成为了我第三个创业,如果可以这么说。这可能是我疲惫不堪的时候,我出差销售已经精疲力尽了。我们需要新鲜的精力,就像在足球比赛中一样,他们换上一条新鲜的线路,他们需要在比赛中加入新鲜的力量。
And so that was when I kind of stepped out of those businesses. We sold them during the pandemic very successfully. But we didn't, well, we ended up, I really that period of helping other entrepreneurs was a really fun and important for me. Because, you know, you learned a lot the hard way, you have a lot of parties you should show and feel like, God, I hope somebody else can learn this without having to go through everything I did to turn the hard one.
所以,那时我从那些企业中退出了。我们在疫情期间非常成功地将它们出售了。但是,我们最终没有,我真的认为帮助其他企业家的那段时间对我来说非常有趣和重要。因为,你知道,你是通过艰辛的方式学到了很多东西,你有很多派对,感觉像,天哪,我希望别人能够学到这个,而不必像我一样经历一切,有一次又一次地挑战自己。
A hundred percent. And so throughout this process, you start another company, CoPilot. And I found it fascinating that, you know, you've been so committed to the automotive vertical, but that specifically that throughout everything you had going on, you're clearly the CEO of this company. So I wouldn't dig into that. What is CoPilot? What are you working on out? And why did you decide to go be CEO of another company, as opposed to, you know, point of management team or incubate it through your, through your firm?
百分之百。在整个过程中,您开始了另一家公司CoPilot。我发现很有趣的是,您一直致力于汽车垂直领域,但是明显在您所进行的一切事情中,您是这家公司的CEO。所以我不想深究这个问题。CoPilot是什么?您正在从事什么工作?为什么决定成为另一家公司的CEO,而不是通过您的公司管理团队或孵化呢?
Yeah, it's a great, great question. So a couple of things. First of all, I learned a community of these people. I really liked the creative process being an entrepreneur, leading a team, trying to help people solve problems. So that was one piece. I knew I wanted to go back and operate again and, and found something. Number one, number two, I founded Max. I really had the naive point of view and you'll appreciate this given your experiences that this would be, Max would be how we'd make the car dealership sales process consumers friendly.
是的,这是一个非常好的问题。首先,我学到了这个人群的社区。我真的喜欢创业过程,领导团队,帮助人们解决问题。这是第一个方面。我知道我想要回去再经营,寻找一些东西。第二个是我创建了Max。我真的有一个幼稚的观点,你会欣赏这一点,这将是如何使汽车经销商销售过程更加消费者友好的Max。
But we had some great customers who did great things. But at Max, the number one, one of my great disappointments was that our number one requested feature for our sales tool. It's like a consumer walks into the dealership. It's a big touchscreen there that they can use our tool to like, so, shop themselves, right? The number one request we had from salespeople was, can you create a button where we can change the price? So somebody hasn't been online and I know that. I can raise the prices on all the cars. And I thought, well, that's terrible. And somebody didn't go on Latin, they came here because they trusted you. And if you're going to raise the price, what it made me realize is that given the nature of the sales process and given the nature of commission-based sales, it was going to be hard to get the industry to go really consumer friendly as a vendor because ultimately you're doing what you need to cut what your customers ask for.
但我们有一些伟大的顾客,他们做了很多伟大的事情。但是在Max,我最大的失望之一是我们销售工具中最受欢迎的功能。就像一个消费者走进经销店。那里有一个大触摸屏,他们可以使用我们的工具来购物。销售人员最大的要求是,你能否创建一个按钮,让我们可以改变价格?所以有人没有上网,我知道。我可以提高所有汽车的价格。我认为那太可怕了。如果有人没有上网,他们会到这里来,因为他们信任你。如果你要提高价格,那么这让我意识到,鉴于销售过程的性质和基于佣金的销售的性质,让行业真正为消费者友好是很难的,因为最终你所做的就是满足你的客户要求。
So I actually took the technology, all the data stuff we had created at Max and I spun it out and created co-power. And the idea came from something very simple.
我其实把Max公司开发的所有技术和数据搬出来,成立了Co-power。这个想法来自于一个非常简单的想法。
I think for people on Twitter you do is probably for your friends, which is we had all this data. We basically had built over just 10, 15 years, the best data platform for analytics, pricing, and cars. We have the original window stickers on $150 million of the 275 million cars out there, for example.
我认为你在Twitter上所做的可能是为了你的朋友,而我们拥有了所有这些数据。事实上,我们在过去的10到15年里建立了最好的用于分析、定价和汽车的数据平台。例如,我们拥有275 million辆汽车中价值1.5亿美元的原始车窗贴。
And so we got out there and what would happen is our friends would call us say, hey, who do you have all this data? Can you help me? So our people would get on the phone, they'd help their friend find the right car, they'd tell them why it's priced right, they'd do everything, they'd help figure out how to negotiate the best deal, they'd do all this.
我们就这样开始了,朋友们会打电话过来,问我们哪里有这么多数据能帮忙。于是我们的工作人员会拿起电话,帮助朋友找到合适的汽车,告诉他们为什么这个价格合适,帮助他们找到最好的交易方式,他们会尽力帮忙。
And their friend would just say thank you, that was fantastic. And they'd say, you guys should really do that. We can't do that because our dealer customers wouldn't like it if we were in the business of using that data to negotiate with them.
他们的朋友会简单地说谢谢你们,太棒了。他们会说,你们真应该这样做。但我们不能这样做,因为我们的经销商客户不会喜欢我们使用这些数据与他们进行谈判。
And so that was the original co-pilot. It was people using all our data to help friends do it. And so we had the idea of like, if you want to make the car business consumer friendly, the consumer needs an advocate.
那就是最初的副驾驶员。人们使用我们的所有数据来帮助朋友。因此,我们有了这个想法:如果要使汽车行业消费者友好化,消费者需要一个代言人。
And one of the challenges that the listing sites have, and I like all the people who run them, but they're paid by dealers. And so they're limited in how far they can go without getting pushed back. And of course, true car is the ultimate example of that, which is as they started pushing too far, the dealers push back on them. And I don't think it's right to take money from people and then work against them.
目前网站上的一个挑战是,我很喜欢运营这些网站的所有人,但他们都是由经销商支付的。因此,他们在没有得到反弹的情况下可以走得有限。当然,真正的汽车是这种情况的终极例子,因为当他们开始走得太远时,经销商就会反弹。我认为,从人们那里收钱然后反对他们是不正确的。
So we started this thing, we won't take money from dealers. But the dealers get free leads from us to try to pass all the time. Division of co-pilot was how do you get your own expert, who knows everything about the car business, will do all the heavy lifting, all the research, search every dealer, analyze every car, rank everything for you.
所以我们开始了这件事,我们不会从经销商那里拿钱。但是经销商会从我们这里获得免费的线索来尝试推销。共同飞行的分部是如何获得你自己的专家,他知道关于汽车行业的每件事情,会承担所有的重活,所有的研究工作,搜索每个经销商,分析每辆车,为你排名一切。
So you're getting the most car for your money every time and you can buy with confidence. And you were talking to the guy in the software guy from Israel a couple of weeks ago, you were talking about that is co-pilot. Well, you guys were describing where that is exactly why I'm creating co-pilot.
每次购车,您都会获得物超所值的最佳性价比,因此您可以充满信心地购买。您曾经与来自以色列的软件工程师交谈过,讨论过co-pilot。你们描述了它的位置,这就是我创建co-pilot的原因。
I love what you were saying. Our name turns out to be a really prophetic one given where we're going with gender today. But that is exactly what the idea is. Everybody should have a co-pilot.
我喜欢你说的话。我们的名字在今天的性别议题中变得非常预言性。不过这恰恰是这个想法的目的。每个人都应该有一个副驾驶员。
And some of our dealer friends are like, well, you know, but then you're teaching people how to, you know, be really great at this. And, you know, does that cut my profits? I said, no, if you're a dealer who prices a car well, who has a great car, who's trying to do the right thing, we have made that customer comfortable trusting that.
我们的一些经销商朋友有这样的想法,他们说,你教人们如何做得很好,但这会减少我的利润吗?我回答说,不会。如果你是一个定价合理、车况优良、诚实经营的经销商,我们为客户建立了信任,这不会损害你的利益。
So now all of a sudden that customer doesn't come in and wear it because they know you're different because we've analyzed the market and said, you know, go to car dealership guy because that accord he has is great quality, one owner, no accidents. It has, it's really well priced. It's got great equipment. It's low mileage. It has all these other features.
现在,顾客突然不想购买这件衣服,因为他们知道你与其他商家不同,我们分析了市场并得出结论,这位顾客会去汽车经销商那里,因为他们知道那辆雅阁质量好、只有一个车主,没有事故,价格合理,配置很好,里程数低,另外还有其它的优点。
And so the whole vision is that by helping consumers, we actually help the industry get more consumer centric because it rewards the people doing the right things. And that eventually will mean those people are more successful and either the other people will change or go away.
整个想法是,通过帮助消费者,我们实际上帮助行业变得更加以消费者为中心,因为这样会奖励那些做正确事情的人。这最终将意味着这些人更成功,要么其他人改变,要么离开。
So I think the magic question that everyone's wondering, how do you make money? That's a great question. So the short answer is, is the secret to our cost side of our business, which is important to understand is, is we have, I took all my best engineers.
我认为每个人都想知道的魔法问题是,你们是如何赚钱的?这是一个很好的问题。简单地说,我们的收入来源来自我们业务的成本端,需要理解的是,我们拥有最优秀的工程师。
So I've got a 25 person team that does this, but it's like they're the best at automotive data. And we have a number of people who are really great at AI. So part of it is, is it doesn't, every customer we get, it doesn't cost us a dime more to serve a million people than a thousand people, or maybe it costs us a dime more, but very little.
我有一个25人的团队,他们非常擅长汽车数据方面,而我们还有一些非常擅长AI的人。所以,我们无论是为1000人还是100万人提供服务,成本几乎相同,甚至可能只比前者多个极小的成本。
So part of it is I've got a fixed cost business so that I don't have an increasing cost as we increase the number of people, which makes it easier to make money because if my, if it was marginal cost, it would run me out of business.
有一部分是因为我的业务成本是固定的,所以随着人数的增加,我的成本不会增加。这使得赚钱更容易,因为如果我的成本是逐渐增加的,我将无法继续营业。
The answer is, is we make money. So 97% of our customers go to our site. We have almost too many people on similar web would tell you, almost two million people go to our site every month. That's doubled since December. So we're acquiring them for free.
答案是,我们在赚钱。因此,97%的客户都会来到我们的网站。同类网站的数据也表明,每个月近200万人访问我们的网站。这个数字自去年12月以来翻了一番。所以我们无需花费什么费用就能吸引到这么多人。
And 97% of our customers will go to a dealer without the dealer ever knowing we were involved. 3% will go into our app and use it to help them across the way, but they stay with us. And so we might help them reconnects their loan when interest rates go down. We're not in that marketing more, but we were before.
我们有97%的客户在没有告知经销商的情况下去了经销商。3%的客户会使用我们的应用程序寻求帮助,但他们会继续留在我们这里。我们可能会在利率下降时帮助他们重新协商贷款。我们已经不再进行市场营销了,但以前我们确实做过。
We certainly, we primarily make money off insurance. So we have partnerships with different folks, including all state, helping people save money on their insurance. And over time, you know, we'll help them with more and more. But it's really that group that becomes our core, almost like an affinity group.
我们主要通过保险赚钱。因此,我们与不同的机构建立伙伴关系,包括全民保险,帮助人们节省保险费用。随着时间的推移,我们会为他们提供越来越多的帮助。但实际上,这个群体已经成为我们的核心,几乎就像一个类同的群体。
So our network becomes this group of people who they say, that was such a great experience. I want to stay with you, help me figure out everything else. And that's how we make money is by saving their money, because they know we're like fast flow, which is we're only going to make a little bit of money on them. You know, insurance person will make $500,000 on something.
所以我们的社交网络变成了一群人,他们说:“这是一次非常棒的经历。我想和你们在一起,帮我理清其他所有事情。”而我们赚钱的方式就是通过节省他们的钱,因为他们知道我们的效率很高,我们只会从他们身上赚少量的钱。相比之下,保险人可能会从某些事情上赚取50万美元。
We'll make $100, but we're fine with that because we're in the long term relationship with that consumer. And if we can pass along most of the savings to them, they'll be loyal to us. And that'll be a great long term partnership.
我们会赚取100美元,但我们对此感到满意,因为我们与那个消费者有着长期的合作关系。如果我们能把大部分的节省成本传递给他们,他们会忠于我们。这将是一种伟大的长期合作关系。
Two million visitors a month. Incredible number. How are these visitors finding you? Primarily through SEO today, and then word about our customers really love us. We have a 4.8 rating in the app store. And our customers really, they love us. I think they realized that we're on their side.
每月两百万访问量,数字惊人。这些访问者是怎么找到您的?主要是通过搜索引擎优化(SEO),然后是客户口耳相传,他们真的很喜欢我们。我们在应用商店拥有4.8的评分,客户真的很喜欢我们。我认为他们意识到我们站在他们这边。
And there's something about that, just like I think a lot of things you've done out there tweeting. When you are transparent with people in a really constructive way, they trust you because you've earned their trust. And once you've earned people's trust, there's this sense of like they can relax and they can start to solve the problem.
有一些东西就像你在推特上所做的许多事情一样。当你以一种非常建设性的透明方式与人们交流时,他们会相信你,因为你赢得了他们的信任。一旦你赢得了人们的信任,他们就可以放松下来,开始解决问题。
Where a lot of people, I think in buying a car, have had a negative experience. And so they're locked up. They're nervous. They're just trying to not be taken advantage of. And having somebody you trust help you navigate the way, I think is really important.
许多人在购买汽车方面都有过不愉快的经历,因此他们处于紧张和警惕之中,只是想避免被利用。在这种情况下,拥有一个你信任的人帮助你引导方向非常重要。
So word of mouth is half our traffic. Wow. And then SEO has become really big because we are searching every dealer. We are analyzing for our customers. We are analyzing every car. And then we're ranking all of them. And we can rank them because the dealer's not paying us.
口碑传播占据了我们流量的一半。哇哦。然后,搜索引擎优化(SEO)变得非常重要,因为我们正在搜索每个经销商。我们为我们的客户进行分析。我们分析每一辆车。然后我们对它们进行排名。而我们之所以可以对它们进行排名,是因为经销商没有支付我们任何费用。
So the dealers who get high ranks love us and the dealers are low ranked. No one ever sees their cars. So they don't actually get hurt. But if we were getting paid by dealers, we could never rank them because they would be worried about and paying a thousand dollars a month. Why aren't you ranking me higher? And consumers like it because the listing sites have to show sponsored cars more prominently. We only show what's better for you.
因此,那些排名高的汽车经销商喜欢我们,而排名低的汽车经销商却没有人看到他们的车。所以他们实际上并不受伤害。但如果我们是由汽车经销商支付报酬的话,我们就不能为他们排名,因为他们会担心并支付每月一千美元,问:“为什么你不把我排名更高?”消费者喜欢这样,因为挂牌网站必须更突出地显示赞助的汽车。我们只展示对您更好的内容。
Do you think you're leaving dollars on the table, especially from the dealers that are high ranking? Do you think you could monetize that cohort of dealers? I mean, and you're smiling. Looks like something you thought about.
你觉得你可能在错失机会,尤其是来自高排名的经销商那里吗?你认为你能赚到那一组经销商的钱吗?我的意思是,你现在笑了,看起来你已经在考虑这个问题了。
Well, it's a great question. My board asked it a lot, of course, my address that question a lot. So you sound like one of my investors, for sure. You know, I would only want to do it in a way if it didn't take away from the independence that our customers trust.
这是个非常好的问题。我的董事会经常问起它,当然,我也回答了很多遍这个问题。你听起来像是我的一个投资者。但是,我只会以一种不会损害客户信任度和独立性的方式去实现。
Our members trust us. And that's the most valuable answer that we have. And I've been hesitant to do it. There's no question that we're under optimizing the monetization of what we have under monetizing what we have.
我们的会员信任我们,这是我们最有价值的答案。但我一直犹豫不决。毫无疑问,我们在利用我们所拥有的资源来获得收益方面存在着优化不足,收益不够的问题。
But, you know, it takes a lot of time to build trust, and you can burn it in a split second. So I respect the fact that they trust us, and I really want to be respectful and protective of that.
但是,你知道,建立信任需要很长时间,但可以在一瞬间丧失。因此,我非常尊重他们对我们的信任,真的想要尊重并保护它。
Yeah, look, I think I know the feeling, right? Because I am, I think what I take pride in is that I consistently try to share an unbiased perspective. And in certain cases, it was a great job. And it's hard. And frankly, in certain cases, I may piss off consumers, in certain cases, I may piss off some dealers. But you know, you're constantly tippy toeing on that fine line, because you want to, like you said, you want to earn that trust of the marketplace.
嗯,听着,我觉得我明白这种感觉,对吧?因为我认为我引以为傲的是我一直在努力分享一个不偏不倚的观点。在某些情况下,这是一份很好的工作。但同时也很困难。坦率地说,在某些情况下,我可能会激怒消费者,可能会激怒一些经销商。但你知道的,你不停地在那条红线上小心翼翼地走着,因为你想,就像你说的,你想赢得市场的信任。
And so it's not an easy task. And I'm glad your board members are bringing up that question. I want to ask you another question, though, but how did you initially wedge into the market, right? So you had this idea, I just knowing the car, the listing, the car listing marketplace is very competitive.
因此这不是一项容易的任务。我很高兴你的董事会成员提出了这个问题。不过,我还想问你另外一个问题,你最初是如何进入市场的呢?你有这个想法,但汽车列表市场竞争非常激烈。
And so how did you, how did you manage to wedge into this market? And how do you retain your spot and just what's such a saturated market? Or at least it feels like?
那么你是如何进入这个市场的?你是如何保持自己的位置的,特别是在这样一个市场饱和的情况下?或者至少感觉是这样的?
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the first answer is it's hard. I mean, they're just in consumer in general. I mean, think in the last decade, how many consumer businesses in consumer Europe as this is a broken up? Not a lot.
是的,这是一个很好的问题。我认为第一个答案是很难。我的意思是,他们在消费领域总体上很难做到。我是说,在过去的十年中,有多少消费品企业在欧洲消费市场中彻底失败了?并不多。
I think there are two ways that we've done it. The first one is, is we early on, we were very successful on Facebook, actually, in getting that chicken egg problem solved with early users. And then I think the fact that we can position is independent, and we're not actually listening site, we're a search engine, we have a search engine.
我认为我们已经有两种方式做到了这一点。首先是,我们早期非常成功地在Facebook上解决了用户的难题。我们能够独立地定位自己,我们不是一个倾听网站,而是一个搜索引擎,这是第二种方式。
So what we do different than a listing site is nobody sends us their inventory. We have a search engine, it's an automotive search engine. And we go find cars and here's the thing, is it's a win-win for dealers on two levels. One, if we find your car and it does well, you're going to get a free lead that's highly motivated. And if you don't do well, well, it's like you never saw us anyway. So there's no real downside to the dealer for us being a search engine. So we're really additive to them. Even though we're empowering consumers, not every dealer likes that, the good dealers do because they're like, hey, I worked hard to price this fairly, but you're giving me third party validation. So the good dealers, the consumer centric dealers trust that.
我们与其他车辆信息网站不同的是,没有人向我们提供他们的库存清单。我们有一个搜索引擎,它是一个汽车搜索引擎。然后我们去寻找车辆,这样做对经销商有双重好处。首先,如果我们找到了您的车辆,并且它表现出色,您将得到一个高度激励的免费销售线索。而如果我们没找到您的车辆,那么你也不会有什么真正的损失。所以我们作为一个搜索引擎对经销商来说真正是有益的。尽管我们正在帮助消费者,但并非每个经销商都会喜欢这种方式,善良的经销商会喜欢这一点,因为他们会说:“嘿,我努力地定价这辆车,但你给了我第三方验证。” 因此,注重消费者的良好经销商将相信这一点。
The other benefit we do that I would tell you that in the search engine, part of it is, is by being transparent with consumers, it's allowed us to counter position. You know, there's never a sponsored car. And people recognize that and we say how long the car has been online and they feel the dealer can't like the fact you told us they're on 123 days, but it builds that trust. But the other thing we do for dealers that nobody else does in pricing is we actually give dealers, we actually give the car full credit for what it has.
我们做的另一个好处是透明化与消费者的沟通,这在搜索引擎中有所体现。这使得我们能够进行反向定位。你知道,我们从来没有推广的汽车。人们认识到这一点,我们会说出汽车的上线时间,他们就会觉得经销商在信任上建立了好的基础。但是我们为经销商提供的另一项独特的收益是,在定价方面,我们实际上给予经销商的汽车以其全部价值。
So for example, if you take a BMW, there's a lot of packages in BMWs that are factored into the trim. If it's a fully loaded BMW versus one of the same trim that's not that's called leather packaged as heated seats, it has a whole bunch of other really great pieces, we actually will reflect that in the market price, where a lot of those pricing tools out there don't. And so dealers a loaded car will get a fuller, fair price from us than it will from other third parties, because it's value to the consumer. I mean, if I can get $10,000 worth of packages for $5,000, that's a great buy.
举个例子,如果你买了一辆宝马,宝马里面有很多套装是已经包含在内部装中的。如果是一辆装满的宝马和一辆相同型号但没有装满的车型,后者只是包含皮座椅加热等简单设备的版本,前者则包含许多其他非常棒的功能,我们会在市场价格中反映这一差异,但很多定价工具却无法做到这一点。因此,对于一辆装载了完善配置的车辆,我们能够从客户那里得到更加公正的价格,而其他第三方则不然,因为这使得车款更有价值。我的意思是,如果我能以5000美元的价格买到价值1万美元的配置套装,那就是一笔很优惠的买卖。
So I think it's that trust, I think it's the fact that we're so different than everybody else that we don't take money and that we're independent has helped the word of mouth. And I think the Gennifer AI, like I picked the name CoPilot, we picked the name CoPilot for a reason. Our vision was always what I've heard you describe, which is the consumer needs that one stop shop. So we just had a hackathon here, all our engineers came into town, we had a hackathon, and we have some really exciting Gennifer AI things. We have a plug-in week submitted to the plug-in store right now. We have a working Gennifer AI in TCHPT into our product, because if you take our differentiated data and the independence, we're not afraid of what the results are, because the chips will fall where they may.
我认为这是信任的问题,我们与其他人非常不同,因为我们不接受钱,而且独立自主,这有助于口碑传播。而且我认为Gennifer AI也是如此,我选择了CoPilot这个名字,这是有原因的。我们的愿景一直是消费者需要一个一站式购物中心,这也是你所描述的。我们在这里举办了hackathon,所有的工程师都来了,我们正在开发一些非常令人兴奋的Gennifer AI项目。我们已经提交了一个插件给插件商店,我们在我们的产品中也有一个Gennifer AI。因为我们有差异化的数据和独立自主,我们不害怕结果,因为结果会如实反映。
But if you have customers who might look bad, as dealers who are paying you, you need to be very, very careful. And so there's a liberation to being on the consumer side of the table only, which is we can just do the right thing, focus on that, and we'll do right by the consumer and the dealers who are doing the right thing to be rewarded. And the other ones will never hear of us. The women know we exist. You know, on that note, I just think that the next generation of car shopping is going to be wild.
但是,如果您的客户可能看起来不太好,例如向您付款的经销商,您需要非常,非常小心。因此,仅处于消费者方面,存在一种解放,这意味着我们可以专注于做正确的事情,尽力为消费者和那些做出正确决策的经销商服务,然后我们将受到回报。而那些不做正确决策的人则永远不会听到我们的消息。女性知道我们的存在。在这个问题上,我认为下一代购车方式将会非常疯狂。
I mean, I look at the Apple Vision announcement, right, the headset, and I think about shopping for a car, right, the first call it dealer or the first company that creates that app for dealers to be on the Apple Vision Pro and truly see, you know, like when Carvana came out with the 360 view, it was like, okay, wow, this is new. And then it got commoditized and every dealer pretty much has that now. And I just imagined this world where, like I said, you go on this website, you say just what you want, and maybe you don't know everything you want, maybe you know exactly what you want. It doesn't matter. But you state a prompt and boom, it pulls up on this just you know, augmented reality. You see the car, you spin it with your finger, and you see it in such fine detail that it truly takes the car shopping experience to the next level. I don't think that's I don't think that's a crazy world. I think that's going to happen. It's just a matter of time.
我的意思是,我看到了苹果发布的头戴式显示器Vision的公告,然后我的脑海里浮现出像买车一样的购物体验,想象第一家开发针对苹果Vision Pro的应用程序的公司或者第一家打电话的经销商,真正地让人们可以看到全景视图。就像Carvana推出的360度全景视图一样,当它首次推出时,这是一个新的里程碑。然后就被商品化,几乎每个经销商都拥有了。我想象着这样一个世界,在这个世界里,你只需要进入这个网站,告诉它你想要什么,也许你并不知道你想要什么,也许你非常清楚自己想要什么。这都无所谓。但你只要提一个要求,它就会在增强现实的环境中呈现出来。你可以用手指旋转车辆,以如此细致的细节观察它,这将真正将购车体验提升到一个新的层次。我认为这不是一个疯狂的世界,我认为它会发生。这只是时间问题。
I think that's right. The other thing that's going to happen that we've been working on for quite a while, we call diagonal search, which is, okay, show me, you know, horizontal search is like, show me all the hinders or show me all the pickups. And you know, for vertical searches, you know, you go down the trail, you go down the in this class, and then you can go kind of across. But, but we call diagonal searches like, I need it. SUV with seven seats with, you know, captain's chairs, because I got a car seat in the way back that I got, I got it, my kids out of the back row in, I need to have cargo space. I need to have a good fuel mileage. And it's really important to me that it has, you know, high five star crash test ratings. What should I do with it?
我认为这是正确的。我们一直在努力的另一件事情是对角线搜索,也就是说,“好的,展示给我,你知道的,水平搜索就像,展示给我所有的障碍物或者展示给我所有的物资。你知道的,对于垂直搜索,你走下一条路,你进这个班级,然后你可以横跨过去。但是,我们称对角线搜索就像我需要一辆七座SUV,装有船长座位,因为我在后排有一个儿童安全座椅挡住了,我需要有货物空间,我需要有好的燃油里程数。对我来说,它的五星碰撞测试评级非常重要。我该怎么办?
Right? Because this is a generation of people who aren't car people, you know? And so I'm not a car guy in the sense that I don't know. I'm not, I don't collect cars. I don't have that sort of things.
对吧?因为这个年代的人们不是汽车迷,你知道的吧?所以我并不是车迷,我不了解。我不懂汽车。我不收藏汽车,我没有那样的东西。
But giving consumers a sense, I think it's all going to change. And if you think about it, you know, you have to question up the listing sites. Well, you know, those are the original classified ads. If you look at the big listing sites, cars.com was classified, that was classified ventures, you know, Auto arm, auto trader.com was, you know, from the auto trader magazine. So if you look at, it's amazing those businesses, what they've done.
但是,我认为消费者的感觉会改变一切。如果你仔细想一想,你必须质疑一下那些上市网站。这些网站本质上就是原始的分类广告。如果你看看大的上市网站,例如cars.com、Auto arm和auto trader.com,你会发现它们都来自分类广告。这些公司做得非常了不起。
I mean, what other businesses from the 1990s internet that pivoted out of the newspaper world are still around low, low, still as big and prominent as they are. It's remarkable what they've done. But it also raises the question of, is that going to be their business model in five or 10 years? Like our search engine, people like, they like the fact that no one's paying us for it. They like the fact they can see everything, not just the people who are paying for it.
我的意思是,除了像他们一样从报纸世界中走出去并进行转型的1990年代互联网企业之外,还有哪些企业像它们一样保持如此之大和显著的存在。他们所做的事情是非常了不起的,但同时也引发了一个问题,那就是在五到十年后,它们还能保持现有的商业模式吗?就像我们的搜索引擎一样,人们喜欢它的原因在于,没有人为它付费。他们喜欢的是,他们可以看到一切,而不仅仅是为之付费的那些人。
So, so I think there's an interesting innovators dilemma question here that you're right on the money on. And I think these guys will make it because they're going to invest in the kind of technology you're talking about. But they have to get that balance right because you've got to do it in a way that brings their customers along unless they fall into the trap that true car fell into where, you know, they, they leaned a little hard one way and the dealers, you know, reminded them who their customers were and paid the bill. Yeah, I just had Scott painter on the pod. So that's a, that's a, it's already life by the time this pod is live, but that's a, it speaks a lot about that.
所以,我认为在这里有一个有趣的创新困境的问题,你说得非常对。我认为这些人会成功,因为他们将投资于你所提到的技术,但他们必须找到平衡点,以便在不使客户离开的情况下进行投资。否则,他们可能会陷入TrueCar的陷阱,即他们偏向一边,而经销商则提醒他们要记住谁是客户并让他们付账单。是的,我刚刚在播客上采访了Scott Painter,这主要是关于这方面的话题。
One thing I want to, at one point that I want to, you, you mentioned, you said we're, we're not a generation of car people. And I think, you know, I just mentioned Scott painter and what he's working on in his company. It's very interesting because the thesis is all about that, the car for, you know, the next generation is more of a utility, much more than call it the prior generation, which, you know, to your point, it's like, Hey, I need something to get me from point A to point B has seven seats and is good on gas. Get me whatever you can. And I just think that unlocks an entire new set, you know, set of businesses, economics, because now I can, you know, operate a subscription, a subscription company with one or two models of vehicles.
有一件事情我想在某个时候想提一下,是你提到的——我们不是一个汽车世代。我认为,你知道我刚才提到的Scott Painter及其公司正在做的事情非常有趣,因为这个论点是关于下一代汽车更多地成为一种实用工具,而不是像前一代那样被称作汽车。正如你所说,现在人们需要的是能够从A点到B点的七座汽车,并且油耗低。我认为这将带来全新的商业和经济形式,因为现在我可以运营一个只拥有1或2种车型的订阅公司。
And at the end of the day, as long as the economics makes sense, you know, I'm going to have plenty of demand because maybe someone doesn't care as much, or maybe just cars are a lot more commoditized. And if I have car plate, I could care less if it's a Chevy logo or a Tesla logo or Toyota logo. So I do think that's a very big monumental change in consumer behavior. And it's got to have a big impact on lots of businesses.
最终来说,只要经济上是有道理的,那么我仍然会有很大的需求量,因为可能有人不太在意或者汽车更趋于普及。如果我有车牌,我不太在乎它是否有雪佛兰、特斯拉或丰田的标志。因此,我认为这是消费者行为上的一个非常重要的巨大变化。它必然会对许多企业产生巨大的影响。
I want to go back for one second, though, on to co-pilot. And I want you to explain to me in the audience, like a third grader, who is the perfect consumer for co-pilot? And what is that experience really like? Or more importantly, how is that experience different from other listing sites?
然而,我还想回到副驾驶员这个话题。请你像向小学三年级学生讲解一样,告诉观众,谁是完美的副驾驶员消费者?那个体验真的是什么样子的?或者更重要的是,这种体验与其他列表网站有何不同?
Yeah, so we wouldn't call ourselves a listing site. We're really in that. Sorry. But I hear you. We probably super officially look like one, so I totally get it.
是的,我们不会称自己为一个列表网站。我们确实在那方面,但很抱歉。不过我理解你的想法。我们可能看起来非常像一个列表网站,所以我完全理解。
I think the first thing I'd say is the perfect person for us is someone who's smart. Most of our people are buying new or nearly new cars. They look a lot like our employees, frankly. But they're not car people. They don't know a lot about the car business. They don't know a lot about cars.
我认为首先要说的是,我们需要的完美人选是一个聪明的人。我们大部分人买的是新车或者几乎新车。说实话,他们看起来很像我们的员工。但他们不是车迷。他们对汽车业务不是很了解。他们对汽车也不是很了解。
So they need help figuring it out. Often they're having families. They'll have a first child in a different car than when I was single. I've got two kids in our carpool. And oh, now I've got my 16-year-old running driver car. They go through these light transitions. They don't know enough about it to know what they need. But they're smart. And they're obviously smart if they're listening to this podcast, right? Exactly.
所以他们需要帮助弄清楚。通常他们有家庭。他们会在不同的车里拥有第一个孩子,而当我独身时是不同的。我们班车里有两个孩子。哦,现在我16岁的孩子已经开始开车了。他们经历了这些轻微的变化。他们不知道他们需要什么,因为他们了解得不够。但他们很聪明。如果他们正在听这个播客,那么他们显然很聪明,对吧?确实。
And they want to be empowered. I mean, that's why those people are the podcast, right? They want to be empowered. But they don't want to go have to go spend hours getting to be expert on something they don't know. And so for that person, it's the equivalent of the simplest way I would say it is imagine you have a brother or a cousin, a friend, a neighbor who knows the car business.
他们希望获得自主权。我的意思是,这就是那些听播客的人想要的,对吧?他们想要获得自主权。但他们不想花费数小时去学习他们不了解的东西。对于这样的人,最简单的方式就是想象你有一个了解汽车行业的兄弟、表兄弟、朋友或邻居。
Imagine your car dealership guy's neighbor. And I come over to you and I'm like, listen, I got to get a new car. My daughter just turned 16. I want something to say. I want something that's not going to be too sporty. I don't want it to be show off or what's this reliable. How do you think about this?
假设你是某家汽车经销商的邻居。然后我来找你,说:“听着,我需要买一辆新车。我女儿刚满16岁。我想要一辆车,能够彰显我的品味,但不要过于运动化。我不想显摆或者追求表面上的华丽,我只想要一辆可靠的车。你觉得怎么样?”
It would be as if you sat down and said, Pat, I will do you the favor of let me give you five models to think about. And let me tell you why you might want to think about these. And then all right, when you search for cars, show me the cars you have. And I'll tell you which ones you should consider, which ones you should. It would be like having you, but as a buy, what's called 80% of you. Productizing me productizing.
这就好像你坐下来对我说:“帕特,我会帮你找出五种你需要考虑的模型。我会告诉你为什么你需要考虑这些车型。当你寻找汽车时,让我看看你找到的车子,我会告诉你哪些值得考虑,哪些不值得。”这就像你把我当作一个产品来对待,让我成为你的“80%”。
Yes, we're pro it's the product ties an expert like you who wants to help people. And that's why we say you're still the pilot. Here's your co pilot. They're going to do the heavy lifting. They're going to do the analysis. They're going to bring the expertise, but you're still the decision maker. And that's what this is about.
是的,我们支持这个产品,因为它服务于像您这样想要帮助人们的专家。这也是为什么我们说您仍然是飞行员,而这里的副驾驶员将会帮您承担更多的劳动,分析情况,以及提供专业知识。但您仍然是制定决策的人。这就是这个产品的意义所在。
I had a I have a patent in early generation, early generation expert system that we did it first, what years ago. And we've been following this whole AI, generative AI piece. And the whole idea of co pilot was exactly this. We picked that brand name because we want to do that with AI.
我在早期开发了一种专家系统并拥有专利,早在几年前。我们一直在关注着这个人工智能、生成式人工智能领域的发展。而Co-pilot的整个想法实际上就是如此。我们选择这个品牌名称,是因为我们想用人工智能来实现这个愿景。
The data that we have is the key to doing that with AI. And it's how do you have a carbohydrate that in your pocket, helping you with every step of the process.
我们手头拥有的数据是使人工智能实现这一点的关键。这就好像随时随地在口袋里拥有一份碳水化合物一样,它可以帮助你完成整个过程中的每一步。
How is that how is that very tactical experience different for me? Right. If I go right now on any platform, listening site, anywhere, a search engine. And you know, I say what type of car one I see a list of cars. How is the co pilot experience specifically different?
那么,对我来说,副驾驶的经验有何不同呢?如果我现在在任何平台、听音乐网站、或者任何搜索引擎上搜索“什么品牌的车”,我都会看到一堆汽车品牌。那么,副驾驶的体验又有何具体不同呢?
So it's because of the copilot. So we go on board with us. You'll tell me, all right, what are you looking for? All right, tell me what you're looking for. I give a particular model in mind. A lot of people have a hypothesis for mind that I got a model I'm looking for.
所以这都要归功于副驾驶员。所以我们让他跟我们一起登机。你会告诉我,好了,你在找什么?好的,告诉我你在找什么。我有一个特定的型号在脑海里。很多人都有一个假设,认为我正在寻找一个型号。
I'm looking for a 2020 or 2021 GMC UConn. Okay, great. What equipment do you want on it? A lot of people don't even know what trim is. So we'll say, oh, you really need to be not. You're in really a case, healthy. Okay, we help them look at these things. And then what we do is we will take their area and say, how far do you want to look?
我在找一辆2020或2021年的GMC UConn。好的,很好。您想要什么配置呢?很多人甚至不知道什么是款式。所以我们会建议,您真的需要考虑一下。您真的需要注意一些细节。好的,我们会帮助他们考虑这些事情。然后我们会问他们,您想要看多远的车呢?
Most people know more than 100 miles unless it's something rare and then maybe they'll before me. Great. Every day we will search within 100 miles of your house. You will find every deal and we will search every dealership. We will find every matching car. We will then find everything from across the internet about every single car. We will analyze every single car. We will give it a buy grade. We will give you a sense of, you know, what makes it great and what makes it risky.
大多数人会了解比100英里更远的地方,除非这是某些罕见的事情,那么也许他们会比我更早知道。太好了。每天我们都会在您家的100英里范围内搜索。我们将找到每一笔交易,并搜索每一个经销商。我们会找到每一辆匹配的汽车。然后,我们会从互联网上找到每一辆汽车的相关信息。我们会对每一辆汽车进行分析,给予购买评分。我们会为您提供感性的评价,了解什么使它出色,什么使它有风险。
We'll give you a pros and cons kind of like reasons to buy reasons to pause. And every morning when you wake up, you will have a choice of how you want to do it. We call them hidden gems. What are the 10 best cars matching what you want in your area? And it's like tinder you swipe left swipe right. You're waiting for the train in the morning. Great. I'm going to look. Okay, I've now looked at the 10 best cars in my market because my competitor works for me.
我们会给你提供买和暂停购买的理由,像正反两面都讲到。每天早上当你醒来时,你可以选择想怎么做。我们叫它们“隐藏的瑰宝”。你周围有哪些符合你需求的最佳10辆车?这就像是Tinder,你左滑右滑来筛选。早晨等待火车时,很好,我来看看。好的,我现在已经看了市场上最好的10辆车,因为我的竞争者为我工作。
Or if you're like, hey, maybe I just want something around me to get just a huge amount of car for my money. It will be exactly what I want. We call that the seal of the day. You can play with the seals today. Same thing, tinder your way through it.
如果你认为,也许我只是想花钱买到更加车型丰富的汽车,那么这将正是我想要的。我们称之为今日特价。你可以今天玩一下这个特价。同样的,你可以通过使用Tinder应用程序来找到它。
Or if you're somebody who's like to power into it, great. We're going to take every car in your market and we're going to rank it. So unlike going to a listing site. So first of the curation I just described, you don't find on the listing sites because, you know, obviously there are winners and losers in that. And you can only do that if the dealers who are losing aren't your customers aren't the ones paying you.
如果你是想直接进入市场的人,那很好。我们将对你市场中的每辆车进行评级。与去列表网站不同,我们进行了删选,描述了的这种删选你在列表网站上找不到,因为显然在那里是有赢家有输家的。只有当那些输家不是你的客户而不是付给你钱的经销商时,你才能做到这一点。
The curation is a big difference. The other big difference that you have is when you do search yourself, every car is ranked. We rank them from first, best force. And then you can filter all that and use all the data that we bring. And so you're always getting a sense of that expertise weighing in on every decision, but you're the decision maker.
策展是非常大的区别。另一个很大的区别是当你自己进行搜索时,每辆车都被排名了。我们将它们从第一名到最好的力量排名。然后你可以筛选所有的数据,使用我们提供的所有信息。因此,你总是能够感受到专业知识对每一个决定的影响,但你是决策者。
And so there's this sense of you do a lot less work, but you know a lot more and a lot less time than you could run any listing site. Yeah, you're making me want to find a car and co-pilot.
所以你会发现自己做的工作很少,但你掌握的信息却比经营任何列表网站所需要的时间和知识都要多得多。是的,你正让我想找一辆车来当副驾驶。
I want to add in typical provocative car dealership guy nature. I want to say this very bluntly, do car dealers hate you? Co-pilot or me personally? Maybe we can focus on co-pilot.
我想要添加典型的挑衅性汽车经销商特点。我想要直截了当地问,汽车经销商是否讨厌你?是副驾驶还是我个人?或许我们可以把注意力放在副驾驶身上。
Yeah, my, no, our clients, our clients, obviously, when we were serving them, we're loved us because we made them very successful. I would say that anybody who encounters us, 99% of them love us, dealer wise.
我们的客户当然喜欢我们,因为我们让他们非常成功。我想说,无论谁遇到我们,99%的人都会喜欢我们,包括经销商。
Why? Because they want, right? They want, they had one of the 10 best cars and that consumer swiped right on them. And so when they say, how do you find me, I find you through co-pilot.
为什么呢?因为他们希望吧?他们希望拥有十大最佳汽车之一,消费者也同意了他们。所以当他们问你是如何发现他们的,你可以回答,是通过co-pilot。
Now once in a while, if there's something, you know, something that's wrong or different, you know, then we got to work that out. That's what we need.
偶尔,如果出现了一些不对或不同的事情,我们需要解决它。这就是我们需要的。
So most dealers who experience us love us because they want, and you know what it's like as a dealer, a consumer comes in feeling confident that they know they want to buy that car. That's a better experience for you as a dealer because they, you start on third base because they trust that car.
大多数和我们接触过的经销商都非常喜欢我们,因为他们想要这样做。你知道作为经销商的感受,当顾客自信满满地来买车时,这对你来说是一次更好的体验。因为他们相信那辆车,所以你就可以从第三个垒开始了。
They come in empowered with knowledge. They're not sitting there like afraid of, you know, engaging with you. You got to understand when our customers, before they find us, we did focus groups, couple, we are interviews, a couple weeks ago. I sat on three of them.
他们来了,带着知识和自信。他们不会像害怕和你打交道。你要理解,我们的顾客在找到我们之前,我们进行了一些重点小组访谈,我在几个星期前参加了其中的三个。
There were three women sales executives, DPs or directors run sales fees. And each of them had a story about the last time they bought a car. One of them said, I bought a car I didn't want. I regret it every day. But I just, you know, I didn't know what was going on. They were talking so fast.
有三位女销售高管,DP或总监,负责销售费用。每个人都有一个关于上次买车的故事。其中一个人说,我买了一辆我不想要的车。我每天都后悔。但我当时仅仅是因为他们说得太快了,我不知道该怎么办。
And they, and they, and the second one said, I know I didn't get treated right. I didn't get treated right on the new one. And so there's this sense of lack of trust that the worst experiences of the car business create for people.
他们,他们,还有第二个人说,我知道我没有得到应有的待遇。我在新车上没有得到应有的待遇。因此,人们对汽车行业最糟糕的经历产生了缺乏信任的感觉。
And I think good dealers pay the price for that. Dealers try to do the right thing, you know, get loyalty from their repeat customers, but new customers come in and assume that they must be like somebody who gave them a bad experience. So for those dealers, we're empowering them.
我认为好的经销商都会为此付出代价。经销商试图做正确的事情来获得他们忠实的老客户,但是新客户却会假定他们和那些给他们不好经历的人一样。所以对于那些经销商,我们正在帮助他们实现他们的愿望。
Now, if we were doing Super Bowl commercials, there'd be plenty of dealers who would say, well, I don't like that because I don't like the consumer knowing everything. But those dealers, we don't send somebody to them. So they're never, we never hurt them. There's no downside for them.
如果我们制作超级碗广告的话,会有很多经销商说:我不喜欢消费者知道所有的事情。但是我们不会派人去找这些经销商,所以他们不会受到影响,对他们来说没有任何缺点。
Yeah. So yeah, like you mentioned, you have this interesting selection process where, you know, it's the good the customers or the the well priced cars received those leads. So it's almost as if the only encounter, and I'm generalizing, but almost as if the only encounter dealers have with you is a positive encounter.
是的,正如您提到的那样,您有一种有趣的选择流程,其中优秀的客户或价格合理的汽车会接收到这些潜在客户。因此,几乎可以认为,除了一次正面的接触,经销商与您没有其他接触,虽然我不是很确定这种概括是否准确。
So I think that's a interesting dynamic given the fact that the dealer is not your customer, they're not paying you. And so it does set you up for an interesting dynamic there.
所以我认为这是一个有趣的动态,考虑到经销商不是你的客户,他们没有付款给你。因此,这确实为你设定了一个有趣的动态。
Zooming out a little bit, I think, you know, going back to the fact that you mentioned your 2 million visitors per month, which is, you know, an incredible number. I'm really curious to know being in your seat, are there any trends or any analytics, anything interesting that you're seeing you guys do put out a lot of data and you've shared some data with me in the past.
稍微换个角度看,比如说你提到你们每个月有200万访客,这个数字实在是让人惊叹。我非常好奇,像你这样坐在这个位置上,有没有发现任何有趣的趋势或分析数据。你们发布了很多数据,在过去也和我分享过一些。
And so are there any notable trends that you're noticing right now from when it comes to either shop or behavior or buyer behavior or markets, anything on that side?
您是否注意到了任何显著的趋势,无论是店铺、行为、买家行为或市场方面的,还是其他方面的呢?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot and you've tweeted and talked a lot about this. I think it's really important.
嗯,我的意思是,你已经在推特和讲话中有很多感悟和想法了。我认为这非常重要。
I'd say the first one is, is in the continuing trend where the sedan is going away and the crossover is growing. And the problem with that is that, you know, this is what's happening before the pandemic but has accelerated.
我认为第一个原因是现在的趋势是轿车逐渐消失,而交叉车型却持续增长。问题就在于,这种趋势在疫情前就已经存在,而且现在还在加速。
It means on used cars, you've got more sedans than people who want to buy sedans and less crossovers than people who want to buy crossovers. So that's definitely a part of it.
这意味着二手车市场上,轿车的供应量大于需要购买轿车的人数,而跨界车的供应量少于需要购买跨界车的人数。这肯定是其中的一个因素。
I think the pricing trend, the thing that we put the alarm on and I knew it as well is the market was declining for most of the last year. It peaked for nearly new cars in August.
我认为定价趋势,也就是我们报警时所知道的情况,市场在去年大部分时间都在下跌。对于几乎新车来说,它的最高峰是在八月。
简单解释:文章讨论了去年汽车市场下跌的趋势,尤其是在几乎全新的车型方面,在八月达到了一个高峰。
It peaked for early other cars kind of and the Q1 older cars and the Q1. And prices were going down month after month after month. And then in February hit and cars started this tread water, right?
这些早期的其它汽车品种以及Q1的旧车都达到了高峰,而价格在一个月一个月地下降。然后到了二月份,汽车价格开始保持稳定,对吧?
Used car price started in tread water. And then we got into a situation where prices have been going up almost ever since. They've just been plaxed on treading water again these last few weeks.
二手车价格一开始停滞不前,然后我们陷入一个局面,价格几乎从那时起一直在上涨。最近几周它们只是在重新陷入停滞状态。
But you know SUVs are $5,000 in 10, 12 weeks. I mean, that's jarring. And so I do think, you know, you've talked about, I don't think we're going to get back to new normal. I think we'll get to a new normal, not normal, the return to normal, that we thought may have happened.
但你知道SUV在10到12周内会下降到5000美元。这是令人震惊的。因此,我认为你所说的,我们不会回到新的正常状态。我想我们会进入一个新的正常状态,而不是回到我们曾经认为可能发生的正常状态。
Given this slight now and the fact that the, you know, less lease returns in the future in the next few years, there's going to be less cars, new cars available because we made less new cars and we, especially lease less new cars over the last couple years. I think cars are going to cost more.
鉴于目前这种情况,以及未来几年里较少的租赁回收,将会有更少的新车供应,因为最近几年我们制造的新车数量少了很多,而且特别是租赁的新车数量也减少了。我认为汽车价格会更高。
And so I was looking at data last night, you know, prior to the pandemic, 38% of the cars, new cars on dealer lots were listed below $30,000. Today, that's 8% of cars. Before the pandemic, 52% of used cars. And I'm leaving off like the, you know, the consumer auction cars, but of the dealers consumers would typically look at, 52% of cars were under $20,000. Today it's 25%. So I think the other trend is, is that prices are going, have gone up on new cars, prices have gone up on used cars. And I think some of this inflation is going to get baked into a new normal, which means that buying cars is less accessible than it's been in a long time.
昨晚我在看数据,你知道,在疫情之前,38%的新车在经销商的库存中售价低于30000美元。而现在,这个比例只剩下了8%。在疫情之前,52%的二手车,不包括拍卖车,但是如果看经销商通常会展示的车辆,52%的车辆售价低于20000美元。而现在,只剩下了25%。所以我认为另一个趋势是,新车和二手车的价格都上涨了。我认为一些通货膨胀已经进入了新的常态,这意味着购买汽车的门槛已经是很长一段时间以来最高的。
And I think this is a big problem. And then you add in interest rates, which make it effectively more expensive to own a car. Big time. I think that's a real negative for consumers. And I think it's bad for the economy. Yeah. And as you know, I tweet about this a lot, you know, clearly prices are being buoyed by just a lack of supply. The use side, while we have seen a little creep up just a tiny bit now in April, and likely in May, it's still, it's still where we store very far on where we should be from a supply perspective and all that is keeping prices inflated.
我认为这是一个严重的问题。加上利率,购买汽车的成本更高。这对消费者来说是一个真正的负面影响,并且对经济也是不好的。你知道的,我经常在推特上发表这方面的言论,显然价格的上涨很大程度上是由于供应不足。尽管我们已经看到了四月份稍微有些上涨,五月份可能也会有所增加,但从供应角度来看,我们仍然远远落后于应有的水平,所有这些都导致了价格飙升。
I think supply is going to be the fix here. Interest rates is not helping. Like you said, right? The average interest rate on a used car loan right now is close to 14%. On a new car loan, it's just about hit 9%. I just tweeted that out. So it's a crazy environment that's changed so rapidly. And it's putting a lot of pressure on consumers. I would add that I think the other problem we have is that the, you know, new car supply will put a little softening into the market. I think 31% versus, you know, 82% were paying over sticker.
我认为供应是解决问题的关键,而利率并没有起到帮助的作用。就像你所说的那样,现在二手车贷款的平均利率接近14%,而新车贷款的利率也接近9%。我刚才刚刚推特过这个消息。由于市场环境变化非常快速,这样的情况让消费者承受了很大的压力。我认为我们面临的另一个问题是,新车供应会对市场造成一些缓和。 31%相对于82%的人付的溢价,新车市场的情况也在发生变化。
But the cars are just more expensive. I mean, the average new cars are over $50,000. And so, you know, they're just more expensive and, you know, we're having challenges. I mean, you know, GM is another chip shortage going on right now. So, you know, you kinds of titles are down to like 20-day supply. And so, you know, you look at that and you say, we're not going to have enough used car supply to really get used cars to come back down. And the new cars they're making are just bigger and more expensive. And so, I think we've gone through kind of almost a structural upward shift in the cost of owning a car. And then you throw in interest rates. And, you know, I do think it's less successful than it's been. And I do think it's going to be a problem.
但是汽车只是变得更贵了。我的意思是,普通的新车价格已经超过50,000美元了。所以,你知道,它们只是更昂贵,而我们面临着挑战。我的意思是,你知道,通用汽车现在还面临着芯片短缺的问题。所以,你可以看到库存现在已经降到了大约20天的水平。你看到这个,你会说,我们不会有足够的二手车库存使二手车价格回落。而他们正在生产的新车只会更大,更昂贵。所以,我认为我们已经经历了一个几乎结构性的汽车拥有成本上升。再加上利率。我认为它的成功程度不如以前那么高了,我认为这将是一个问题。
I mean, it's all but my belief is our data shows that, only reason this is happening is because the upper end of the market, the lower end of the market, is actually been treading water all year. But the upper end of the market, because there's the San Francisco Fed reported last month that there's 500 billion left and excess savings, savings on top of what people would normally have from the pandemic between lockdowns, not spending money and stimulus money. And that 500 billion is what's keeping the economy, the consumer so strong. But it's creating this paradoxical problem, which is, you know, yeah, consumers can afford to buy cars and we're still solid. There's a lot of cars, but we're baking in these high prices in a way that when supply goes down further, I don't think the prices are going to ever bounce back to normal. At least we go low.
我的意思是,我们的数据表明,这种情况发生的唯一原因是市场上端,而市场下端实际上一整年都处于停滞状态。但由于上市场有5000亿的过剩储蓄,即疫情期间封锁和经济刺激措施导致的人民过剩储蓄,这使得消费者依然非常强劲。但这也创造了一个悖论的问题,即消费者可以负担得起高价位的汽车,但是这也导致了高价的形成,我认为一旦供应进一步下降,价格将不会恢复到正常水平,起码也不会降低。
Yeah, it's definitely feels like a structural upshift. And especially, I think the main point being that the average new car, the cost to produce a new car has just gone up. And that's just going to trickle down to use cars eventually. So I think on a more positive note, I do want to know, you know, what's the vision for Co-Pilot? How does the company and the brand and the product evolve over the next five years?
是的,这绝对感觉像是结构性的提升。尤其是,我认为主要的问题在于平均新车的生产成本已经上升了。这最终会传递给二手车。因此,我认为更加积极的是,我想知道Copilot的愿景是什么?在未来五年内,公司、品牌和产品会如何发展?
Well, I mean, we've been long playing in the AI space. We've used AI to power some of our data and models. We have a lot of time, it's because I will have a plug-in in the JetGPT plug-in store. I think Co-Pilot will be what you described on your show a couple weeks ago, which is with the AI, we will be able to 10x, I think, what our Co-Pilots can do in your pocket. And so ours isn't for everybody. I mean, I think the segmentation of the car market is an important thing to think about. If you always buy a BMW, we always buy a Mercedes and go to the same dealer for service. You always buy a Lex, go to that same dealer for service and you have good relationship with the salespeople. You don't need a Co-Pilot necessarily because, but if you're somebody who doesn't know a lot about cars, doesn't have a deep relationship with the dealership and often has to look your needs evolve as your life evolves, you need to need to want to go become a student of the car world or you need a partner, you need a Co-Pilot.
嗯,我的意思是,我们在人工智能领域已经玩了很久了。我们使用AI来提升我们的一些数据和模型。我们有很多时间,因为我将在JetGPT插件商店中安装一个插件。我认为Co-Pilot将是你几周前在节目中所描述的那样,也就是说,借助AI,我们将能够在你的口袋里提升Co-Pilot的能力10倍,我想。因此,我们的产品并不适合每个人。我的意思是,汽车市场的细分是一个重要的事情要考虑。如果你总是买宝马,我们总是买梅赛德斯,并去同样的经销商进行维修保养,你总是买莱克斯,去那个经销商进行维修保养,你与销售人员有良好的关系。你不一定需要Co-Pilot,但如果你是一个对汽车了解不多,与经销商没有深入的关系,经常需要根据自己的生活需要进行调整的人,你需要成为汽车领域的学生,或者你需要一个伙伴,你需要一个Co-Pilot。
And so we want to be that in everybody's pocket. And our view is that an empowered consumer actually buys faster, buys with more confidence, and we think it creates a healthier car business.
我们希望成为每个人口袋里的车辆购买专家。我们认为,消费者能力增强会促进更快、更有信心的购买,这将推动汽车业更健康发展。
And you know, we're not because we don't make money up the auto dealer ecosystem. We're happy to have lots of people succeed. We work with car facts. We work, we send people to dealer websites. We be happy to send people to listing sites. Like our view is we're just that partner to help them. And so we don't see this as a zero sum game with us. We see it as we're something that makes the ecosystem move more smoothly because an empowered enlightened consumer won't be reticent to go into that dealer.
你知道,我们并不是因为从汽车经销商生态系统中获得收益而存在。我们很高兴看到许多人取得成功。我们与汽车信息公司Car Facts合作。我们会发送人们到经销商的网站,也会乐意把人们送到车辆列表网站。我们的目标是成为那个帮助他们的合作伙伴。因此,我们不认为这是我们和别人争夺的游戏。我们认为,我们是让生态系统更顺畅的因素,因为赋权和开明的消费者不会对经销商退缩。
We always say we would we would we monitor consumer consumer shopping. We'd say it's amazing how long they're circling the airport. And they basically a lot of them don't want to go in until they have to. They run out of fuel and they crack land because I just had to go in.
我们经常说我们会监控消费者的购物行为。我们觉得奇怪的是,他们在机场周围转了很长时间,很多人其实不想进去,直到必须要进去的时候才进去,就好像他们飞机快没油了,必须得着陆一样。
Where if they feel confident they go in sooner when they meet your people, they see your people and say, hey, you're I'm really excited about this car. Here's why. Like a motivated empowered consumer. Well, the well, there are some dealers who haven't come to accept that yet is better for their business. It is better. They will buy it with more confidence. They will be more loyal because they don't have to feel like when someone's doing the right thing that they have to be protecting against it.
如果顾客感到自信,他们会更早地进来,见到你们的销售人员,然后说:"嘿,我真的对这辆车很兴奋,这就是原因。"就像一位有动力的消费者。有一些经销商还没有认识到,这对他们的业务更有利。如果顾客更有信心购买,他们会更忠诚,因为他们不必觉得当某人做正确的事情时,他们有必要进行保护。
They can know who's doing the right thing and trust and build relationships with people doing the right things. And so we feel like we can be that connected blue by the as a consumer advocate that helps the dealers and others and ecosystems doing the right thing. Actually build the relationships with consumers that they really want to have but have struggled to build over the last decade or two except for that core 30% of loyal customers will return all the time.
他们可以知道谁在做正义的事情,并信任并与做正义的人建立关系。因此,我们觉得我们可以作为一名消费者维权者成为那个连接着正确行为的经销商和其他生态系统的蓝色纽带。实际上,我们可以与那些真正想要建立关系但在过去几十年中一直难以建立除了那30%的忠诚客户之外的消费者建立关系。
Well stated, my friend, very well stated. Pat, where can the audience learn more about CoPilot and yourself? So we're in the app store. CoPilot is our app name. Hopefully being in the plugin store by the time this drops. So chat to be T plug in store as well. Our website is co-pilotsearch.com. You can go there. Our Twitter handle is co-pilot for car account is co-pilot for car shopping with big followers of yours. And I'm at Pat Ryan Chicago on Twitter as well.
非常好阐述,我的朋友,非常好阐述。Pat,观众在哪里可以了解更多关于CoPilot和你自己的信息呢?我们在应用商店里。CoPilot是我们的应用程序名称。希望在这个发布前会在插件商店中。所以也请在插件商店中留言。我们的网站是co-pilotsearch.com。您可以去那里。我们的Twitter帐户是@co-pilot,车辆账户是@co-pilot for car shopping,我们非常追随您。我在Twitter上的用户名是@Pat Ryan Chicago。
I love it. Pat, this was awesome. Thanks for sharing all the gems. I loved hearing the stories from back in the day. And I'm excited to keep an eye on what you guys are doing. I think there's some really great things on the horizon here with all this new technology and pumped about what you're going to build. I think you're on a great track.
我喜欢它。Pat,这实在太棒了。感谢你分享了这些珍藏。我喜欢听你们回顾过去的故事。我很期待看看你们接下来会做什么。我认为这些新技术将会带来很多伟大的事物,我很兴奋地等待你们要建造什么。我认为你们正在走向成功的轨道。
Thank you. Well, thank you. Listen, you've learned a lot from you and we appreciate all you do for the ecosystem and consumers. It's really fantastic. Thanks, Pat. All right. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Please give the podcast a rating. Consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you guys next time.
谢谢你。好的,谢谢你。听着,我们从你这里学到了很多东西,感谢你为生态系统和消费者所做的一切。这真的很棒。谢谢你,帕特。好的,希望你喜欢这一期节目。请给播客一个评价。考虑订阅节目,并在节目说明中查看我们所谈论的链接。感谢你收听。下次见。