Will dealers buy leads from a (small!) startup competitor to CarGurus and TrueCar?

[carwebsite]

I'm working on a project that's a more humble car grading / inventory site. I'm not in the industry, I'm just shopping for a used car now and hate the experience I've seen.

At some point I may hope to connect high-intent buyers to single dealers (i.e. only getting a phone call from the dealer they want about the exact car they want).

My best case scenario is to be a significantly smaller version of CarGurus, etc. with a more transparent scoring system, less spam, etc. I'm just enjoying the project.

So I'd love to know from any professionals--at what point would dealers be interested in talking to me? I theoretically have the means to keep the project afloat for a year or more while I (hopefully) gain some scale. I'm obviously just clueless on what it'll take, what kind of metrics and outreach I should do in Year 1, if I should just ditch this whole idea, etc.

Any advice much appreciated!

 

[DjSec]

I'm working on a project that's a more humble car grading / inventory site. I'm not in the industry, I'm just shopping for a used car now and hate the experience I've seen.

At some point I may hope to connect high-intent buyers to single dealers (i.e. only getting a phone call from the dealer they want about the exact car they want).

My best case scenario is to be a significantly smaller version of CarGurus, etc. with a more transparent scoring system, less spam, etc. I'm just enjoying the project.

So I'd love to know from any professionals--at what point would dealers be interested in talking to me? I theoretically have the means to keep the project afloat for a year or more while I (hopefully) gain some scale. I'm obviously just clueless on what it'll take, what kind of metrics and outreach I should do in Year 1, if I should just ditch this whole idea, etc.

Any advice much appreciated!

Dealers don’t care about “cool projects”, they care about selling cars for a profit.

They care about:

1. Cost per sale
2. Lead quality
3. Phone calls that show up
4. ROI vs their current vendors

When Would Dealers want to talk to you?
When you can say:

• “I generated 27 inbound calls last month.”
• “12 turned into appointments.”
• “5 cars sold.”
• “Average cost per sale: $214.”

What backend and frontend are you using?