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Dealer Fire you don't really hear much from anymore. They're tech is pretty stale, maybe they spent a lot of unnecessary time on integration work, I don't know. They've been standing still from an outsiders perspective, though. VinSolutions as well. Once these companies get acquired by a publicly traded company, they need to be very careful about what they talk about online. Dealer Inspire had some pretty strong themes, their chat/AI product is pretty good, AFAIK they still lack a finance piece, but I think a CRM is going to be a trip down the rabbit hole without much of a reward. CRM's in this business are extremely competitive and they work well; there's not much more to squeeze out of them IMO.


There's still more work to be done in terms of merchandising product better. Search on mobile is atrocious across the board. A lot of the SEO text there for optimizations is useless to end users. IMO it needs to go. Lead forms are still pretty lousy, long forms even worse. There's a lot of room for innovation IMO and I think spending resources on a YACRM (Yet Another CRM) is wasteful.


I hate to be a pessimist but I think this was the plan all along. Grow like a weed and sell. That'd be great if they can stick around and still innovate, but every Silicon Valley success story I read the opposite happens. More lip service than action. Public companies need to grow by acquisitions, founders are muzzled then pursue something else, and it's more about operations and selling what you have now.