TechCrunch
YourMechanic Introduces Pre-Purchase Car Inspections So You Don't Buy A Lemon
Before you buy a used vehicle, it’s always a good idea to take the car to a mechanic. Knowing what’s wrong with a car before you buy it could save you a lot of headaches down the line, and it could help you negotiate down the price of the vehicle. Disrupt Battlefield winner YourMechanic now wants to make it easier for used car purchasers to get vehicles checked out, with the launch of Pre-Purchase Car Inspections.
For those who might have forgotten, YourMechanic runs a marketplace that connects car owners with on-demand mechanics who come to them. All mechanics are certified to check out and repair vehicles at the users home, meaning no more taking your car to the shop and waiting days for a fix to be made. YourMechanic also does all the work of figuring out which parts need to be ordered and installed. It’s like Uber, for car repair.
Since last year, the company has been growing steadily — about 25 percent per month — and attracting a number of return customers along the way. It’s also been expanding over time: YourMechanic started out just offering service in the San Jose area but has grown to service pretty much the entire San Francisco Bay Area.
That said, it hasn’t always been easy going. YourMechanic co-founder Abhas Art Agrawal said that at the outset, the company had a fair number of problems with its part-matching algorithm. In March, for instance, about 40 percent of the parts it was shipping to its mechanics were wrong, which led to repairs not being able to be completed or on time.
Agrawal says that there are about 27,000 vehicles in its database, along with about 200 different jobs for each of those cars. That’s a lot of different jobs and parts that were necessary to clear up. Things have drastically improved since then, with mistaken parts down to about 5 percent now. That’s still not perfect, but the company continues to improve with time.
Anyway, so now that we’ve caught up, what about that new inspections service? About 10 percent of clients already request inspections, but the company wanted to standardize the ability to make that request. Car inspections cost about $100 each, but can save clients a ton of money in being able to negotiate down the cost of a car.
For YourMechanic, the car inspections service also acts as a new way to sign up clients. After all, once a car buyer knows what work needs to be done, it’s pretty easy to sign up and have one of the on-demand mechanics show up and take care of things that should be fixed.
The company was a Y Combinator alum and has raised $1.8M in seed funding from YC, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Ventures, Launch Capital, Jeff Clavier, Crunchfund, Paige Craig, A-Grade Investments, Jawed Karim, Justin Waldron, Joshua Schachter, and Kevin Freedman.
This Week On The Gadgets Podcast: Silk Road, Instagram Ads, BBM, And The Z30
An anonymous, underground drug trafficking web site Silk Road has been busted and the founder has been arrested, effectively shutting down a $1 billion+ revenue business after two years. And in softer tech news, Instagram has revealed plans to put ads in the stream over the next couple months. Meanwhile, BlackBerry continues to be in shambles, with BBM for Android and iOS delayed and the Z30 reportedly not going on sale in the company’s home country of Canada on Rogers.
We discuss all this and more in this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, Darrell Etherington, and a special guest appearance by Chris Nesi.
Enjoy!
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Intro Music by Rick Barr.
Twitter Vs. Facebook IPO In One Chart
In the near future, anyone with an Internet connection and some lunch money will be able to invest in one of Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies. But after big brother Facebook’s IPO debacle, should America’s armchair investors pin their hopes and dreams on Silicon Valley’s younger sibling? We help you compare in one easy chart.
The difference between the two is Twitter’s glaring negative sign on its net income. That’s right – Twitter is losing money, where at least Facebook was turning a profit at their IPO.
Other than the sheer size of Facebook’s user base, the companies are wildly divergent: Facebook went public at a valuation in and around $100 billion, and Twitter is expected to price its shares at a level that will value it at under $20 billion.
Facebook, quite simply, was much larger at the time of its IPO. In fact, looking at Twitter’s filing documents, you almost wonder why it is going public now. It has ample cash reserves but accelerating losses, as it invests in its research and development budget and builds out its sales team.
The reason, we think, is that investor pressure has built to the point that Twitter needed a large liquidity event to break free from some of its oldest invested capital. For a company of its scale, there were only two options: sell or IPO. And for Twitter, that meant it only had one option. Hence its S-1. We do not say all that to indicate that Twitter is not a valuable, interesting company. It is both. But the bent of its filing docs feels more like a company heading toward an offering and not the numbers of a firm ready to enact one.
Notes: Twitter’s full-year data is 2012. Facebook’s full-year data is 2011. Facebook two-quarter revenue figure is not listed in its S-1, and so was calculated by deducting its third-quarter 2012 revenue from its nine-month tally that was provided in that release. The initial Facebook S-1 had a lower monthly active user count, but the quoted figure is the number listed in its amended S-1.
Top Image Credit: Andreas Eldh
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