Catching up with Carmigo

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Transcript

Elena: Daniel Kim, the one and only he is here at Auto Intel and he just accepted his award for the Emerging 8. Congratulations and thank you for being here.

Daniel: Thanks for having me on the podcast super excited to be here. And yes, Carmigo actually won the Emerging 8 as one of the honorees so super excited to be accepting the award.

Elena: Well deserved my friend. I know that you have been working extremely hard in the industry for many, many years. So for the couple of people that don’t know you, let’s bring them up to speed on your background. Let’s talk about how you got into the automotive industry. What brought you to where you are today.

Daniel: Perfect. So it’s gonna take about two hours to get through this. So my name is Daniel, currently the CEO of a company called Carmigo. I got into automotive a little bit unconventional way I was a consultant for a company called Bain. And we were doing a lot of post merger integration work for back then autotrader there wasn’t Cox automotive yet when they had just bought up VinSolutions, Kelley Blue Book, HomeNet, all sorts of other companies that they bought and I kind of got thrown into it and I said, Wow, this is kind of a cool space and you can make a lot of money. So I got into automotive by starting a digital marketing company called Orbee. It’s still around, it’s they do a lot of like customer data platform things. And I did that I sold out in about a few years now to talk a little bit of a break and hooked up with one of my old clients Andrew, who started his own company, which is called car amigo, to commercial auto auctions for car dealerships where we have access to consumer vehicles. So a great way to like acquire consumer cars and a familiar commercial auto auction platform that dealers are used to.

Elena: Before we hit the record button on our episode today, we were chatting a little bit about like your hot take on EVs. What do you feel, especially now that we’re at this conference, there’s a lot of thought leadership here around electric vehicles. What’s your hot take on EVs and where you kind of see things getting or going?

Daniel: Yeah, I think you need to be specialized to be buying electric vehicles, right. So you know, buyers dealers who are on our platform who buy cars, unless if you’re a wholesaler that deals with just all sorts of cars. It’s it’s difficult for dealers to kind of get their hands around electric vehicles, right, whether they don’t have the right customers. They don’t focus on it. So I do feel that there’s a need for some specialization, right? Whether it’s a different section on the website or a filter for EVs, and you know, the biggest thing is depreciation, right? I was just talking to a dealer that we work with out in Birmingham and he had, I think, 30 to 40. Tesla’s right around the time when Elon Musk Tesla’s and he lost big, right. So I think there’s a lot of volatility a little bit more difficult to understand. So definitely a focus on either on the buy and the sell side and especially for auctions to you know, properly allow for people to buy use electric vehicles. And I think the big portion of is going to be education and like specializing in that section.

Elena: And I think you really hit on it is the education aspect. Do you feel that there’s a lot of like, Maybe fear around like the dealer that you had just mentioned how he got burned on the what 14 Tesla’s that he didn’t do so well on Do you think there’s a lot of fear around like, oh my gosh, I might get stuck with you know, a bad couple of EVs?

Daniel: Yeah, I think for our dealers, number one, they’re gonna buy cars out there consumers want, right so if their dealership is not selling a lot of EVs or their customer set isn’t focused towards EVs, that it’s gonna be really hard, but also, I think they have, especially in this climate right now, people are waiting around, right? I mean, the wholesale prices are so quite high at the auctions. A lot of people think it’s $2,000 too high, and there’s still inventory is pretty tight, but people are a lot more careful about buying cars. And I think the biggest issue is with depreciation on electric vehicles, and if you hold on to it, so it’s a mixture of I might have to hold on to this for for a long time because I don’t have any customers to buy, and then that during that time, the price of the car might go up. Go down. Who knows? Right? There’s a lot of volatility. So I think those are kind of the two main factors that we see. And it’s kind of sad, but it’s kind of a joke to when we send out inspectors to, you know, inspect some cars and we’re like, oh my gosh, it’s another electric vehicle, right or if our customer does or self inspection and lists their cars and it’s another Eevee. We listed a Lucid Air touring, beautiful car, a Lucid Air touring. First of all the owner wants like 50k above MSRP but you know, it’s like how do I find a buyer for that.

Elena: Getting a little bit back a little bit to Carmigo and what you’re doing there. What do you see on the horizon for Carmigo in the next year, year and a half? What are some cool and exciting things you guys are working on?

Daniel: Yeah, so we’ve had a lot of success with consumer cars. So we deal with mostly late model consumer car’s not 100% frontline ready, but near frontline ready, which also helps our dealers kind of quickly turn the cars and sell it. So we have expanding with some of our dealer partners who by to also saw on our platform, few of them asked us so we’ve we’ve started kind of expand up business for us because to tell you the truth, acquiring customers cost a lot of money, right? And the problem is you got to start at zero every month because that customer who bought a car or sold the car to you last month, they didn’t come back for another five years. So we’ve been expanding out kind of our dealer to dealer platform. So that’s actually pretty exciting for us. It’s been doing relatively well and we’re trying to keep the quality of inventory fresh, right so none of the junk trade and type of stuff are more of age inventory. That is frontline ready, that dealers just couldn’t get rid of men in this climate. It’s great to move your inventory fast so that you don’t have issues where you if you hold a car for too long, you might take a huge hit in the market. So that’s something that we’re working on.

Elena: It’s been awesome to see your journey and kind of where where you are today. What you’re working on. I really just enjoy you as a person. And just I always look forward to seeing you at conferences, and you’re my favorite friend at conferences. So thank you so much for being here.

Daniel: Thank you for having me. And same goes with me like I always see you at a lot of conferences and I love hanging out with you. Thanks for having me on the show. And you can reach out to me daniel@carmigo.io

Elena: And I’m going to put that in the show notes so that your inbox is going to be flooded with inquiries. We’re going to just we’re going to make it happen.