Announcing: LVL Up Auto - Vendor Management Platform

[Carsten]

Totally the boring stuff is where it's at!

 

[jon.berna]

Big news: LVL Up Auto Vendor Search is now Public: LVL Up Auto | Dealership Vendor Management Platform

Although this took nearly a year to get here – this is day one everyone being able to access it. Only LVL Up dealers and early access vendors have seen it.

What's coming:
- There are 21 product categories, this will grow with time. A company can be in many. Products can be in up to a maximum of 2.
- As more vendors claim their pages the product detail pages will fill in with more content
- I am already planning to display the upcoming conferences in here, just like I did for NADA

What's here:
- Creating accounts for both dealers and vendors is complete free, this unlocks a lot of features to bring life to this data
- Demo Up: end to end demo support is now live. This impacts dealers and vendors best way to describe this is Bumble for dealerships.
- Sandbox Collections: allows you to create lists of vendors you are keeping on eye on.
- It has dark mode also

 

[joe.pistell]

LVL Up Auto Vendor Search is now Public

Baadddd Asssss JB!

 

[Brendan Dougherty]

Hi Jon - I just registered for a vendor account for AutoFi, this looks pretty slick and is a great idea! I'm looking forward to getting our profile built out!

 

[jon.berna]

Just saw that come over. I'll get you the claim information!

 

[jon.berna]

Here is the recap of the first quarter. 28 features so about 1 every 3 days. Some of these are more significant than others and took longer. Overall quite pleased with the state of the app, everything is stable so time to shake it up

Here are my ideas for the next 90 days. I'd like to hear from DR on new ideas or areas you'd think would be cool.

Q2 roadmap ideas (in no specific order):

• Notifications for everything, individual type customization (In progress now)
• New user walkthroughs. For new user training on how major feature work. Avoids having to read documentation
• Sandbox make this public
• Build a dealership and share your builds with challenges with drag and drop ui
• Top Header with common user actions, also available to public
• Vendor onboarding forms with template builder to know what's needed post sign up and to make onboarding easier
• Vendor Search 2.0 Thinking of extended side bar as another end drawer with 10 or some additional facets
• User leaderboards probably for later, but starting with Build Sharing
• Google Gemini integration lots of interesting uses here. The database side is interesting as it can read the vendor and product data. It will require a lot of testing. I have been reading more about this last couple weeks and think I have a few small tests I can deploy it in first.
  

 

[Alex Snyder]

That development pace is so much fun when you're getting started! Also waaaaay easier when you keep your engineering team smaller. Too many engineers = too little innovation.

If you hear a tech company bragging about how many engineers they have, run!

 

[jon.berna]

That development pace is so much fun when you're getting started! Also waaaaay easier when you keep your engineering team smaller. Too many engineers = too little innovation.

If you hear a tech company bragging about how many engineers they have, run!

This was all solo and I am having a lot of fun. I also work +70 hours a week, with 2 nights till 3am. Our customers see the emails at 5am all the time, I get a couple wellness checks here and there but I have a good rhythm and still work out 3x a week and go outside daily. I have found I can pretty much figure any development problem out now, just a matter of how much time it takes and if it's worth it.

Although each product is different and some will need bigger more specialized devs the trend is to get ultra lean. I was reading about how we'll see the first 1 person billion dollar company soon. They hedge in the article and say 1b with 3 people (ceo, product. ops) in 3-5 years. The other big takeaway is on the most important skill is selecting and managing vendors

I am more excited about doing everything in public, versus all the secrecy normally associated with development.

 

[BillVaughnKMC]

This was all solo and I am having a lot of fun. I also work +70 hours a week, with 2 nights till 3am. Our customers see the emails at 5am all the time, I get a couple wellness checks here and there but I have a good rhythm and still work out 3x a week and go outside daily. I have found I can pretty much figure any development problem out now, just a matter of how much time it takes and if it's worth it.

Although each product is different and some will need bigger more specialized devs the trend is to get ultra lean. I was reading about how we'll see the first 1 person billion dollar company soon. They hedge in the article and say 1b with 3 people (ceo, product. ops) in 3-5 years. The other big takeaway is on the most important skill is selecting and managing vendors

I am more excited about doing everything in public, versus all the secrecy normally associated with development.

LEGEND

 

[Carsten]

Congrats!!

bug: when you click on a category and go a few pages, and then if go to another category, the next category thinks you're on that same page nunmber.