In 2018, a friend and I set out to build something we thought the automotive industry badly needed: an on-demand platform for car servicing and test drives, connecting consumers directly with dealerships and service shops.
We built a mobile app, tested it with dealers and independent service shops, and started running pilots. The service shop side actually showed promise. We got a few pilots going and the mechanics were into it. But the economics were brutal. We couldn't get unit costs to work, and building a two-sided marketplace turned out to be exactly as hard as everyone says it is. You need consumers and you need to seed the supply side with dealers, and getting both at the same time is a chicken-and-egg problem that takes serious capital to solve.
We tried to raise funding but couldn't get enough traction to make it happen. Without the capital to push through the cold start problem, we had to wind it down.
Of course consumers would love the convenience of on-demand service and test drives. And dealers and shops wanted to offer it too. But the intensity of effort and cost to actually deliver that convenience was too high. Consumers would pay a slight premium, but not enough to overcome the inertia and cover the extra cost for the shops. The math just didn't work.
I guess there's a reason these models haven't worked out at scale. But I had to learn the hard way. And honestly, sometimes learning these lessons for yourself isn't a bad thing. It makes you understand the world a little better, and I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.
Everything I did, every lesson I learned, has made me a better product leader.