Meet David Edmonston - the founder of PistonHeads

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Welcome to Confounded TV series 4 episode 2, and I'm here with David Edmonton, the founder of Piston Heads, amongst other things.
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We're going to have a wide ranging chat about David's history, building Piston Heads, starting software at 14, and then we're gonna move on to where the future lies with AI and the agentic search and so on.
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So with all, uh, no, with no further ado, welcome, David.
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Thank you very much, thank you for having me.
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It's a pleasure.
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Um, I, I would like to start with one of the things he told me was he'd started coing at 14.
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Berlin actually had 12, I came down I I still remember this day, I came downstairs and on the side in our living room was a ZX 81 sat there, little black box rubber rubber keys like what on earth is that?
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Um, And I yeah, I'd just monopolise that, so that was his toy which er he was curious about, but uh yeah, once I got to grips with that, it's just.
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Mind blown.
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um, well it must have been at the same time because I had a Commodore 64 and I did I typed in all the basics to make the balloon float across the screen out of magazines and, um, and yeah, I just started writing my own games and it was another moment my brother-in-law was a, I think he'd done computer science or something at uh.
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University and he showed me the sort of concept of, you know, I was doing the whole sort of print this hello world, etc.
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he showed me the N equal N + 1 and that was, oh, OK, so actually this whole thing can change, you don't just.
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Deliver something, what you're delivering can change each time, and that was the sort of light bulb moment, again, age 12 that I thought, oh, OK, this is amazing.
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I can do all sorts of stuff with this.
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Yeah, I remember that, and it, it must be, I mean for my children, this is completely boring historical stuff, but I remember when, when we had a Commodore 64.
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I remember my dad brought a modem back and we lived outside Aberdeen, so you had to dial London to connect to CompuServe to get on the internet.
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So I was only allowed like 10 minutes a week because I think it was 1 pound 50 a minute, right?
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And then, but it meant I could talk to my cousins in Canada on CompuServe because those are the days when you had to book your international call.
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That's how old I am.
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Yeah, likewise, yeah, and we've come a long way.
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There's, you know, I talk about it to my kids now and.
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We'll get on to this, but even pistonheads is the dark ages compared to where we are now.
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So the idea of, you know, a computer you plug into the TV doesn't connect to anything, has no storage, um, yeah, it's prehistoric, isn't it?
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So did you, did you, was that, was that, was that it for you?
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Did you just stick with it from that moment on?
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Were you like with school and irrelevance?
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Were you just desperate to do this or?
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No, no, I, I think I sort of abandoned the other sort of boyish hobbies at the time.
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I was a big airfix modeller, um, that all just stopped, um, and I was just plugged into the TV all the time, it was uh.
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Um, Yeah, it's just the imagination was just running wild and yeah, I was, you know, creating Space Invaders and games and taught myself machine code and assembly language and um, because you only had one key to play with.
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So, yeah, you couldn't fill the screen and have a large programme, so, um, I just went down rabbit holes and you know, the books are still so memorable to me, the the manuals, um, because it was just this mine of, it just seems so amazing what what you could do.
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Um, so yeah, sort of teenage years, moved on to BBC Micro, um, sold a bit of software, friend's mother wanted something to mark all her, uh, students.
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She was a teacher.
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So you're selling really early.
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I mean, it's a one off.
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I, I spent 6 weeks in the summer holidays coating this thing up and sold it for 20 quid, I think, but I did the same thing actually with some some accounts like, you know, it's like, can you turn these into away from books and build a spreadsheet that automated the sums and people were like mind blowing.
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Uh, so I did that, uh, and then when I was in sixth form, was doing a bit less, um, but, uh, one of the teachers at school left and set up a software house, and he'd seen what I was doing, um, in my spare time, so we had a chat and I worked for him for one summer, and he said, well, come work for me when you finish school.
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So sort of parked to university and my God, that was that that was it.
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I was.
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Not very glamorous, it was a software to print barcodes, um, for mainly for bakers, bread companies, um, and we we end up doing the little tags on the loaf of bread through, they they end up building a custom printer, and I did the software, the um PC software for that.
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But that would have been quite groundbreaking at the time.
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I guess so, yeah, particularly on the hardware was actually, that was um really quite innovative.
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Um, the software was what it was, but yeah, IBM PCs and you know, it was a jump between there and eventually, like, did you, were you building things in your spare time?
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Is that where piston heads came from?
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Yes, so, roll forward 10 years, I've been doing it professionally, wasn't doing much in my spare time, um, I ended up working for a number of software houses.
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Then financial investments and then Lehman Brothers, um, and it was a Well it sort of fake things really.
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The internet was going mainstreamish, so it was sort of late '98.
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Um I was on various email groups.
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I like everyone else, I sort of created your own, my own website, personal website and Just thought there's something here, potentially commercial in that I can't get, can't use other than magazines.
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The magazines, all the publishers were terrified of going online, um, rightly so in hindsight, um.
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So I thought it was a bit of an opportunity here, started doing it in my spare time, and, you know, I had a good job, was well paid, but went a bit pear-shaped politics and whatever, so actually it sort of fate lent a hand and pushed me into one day I just oh screw this, I'm I'll, I'll give this a go for a few months.
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If it doesn't work, I'll go get like.
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Yes, uh, yeah, that's right, yeah, so August '99, I, I.
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Try to book a day off to do a track day like the following week, and my boss wouldn't let me take the day off.
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I petty little man, um, yeah, so I screw it.
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So and you know, like I say, I thought if it doesn't work out, I can get another job.
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It's not a risk really.
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Um, I had a small mortgage, I was single, so, you know, people say, oh, a big risk.
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It wasn't really, it was a calculated risk, um.
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And I'd Started to get a few sponsors, so a few of the TVR dealers cos I I focused on TVR initially, that was the sort of community I was in.
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They started sponsoring the site, I thought, well this is easy, people would just give me money, so if I go full time, happy days.
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Um, but once, once those first few had come along, I had to work for the rest and that that got a bit more difficult, so actually it took me, I think it was 2 years before I was washing its face.
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Um, so that was 2 years effectively just working for nothing.
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Yeah, through my small pile of cash.
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Um, I almost went back to work at one point again, luckily there was a head count freeze, I was going to go back to Fidelity.
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Um, that didn't happen, which was fortunate in hindsight because it just maybe just pushed on ever harder and it just turned a corner and inch by inch, you know, start paying paying for itself and.
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Because that would be, you so now into the early 2000s and Google would be starting at around soon.
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Yeah, so it was all out of Easter and yeah and yeah, um, so I never paid much attention to that.
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The, the driving force for growth was word of mouth for me.
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It was all, it was exciting at the time.
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It was a social network.
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It started off as a, a magazine, effectively, so I was publishing news every day, so that was novel initially.
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Um, Then I experimented with sort of various types of forum and settled on a format that was working, and then that took on a life of its own, and then all of a sudden I've got this two-way platform and the user generated content meant I didn't have to.
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Worked so hard on generating content myself, but the community aspect of it just took off, that that's the this sort of zeitgeist of I can now go online, meet people with cars similar to me.
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I don't have to join an owners club where it's all the same car.
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I can go and hang out with some guys who've got some Lamborghinis or Ferraris or whatever, it was all new, you know, that just didn't exist before, um, and we had the sort of ad hoc Sunday meet so we're getting organised on the forums and.
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You know, they got to the point where you'd have 1000 cars turn up and it was all just going mental, um, and I'm just the sort of custodian, just trying to maintain it, not get too involved in.
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organising meeting myself because that's all a bit complicated, but yeah, it, it had a lot, took on a life of its own and that that's, that was the excitement of it.
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That's really interesting because that's a, the user generated side is really interesting and also the fact that you were building community, because most of the people I was hanging with that time, it was how to it was selling the service and how to get found, which is why Google was so great because in the early days you could hack it, but you would have already had, as that was coming in, you'd already had all that user generated content.
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So basically meant you had every unique string about cars and everything, you know, people would find you're looking up thunderbirds or gardening or whatever, people end up on pissers because there was always a thread about it, um, and that that's how I ended up going into the classified space as well.
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Um, it was user generated content initially, if you want to sell your car, yeah, just give it to me and I'll stick it up and I'll create a little section for it.
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Uh, a few of the dealers started paying nominal sum to be there.
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But I wanted the content, I, it didn't occur to me to commercialise it for probably 2 or 3 years, and then I just sat down one Christmas and thought, OK, I need to have a bit of rethink here because, um, and it's a good job I did actually, cos the whole advertising market just, Changed enormously once Google did start doing ad words and etc.
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um, and yeah, it was.
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So sort of where are we now?
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2006 27, 8000 cars for sale, and they were all really interesting cars.
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Yeah, yeah, we had one section for boring cars and repmobiles and SUVs and everything else was something interesting.
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So people were just coming back day after day just to see what's what's new today.
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I think that's the thing that probably people under, I'm not gonna say ages, but I'm thinking if you're under 30, you probably don't know what we're talking about, you know, and the idea that you, you, you people.
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It would be, even if you weren't into car, if you were into cars just a little bit, you always went to look at what was for sale because it was super interesting, and you always ended up there.
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I mean, as when Google was indexing it, by definition, you would always get a result in the top three pretty much for almost any time related to cars and everywhere.
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The way I operated it was I would be changing this code every day.
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That was, it's what excites me most, so.
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Uh, the classifieds was all home-brewed.
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The forums was, uh, largely home brewed, but, you know, on the classifieds I'd create a a philtre for the cars listed in the last 24 hours, and that's what everyone would use every sit every morning they'd sit down with a coffee and read that, so I could tailor the product to suit my particular audience, um, in a way that's, Got more difficult since because it's just got so much more complicated and uh whereas I can sort of change the software overnight and just publish it and to some extent you can still do it these days, but I don't see any successful business just gets tied up in its own complexities now.
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Yeah, yeah, I think there's there's, I've been looking at that and thinking, how would you do this now because I look at some of the stuff I'm doing or involved with and I think.
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There's almost like when you, when I, when I look at people who are running businesses that are friends of mine, and I look at the ad spend, and it's almost like that is the only way.
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You know, every everything is just so expensive.
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The paper click is insane.
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You can't get that kind of viral growth.
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And if you maybe you can on TikTok or somewhere else, but you cannot do it in a kind of structured way to bring somebody in to do that again.
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And I just don't see if that even exists.
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We'll come on to this later, but I'm, I'm seeing this with driving masters.
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I've started with a blank sheet of paper 18 months ago.
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Just just explain what that is for.
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Driving masters is, uh, a network of advanced driving instructors across the UK and I introduce people to them and you go off and do a one day advanced driving course with the next police driver, etc.
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um, so it's fairly simple concept.
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I just need to find people who want to do this and then I, um, manage the process.
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Um, but I'm signing for a blank sheet of paper in a world where everything's social media, I haven't got content I can put on social media day in day out.
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So I've got to find a route to market for that and as you say.
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There are no super bullets and I've got to spend to some degree.
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Um, but I'm also having to look at, OK, how can I innovate, given what's going on at the moment to get to market in a way that perhaps someone else isn't.
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Yes, because if you ask anyone, they'd say, oh you need an agency, you'll need to do some, some cool videos, you need to repurpose a video and chop it up many times.
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Google's working for me because there's intent.
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People have just said, I want to do advanced driving in Kent so I can say, OK, we can do that.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Um, and that's fairly simple.
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What I'm struggling with is Messaging around the people who want to convinced to do it.
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That's really difficult.
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There's a whole world out there of performance car owners who would benefit from doing this.
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Not just to improve their driving, they would enjoy it more.
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And that's the bit I really want to get across and I'm struggling to find channels to do it.
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Yeah, I can see that.
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I mean, I've got a friend who's a CMO and he he talks about this intent, you know, there's one there's a sort of the brand, your brand, and then there's the pieces of content you reproduce, and each one of them, you need to capture the signal and effectively score the price till they get to that point where you're saying where they go, yeah, I'm ready to book.
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But this is, is long and expensive.
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so busy out there.
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You're just competing for everyone's attention.
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Yeah, people are spending an enormous amount of time on the phone, so I suppose in that respect there's a lot of attention to be grabbed, but everyone's just 3 seconds on there's 3 seconds on that.
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How do you grab them and, yeah, and I don't want to pay for it really.
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I wanna be, I want to try and innovate in some way that.
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People are getting there via other means.
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So yeah, so we go back to pistonheads at this point it's now crazy busy.
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Are you running display ads?
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Are you, are you, are you making money off display ads or I, yes, it was banner ads back in the day when they were still, um, maintained by the property themselves.
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I started working with a couple of ad networks.
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Um, I wasn't very good at selling, I wasn't commercialising it well.
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I was charging a couple 100 quid to.
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70 or 80 dealers um making starting to make some decent money on the classifieds and then I'd, um, I engaged with a couple of agencies who were getting ad spend from manufacturers, so occasionally I'd get a deal for several 1000 quid, which was, you know, moving the dole significantly, um.
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Classified was gaining momentum, I say we had about 8000 cars there, um, and that's when I started getting interest from some of the existing publishers and EMA, as was Nell Bauer, um, they approached me.
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In 2006, um, uh, you know, fairly transparent fact-finding exercise, um, so I just turned around and said, are you sniffing around here or you, you, you after a partnership or are you really just trying to work out what's going on?
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And they wanted the software, funnily enough, um, they didn't have, and again, yes, we're back in 2006, the internet just wasn't very mature.
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There weren't products you could get off the shelf to do X, Y, and Z.
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They were just starting to emerge.
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So for a content management system to run a busy website, um, to publish every day, to engage with users, all of it, yeah, yeah, most of the CMS systems were siloed, you couldn't have a comment system underneath them.
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Whereas I had all that, um, you know, behind the scenes, the code might have been a bit ropey, but, um, that's what they wanted for their um, their platform and their their magazines, so.
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Started talking to them, um, got an advisor on board and said, well, you know, to get the best out of this, you need to go and talk to some others and create a bit of competitive tension.
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Um, which got quite tense.
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Uh, so we end up talking, well, I went to Daily Mail, Yahoo, um, a few of the other publishers, and then Haymarket, who eventually did buy it, and so it came down to the Haymarket and EMA and Haymarket were very straightforward to deal with and some very nice people and um we went with them in the end.
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And that must have been.
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Quite experience because like the the the now there's 5 million pages you could read about this and you know, I'm presuming this is roughly the time of lastminute.com and all that kind of period.
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So there wasn't a guidebook here.
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I think the new media Age magazine, which was literally a magazine.
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I mean that was.
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Part of the challenge, yeah, I, I had these two big companies interested in buying it, I had no idea how to value it.
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As a business itself, it wasn't that um nobody else would have an idea either, no, um, so I was frantically talking to anyone I could think of, um, and sort of networking furiously, um.
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Friend did give me some very good advice on the evaluation.
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It's, it's just what's your walk away number, it doesn't matter what the business is worth in terms of multiples, what's it gonna take for you to hand over the keys?
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So that was quite useful.
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I just sat down and worked out, um, what was important to me in life and how to put a number on it, um, and then I just looked up who had handled the Friends Reunited.
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I thought well I've got to go big here.
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I've got to set the expectation that they did.
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I'm not going to turn up with some local solicitor because that's going to set the expectation.
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So I found the the company and law firm in London, went to see them and they said, well, you know, you actually need an advisor.
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You don't need lawyers yet, you need a a M&A advisor, um, to give him some pointers there, and then we Pulled it together and yeah, rocked up.
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She basically rocked up and said these guys are serious, they know what they're doing.
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Look what happened with Friends Reunited regardless of I don't care about the software or any technical debt or the usage or the or banner ads or dealers paying 70 quid.
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I don't care about any of that.
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This is really valuable to you, and I know it.
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Yes, and it was understanding why it was, what the value was.
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So I say for EMap, it was a software, for Haymarket, it was the traffic.
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So I was doing about big numbers these days, it was a million users a month, um, however many million pages that was.
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I couldn't measure it at the time, so I couldn't get any software to do it, um, but that was bigger than any of their Mags collectively.
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Um, so they were buying traffic and they knew how to monetize it.
00:19:39.289 --> 00:19:53.338
So yeah, the minute they did, yeah, they were, they were turning over millions in the following years, um, you were happy and they were happy, basically, yeah, so it's fairly quick handover, um, they didn't want me hanging around particularly great.
00:19:54.189 --> 00:20:01.900
Uh, so yeah, after I, I was tied in for 3 years as a consultancy agreement, but, but that was really just lenting to non-compete.
00:20:02.309 --> 00:20:07.578
So I was sort of 4 years non-compete and uh didn't really engage with them much for that period, left them to it.
00:20:07.868 --> 00:20:14.539
But it was a very personal thing to a lot of, um, a lot of the the members of business.
00:20:14.868 --> 00:20:17.949
Did you get any pushback from selling out?
00:20:19.380 --> 00:20:26.689
No, I think, um, Haymarket handled it well, so they didn't just turn up as a corporate and ruin it.
00:20:27.108 --> 00:20:33.858
um, and all credit to them, you know, they, they grew it significantly afterwards, um, so they, they understood it.
00:20:34.269 --> 00:20:37.640
And I think people were genuinely happy for me, you know, they, they'd seen the journey.
00:20:37.719 --> 00:20:53.630
I'd I'd sort of built in public as people talk about these days, um, so people have been with me on that journey and they'd seen it crash endlessly and you'd be down for a week when I get hacked and I knew what I've been through to get there and people were, you know, genuinely happy for me.
00:20:53.848 --> 00:21:02.500
And, and did you actually do any consultancy or did you, were you, were you, were you involved in that or did you just kind of I, there was a sort of a software handover.
00:21:02.799 --> 00:21:03.130
I.
00:21:03.959 --> 00:21:20.689
The only sort of real bit I did curiously was they asked me to go and speak to James Hind, who runs Carwow, and at the time he was setting up as a reviews aggregator, we'll go and have a chat with him, tell him your story and, you know, see if there's anything, you know, is he onto something that we should tie him in early?
00:21:20.809 --> 00:21:31.959
This is when he's in his parents' hat, yeah, literally, yeah, so we went up, went up to Liverpool, Wirral and uh met him, um, so yeah, that was the sort of one bit of non-piston heads consultancy I did, um.
00:21:33.189 --> 00:21:34.469
And then did you, and what did you do?
00:21:34.500 --> 00:21:35.059
Did you kick back?
00:21:35.180 --> 00:21:40.130
Did you, I did a lot of track days, I think I did 20 track days that year, um.
00:21:41.098 --> 00:21:42.989
No, I saw, I was straight back into coding.
00:21:43.029 --> 00:22:01.410
I just wanted to, I, you know, like anyone, you sort of think you're invincible then that I, I need to churn out the next one and prove it wasn't a fluke, um, which I didn't, so I went through several ideas that didn't work, um, but always thinking, OK, once 4 years is up and I can do something car related again, you know, games on, then I'll re-engage.
00:22:01.588 --> 00:22:04.979
I'm a bit worried about the fluke thing because I have that thing with like company check.
00:22:05.108 --> 00:22:07.868
So UK Data was my first one, but this is the time you were talking about.
00:22:08.509 --> 00:22:16.118
And that, that was, that was like, I won't say where I got the data, but I got the data uh SEO that did all the directory submissions and all that jazz.
00:22:16.390 --> 00:22:20.140
That was OK, and then come check was like, oh my god, I need to eat my own lunch here.
00:22:21.348 --> 00:22:22.239
And then that worked.
00:22:22.279 --> 00:22:24.568
And when that's all the credited after that, I thought, oh, I'll just do another one.
00:22:24.670 --> 00:22:28.269
And I think like my cars and everything was, it's almost heuristic.
00:22:28.559 --> 00:22:42.009
Like, oh, I did 123, it's obvious I've just got a natural, and then you realise actually this is much harder and there was a lot of it's, it isn't luck, you work hard, but there's sort of luck timing persistence, yeah, piston edge was of its time.
00:22:42.118 --> 00:22:45.358
Yes, you know, I, I, in hindsight, I can identify why it worked.
00:22:46.049 --> 00:22:50.969
At the time, you can't see it, and people talk about uh change brings opportunity.
00:22:51.689 --> 00:23:02.519
Well, obviously there was massive change to the internet going mainstream, so of course it's opportunity, um, I had a window where publishers couldn't get their head around how to deal with it, um, so I seized upon that.
00:23:03.479 --> 00:23:06.650
Again, in hindsight, but everything's obvious in hindsight.
00:23:06.848 --> 00:23:09.059
Yeah, I think you can see this now with some of the podcasts.
00:23:09.279 --> 00:23:10.598
They're really successful ones.
00:23:10.799 --> 00:23:16.559
So basically, I mean, we'll take Joe Rogan just because he's so huge, but, but effectively, he's doing the same thing.
00:23:16.598 --> 00:23:21.509
He's got this audience, the major networks in the states don't know how to get to that audience.
00:23:21.670 --> 00:23:25.989
You know, he interviews anybody and that person is insta famous.
00:23:26.199 --> 00:23:28.279
You know, he did it, uh, Oliver Anthony.
00:23:28.670 --> 00:23:34.430
Um, you know, the guy sang Richmen north of Richmond, you know, and that took, so he was already doing really well.
00:23:34.479 --> 00:23:38.588
He goes and Joe Rogan, it just goes nuts and before you know it, they're asking him to do massive gigs.
00:23:38.959 --> 00:23:42.318
And that is the same thing that the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
00:23:42.358 --> 00:23:45.118
How do they get that audience and they don't know how.
00:23:45.199 --> 00:23:52.640
So in the end, they're sort of buying podcasts and bringing them into a network because they don't, they don't otherwise know how and you, you see this constant change with the children.
00:23:53.519 --> 00:23:58.299
And there's a, there's some really interesting stuff that, you know, that the children aren't using Google, they're using chat GPT.
00:23:58.848 --> 00:24:01.598
So there's already, there's another big change coming.
00:24:02.170 --> 00:24:09.838
And it's, it's how I love the hindsight comment, it's so true because with hindsight, I can say exactly why the things I did worked and why the things I did that didn't work.
00:24:10.529 --> 00:24:15.969
Also I I read the lean startup in afterwards, yeah, and that just resonated so much.
00:24:16.088 --> 00:24:19.000
I realised, OK, I'd actually be doing all these experiments.
00:24:19.410 --> 00:24:23.088
So I spent a long time sort of messing around with motor sport and um.
00:24:23.380 --> 00:24:40.739
I created a system to do the points for a race series, because you you'd go, if you followed a race series, you'd never actually know who was leading the series or what would happen if they win this time and they lose next time, so I created that, corrected the series organiser because they'd got it wrong, um.
00:24:41.219 --> 00:24:57.049
But there's no money in motor sport, um, so that was sort of one example of something I, I tried and sort of just kind of forgot about it because it wasn't working, but it was one of many things I tried, which again in, in hindsight was sort of pure lean startup, you try something, it doesn't work, move on to the next thing.
00:24:57.209 --> 00:24:58.959
Yeah, I didn't realise I was doing it at the time.
00:24:59.209 --> 00:25:00.640
Yeah, you just focus on what works.
00:25:00.848 --> 00:25:05.170
Yeah, I remember that when I, I, because it was the same time as you in 1999 or whatever, I quit my job in London.
00:25:05.680 --> 00:25:08.979
And I was knocking on doors and door came a website building what what that's just a fad.
00:25:08.989 --> 00:25:09.759
I don't want one.
00:25:10.019 --> 00:25:14.489
And I think I knocked on like 200 doors or something until I found a guy who ended up being my next business partner.
00:25:14.660 --> 00:25:15.559
He said, Yes, I do actually.
00:25:15.618 --> 00:25:17.078
I want a single page and I wanted to do this.
00:25:17.180 --> 00:25:19.400
You're like, Oh my God, I think he paid me 500 quid.
00:25:19.900 --> 00:25:24.140
And but I remember I think my wife must have thought I was mad.
00:25:24.150 --> 00:25:28.019
I sat in the evenings or actually I say evenings till 2 in the morning, building.
00:25:28.098 --> 00:25:35.259
I built a directory startup, I built you a book publishing thing, you name it, you had an idea you could code it and build it.
00:25:35.838 --> 00:25:50.318
And we can probably come on to this because this is where I think the really interesting thing about um effectively coding using things like lovables coming in because we're there again, like, you know, 30 years later or 25 years later we're there again.
00:25:50.529 --> 00:25:53.680
So you sat there, you, you'd exited, you're doing your track days.
00:25:54.170 --> 00:25:57.559
Were you doing more startups at that point or were you relaxing?
00:25:58.568 --> 00:26:01.358
No, I wouldn't, um, my kids were young, so it was a good time.
00:26:01.529 --> 00:26:10.049
They were sort of 2 and 3, so I spent a lot of time with them, um, but I would keep disappearing into my office and playing with stuff, um.
00:26:11.229 --> 00:26:23.779
I can't, I messed around with a classified system that was a bit like the Facebook marketplace where you, it would show the degrees of separation between you and the seller, so you get some sense of trust, um, that didn't really go anywhere.
00:26:24.368 --> 00:26:32.410
Um, I did a thing I called Spiler which was um mapping tweets.
00:26:33.289 --> 00:26:36.729
So a lot of tweets used to have geolocation data on them.
00:26:36.818 --> 00:26:37.489
I don't even remember that.
00:26:37.568 --> 00:26:50.640
OK, um, again, when there's a bit more sort of wild west before privacy was more regulated, um, so it's quite interesting you could just put up a map and see what people are tweeting about in that area.
00:26:51.209 --> 00:26:52.410
Um, I didn't even know that.
00:26:52.809 --> 00:26:55.809
So it's interesting, but I couldn't find a commercial angle to it.
00:26:56.519 --> 00:27:06.068
Let it run for a couple of years in the background, turned it off, then a policeman from, um, detective from San Diego or somewhere, contacted me and said, oh a shame you turned that off, you used to find it, find.
00:27:06.479 --> 00:27:12.750
Um, witnesses to crimes, because I could see you were in the area of that street that time last night.
00:27:13.400 --> 00:27:14.559
Yeah, did you see anything?
00:27:14.750 --> 00:27:16.618
So you builtalanter before Palanter existed.
00:27:16.969 --> 00:27:29.000
Apparently there was a more serious version where which used a whole Twitter uh fire hose to get all the data, whereas I was just getting samples, um, so there was something in that, but I didn't quite see the full, uh, picture.
00:27:29.578 --> 00:27:31.828
Had you closed it before this detectives contacted you?
00:27:31.858 --> 00:27:36.539
Yeah, cos I only had a couple of people, you know, a couple of dozen people using it a day and just didn't really see.
00:27:37.608 --> 00:27:39.509
Um, I'm, I'm slightly obsessed with maps.
00:27:39.588 --> 00:27:47.559
I also did YouTube on a maps a lot of YouTube videos are geolocated, but that was a bit spooky because you just find some kids who submitted a.
00:27:48.608 --> 00:27:51.380
Video of them having a pillow fight and you could work out where they lived.
00:27:52.088 --> 00:27:53.699
So I thought, OK, well I can't do that.
00:27:53.848 --> 00:28:07.769
um, then I went down the the route of, OK, well what would piston heads mark 2 look like because I still had various ideas I hadn't explored on PH um, that was Blatter's, so that was around.
00:28:08.640 --> 00:28:18.140
Again, a social network, um, news, but in a more modern style, PH was feeling a bit dated by then but still worked, um.
00:28:19.559 --> 00:28:23.489
I did a a nice sort of my garage feature that looked like a magazine you.
00:28:23.838 --> 00:28:25.029
It's all, so it's all good.
00:28:25.118 --> 00:28:28.439
I had about 3000 people using it, but it wasn't really growing.
00:28:28.479 --> 00:28:30.729
It wasn't actually unique in any way.
00:28:31.318 --> 00:28:35.759
Um, what I, where it ended up going was twofold.
00:28:35.838 --> 00:28:42.469
I had a mapping facility where people could put them the nice roads they like, that turned into something else.
00:28:43.598 --> 00:28:45.559
That's another story, um.
00:28:46.380 --> 00:28:57.568
And then I thought, well, OK, I'm gonna need some sort of classified section that's probably where the money is, so we'll go off and scrape some cars, get them in there, and that's when I realised scraping was easier sort of than I thought.
00:28:58.400 --> 00:29:04.709
And so I created this thing called Motor mutt, um, went off and scraped a couple of 100,000 cars.
00:29:05.219 --> 00:29:06.328
OK, what do I do with this?
00:29:06.338 --> 00:29:14.939
This is more interesting than the social piece and I knew quite a bit of networking one of the directors at Dennis Publishing.
00:29:15.650 --> 00:29:27.880
And they didn't have any classifiers, so Evo, Octane, Auto Express didn't have a classified system, which seemed a bit of a missed opportunity, so I got in touch with him, when I met Felix Dennis, showed him my little prototype, um.
00:29:29.049 --> 00:29:31.618
And a bit like Carsnip it was a um.
00:29:33.439 --> 00:29:35.549
Uh, what you call it sort of free text.
00:29:35.838 --> 00:29:40.588
You just type in what you search, which doesn't actually excite people as much as it excited me.
00:29:40.799 --> 00:29:41.279
The same with me.
00:29:41.318 --> 00:29:43.150
I was like, this is revolutionary.
00:29:43.358 --> 00:29:48.828
I remember because that's when I saw it and I was like, I was, my, so my take on that was.
00:29:49.368 --> 00:29:52.729
I must be right because you were doing it, right?
00:29:52.828 --> 00:29:57.660
So it felt like self reinforced my, like, this guy's done all these amazing things.
00:29:57.989 --> 00:29:58.868
He built that website.
00:29:58.989 --> 00:30:01.598
He's doing this validation, thanks everyone.
00:30:02.189 --> 00:30:02.828
And nobody cares.
00:30:02.989 --> 00:30:06.789
No, I, I thought the idea of typing in GT3RS.
00:30:07.799 --> 00:30:10.358
Near Brighton with aircon would excite me.
00:30:10.439 --> 00:30:15.598
Well, actually, all I was forgetting is the journey of looking for a car like that is all about scouring the classifieds.
00:30:15.719 --> 00:30:20.118
It's about the rigour of looking at all the cars, discounting that one for your reason.
00:30:20.598 --> 00:30:23.750
um, so the free text piece is just a complete red herring.
00:30:24.279 --> 00:30:34.469
um, what was useful, so we were going to launch Motor mutts potentially with Auto Express as a um mainstream classified solution.
00:30:35.250 --> 00:30:41.049
Um, so we're ramping up the volume and I got a bit greedy with the data I was scraping.
00:30:41.858 --> 00:30:58.769
Because I started getting excited about, well, you know, find me the car with the biggest boot or the lowest CO2 or so I started scraping that data, which of course originates from HPI, um, and so we got a phone call or an email from them one day and, oh, you know, do you want a licence for the data you're publishing?
00:30:58.828 --> 00:31:03.209
And I wasn't publishing it directly, I, or perhaps I was, maybe that's when I gave the game away.
00:31:03.900 --> 00:31:08.979
um, so using it in search, I might have got away with it, but when I was surfacing that data, which obviously they.
00:31:09.608 --> 00:31:16.199
Own in some respect, um, that kind of buggered up the business model because they wanted 10s of thousands.
00:31:16.439 --> 00:31:17.880
I had the same conversation.
00:31:18.209 --> 00:31:19.689
You're using this here as a bill.
00:31:19.729 --> 00:31:20.640
I was like, yeah, no.
00:31:20.809 --> 00:31:25.019
So we turned it off and then sort of retreated and thought, OK, what do we do?
00:31:25.130 --> 00:31:44.759
And where it ultimately came good was I was scraping a lot of individual dealers who had websites, you know, built by their nephew in a room, had no export facility, and I'd go and scrape the data and create a Site for Revo and Octane was just inching cars on there were no issues with the data.
00:31:45.009 --> 00:31:46.529
Deer was happy to have some exposure.
00:31:47.368 --> 00:31:55.318
Um, and that ran for 2, 2.5 years, I think, and then they replaced it with something more mainstream.
00:31:55.479 --> 00:32:00.868
It was very sad though because for me it was, I, I wasn't so petrol heady.
00:32:01.130 --> 00:32:04.729
So my thinking was, I just want a 7 seat car for 200 near Nottingham.
00:32:05.209 --> 00:32:13.328
And I, my feeling has always been that a certain big classified site, I think so much of their traffic is literally petrol heads.
00:32:13.729 --> 00:32:15.640
Uh, and or car dealers, right?
00:32:15.809 --> 00:32:21.559
So all the noise, but all the big numbers, I think there's a lot of repeat traffic there from petrol heads and from car dealers.
00:32:21.729 --> 00:32:24.459
I'd love to know what the actual figure and the funnels are for this.
00:32:24.568 --> 00:32:27.500
So my thing was, I know that not everyone's a petrol head.
00:32:27.608 --> 00:32:33.449
In fact, when I, when you sit in the pub, you'd have one or two people interested in cars out of a big group, and nobody else cares.
00:32:33.529 --> 00:32:36.009
It's a thing to get them to work to here, to wherever.
00:32:36.559 --> 00:32:40.078
So my view was, surely they don't want to go philtre philtre philtre.
00:32:40.160 --> 00:32:42.439
Oh my God, there's 684 Land Rovers.
00:32:42.479 --> 00:32:43.670
I just want one of them.
00:32:44.000 --> 00:32:48.769
And it seemed to be obvious to go 7 seats, Nottingham red.
00:32:49.380 --> 00:32:52.029
I think the same and then you start looking at the user journey.
00:32:52.400 --> 00:32:55.410
So people ask me, yeah, I need a new car, what do you recommend?
00:32:55.759 --> 00:32:56.959
I'll recommend something.
00:32:57.650 --> 00:33:06.949
But then they reveal their brand snobbery, and it just cuts all so basically what you're telling me you want an Audi or a BMW so it doesn't matter if the Skoda's better.
00:33:07.650 --> 00:33:22.000
Um, so actually there are all these nuances to that journey that you need to get your head around and so I think there's probably maybe, I mean, that's where perhaps Carwell did come good is maybe they made that journey, um, seem more accessible.
00:33:22.250 --> 00:33:23.549
I think so because I think.
00:33:23.868 --> 00:33:30.598
I just look at family when they and the process, and when I get asked the question, what, what should I buy, it's like, I have no idea.
00:33:30.769 --> 00:33:36.000
Like I don't want to be part of this because I'm the last person you should ask, like what is it you need?
00:33:36.449 --> 00:33:39.598
And and I think, and it's a shame about the natural, but you can see.
00:33:40.529 --> 00:33:57.920
There's actually a it's such a, it's the one thing I really don't like about the whole thing is it's it's it's a, it's a 3 to 5 year repeat purchase, which means almost by the time you've, you're onto your next car as a consumer, the, the, the platform itself has changed, the technology is changing.
00:33:58.088 --> 00:34:02.689
So you're trying to fix a problem for someone who's acquiring something every 3 to 5 years.
00:34:02.729 --> 00:34:05.219
I think it's why they never fixed the house, the housing market.
00:34:05.449 --> 00:34:07.759
You go through a house purchase.
00:34:08.208 --> 00:34:13.148
And every time you do, I bet you think I could build something but you probably think I could build something to fix this.
00:34:13.949 --> 00:34:21.659
Right, and a lot of people try, but actually you go through the pain of finding a house, solicitor's mortgage, and you end up with moving house, right?
00:34:21.708 --> 00:34:23.500
And you think I could solve this problem.
00:34:23.550 --> 00:34:28.559
I could raise some money, I could bootstrap it, I could build something, but then actually, you've gone through it, you've you've bought the house, you no longer care.
00:34:30.409 --> 00:34:33.139
And this is true of all startup culture.
00:34:33.148 --> 00:34:36.929
There's magic sauce, yeah, and it doesn't, you can build the best thing.
00:34:37.929 --> 00:34:54.570
And it's, it's just this unknown element of luck, um, your own execution, that's why things work, it's not because they're necessarily the, the best solution, it's execution, it's time, timing, um, and yeah, we've seen it with collecting cars.
00:34:55.958 --> 00:34:57.688
We got it right, it works.
00:34:57.768 --> 00:35:01.157
We've seen loads of people come and go try to mimic what we've done.
00:35:02.128 --> 00:35:06.199
It's no good just to mimic it, because we probably can't even tell you ourselves what the magic sauce is.
00:35:06.398 --> 00:35:10.090
We've just gone out and done what we think is best and and it's worked for us.
00:35:10.239 --> 00:35:12.918
So you can tell us what collecting cars is, I think we should go back a step there.
00:35:13.119 --> 00:35:29.349
So, stepping back in 2019, I was still scrapping around with a few projects that weren't particularly going anywhere and collecting cars had started, so, um, at the time, I noticed a few people on Facebook.
00:35:29.938 --> 00:35:45.849
Talking about the collecting Cars podcast and how interesting it was and Chris Harris was interviewing a lot of his old mates, basically, so journalists um of the 90s, 2000s, and it was quite gratifying that pissheads would often come up in conversation in, in those episodes.
00:35:46.199 --> 00:35:52.929
And then there was one with Harry Metcalfe, where he was talking about closing down the Evo forum because it was costing him too much money to run the servers.
00:35:53.610 --> 00:36:05.139
And said, yeah, basically that's when Pistoners took off, and I thought, well, OK, Harry, uh, do you think I'm not quite sure about that, so I did contact Harry and we had a brief discussion about it and that's his recollection, so that's fair enough.
00:36:05.260 --> 00:36:09.619
We all got different perspective on things, um, I didn't even know they had it for him, so there you go.
00:36:09.699 --> 00:36:14.579
Yeah, um, it was alright, ticked over at the time, but yeah, Pistos was massive by then.
00:36:15.228 --> 00:36:25.349
So I was still slightly niggled by this, so I, I had met Chris Harris, so I, I got in touch with him and said, well, can we, can I tell the person's story, cause probably be quite interesting seeing as it keeps coming up.
00:36:25.429 --> 00:36:35.550
So a couple of weeks later we got together, um, Ed Lovitt came along, founder of collecting cars, so I won't claim to be the founder, Ed was the founder, um.
00:36:36.050 --> 00:36:51.550
And it was in its infancy, um, it's an online auction site, so like bring a trailer in the US and we sell nice cars online every day, um, purely virtually, we don't touch the cars, so it's, we're not a traditional auction house.
00:36:52.340 --> 00:37:05.489
Um, So did the podcast, got on to Ed, and basically the technology he was using at the time, he used an agency, more sort of marketing agency to build it and build a brand.
00:37:05.570 --> 00:37:12.889
So the brand was good, website was OK as a sort of proof of concept, but it was already very, you know, he was struggling big time.
00:37:12.929 --> 00:37:14.780
It was a WordPress site trying to run auctions.
00:37:15.438 --> 00:37:17.668
Um, so quite a lot of stress there.
00:37:18.820 --> 00:37:20.610
So I said, well, you know, I'm not really doing much at the moment.
00:37:20.780 --> 00:37:23.769
I'll come and have a look if you want and see if I can give you some pointers.
00:37:24.340 --> 00:37:25.909
Um, so when.
00:37:26.559 --> 00:37:33.079
When I met with them, uh, 5 people at the time, selling a listing a car a day, selling.
00:37:33.599 --> 00:37:34.090
Why had he done it?
00:37:34.199 --> 00:37:42.280
Why did he think that was a, he'd been to Pebble Beach that year and everyone was talking about bring a trailer, and bring a trailer.
00:37:42.949 --> 00:37:51.610
The background to that was it used to be a blog that talked about cars on eBay and got so much traffic themselves doing this, they said, well, we might as well just run the auctions ourselves.
00:37:52.269 --> 00:37:55.949
And they now sell, oh it's mad, it's 100 cars a day or something online.
00:37:56.000 --> 00:37:58.769
And these are in the specific type of car or just collectible cars.
00:37:58.860 --> 00:38:03.179
So it's not mainstream cars, um, it's, you know, obviously the market in the US is massive.
00:38:03.228 --> 00:38:07.500
They can, it's classics through to modern Porsches, Ferraris, etc.
00:38:07.898 --> 00:38:10.898
So they basically take all that stuff from eBay, that's where you would go now.
00:38:12.070 --> 00:38:13.780
eBay's still got its place.
00:38:13.929 --> 00:38:18.530
Um, we've specialised in collectible cars, so slightly more premium.
00:38:19.070 --> 00:38:22.349
So I think our average sale value is about 50, 55,000.
00:38:22.989 --> 00:38:28.510
Um, anyway, so I went in there, had a look, I thought this is brilliant, this is so up my street.
00:38:28.829 --> 00:38:36.628
it's cars, it's technology, there's an opportunity here to prove the concept, um, it's got market fit, but the technology's.
00:38:37.159 --> 00:38:48.168
Just needs sorting out, yeah, so initially where I'd offered some consultants said, well, actually, can we have a conversation here because I I really want to be part of this, um, so we sorted that out.
00:38:48.378 --> 00:39:06.010
I, I took a small stake, um, and just spent 6 months, I mean by modern standards, that's, that's gonna seem a long time now, but, um, just rewrote the software, um, I had one contractor helping me, uh, so we totally revamped it and it was a.
00:39:06.628 --> 00:39:11.938
Perfect time, you know, I'd spent all these years building all sorts of software, had all these.
00:39:12.878 --> 00:39:19.280
Libraries, methods, ways of doing things, I can now bring to them into play and build a robust.
00:39:19.570 --> 00:39:22.378
The systems that I knew would stand the test of time.
00:39:22.829 --> 00:39:29.550
Um, not say we didn't have some dramas in the early days, but, um, basically that framework is still largely in existence today.
00:39:29.628 --> 00:39:34.739
It's obviously it's a lot of code has changed, but that backbone is what got us to where we are today.
00:39:34.869 --> 00:39:40.628
But you posted the other day that you've done the, the 1000th Ferrari sale, yeah, so there's some scale going on here.
00:39:40.750 --> 00:39:45.179
sold 20,000 cars in 5 and a bit years.
00:39:45.769 --> 00:39:48.239
Um, we sold about 15 cars a day.
00:39:48.820 --> 00:39:54.360
And we've sold, you know, we sold a um F40 the other day, largest online sale this year.
00:39:55.179 --> 00:39:58.418
Uh, can't say what the number was, but it's 2 million quid plus.
00:39:58.829 --> 00:40:01.668
And is that, I presume the buyer is going to look at that.
00:40:02.949 --> 00:40:03.559
No.
00:40:03.989 --> 00:40:06.539
Oh my God, so this is.
00:40:07.639 --> 00:40:13.820
The world we live in now, we've, we've reached a point where, and COVID is probably partly to.
00:40:14.559 --> 00:40:16.168
Contributing to this.
00:40:17.010 --> 00:40:22.570
People are more happy buying stuff online without seeing it, so we will, you know, we can publish 200 photos of that car.
00:40:23.719 --> 00:40:41.949
So if you know what that the weak points of that particular model are, you should know where to look and you can look under the wheel arch, the, the rear quarter and you can see the photographs of them because there should be a rubber fuel tanks and not aluminium so you've got all that, you've got the service history, if you want to go and see it, you can.
00:40:42.800 --> 00:40:44.280
But what we're finding people are.
00:40:45.219 --> 00:40:47.530
Generally buy them unseen, so, um.
00:40:48.260 --> 00:40:51.610
And what, the more expensive the car, the easier the transaction.
00:40:52.340 --> 00:40:59.938
Seriously, so the, the million pounds Koenig egg chap bought from Japan, just wires the money, sends his man to pick it up.
00:41:01.309 --> 00:41:13.559
At that level, the cars are known in the community because there aren't that many of them, um, so, and the internet will soon tell us if we put up a car that's got some history we were unaware of.
00:41:14.219 --> 00:41:17.289
Um, so you've almost got like the power of the crowd.
00:41:17.458 --> 00:41:25.228
I put up my Adventador and somebody goes, yeah, that's the one that was used for track days at at at Bedford and was in that accident at yada yada.
00:41:25.360 --> 00:41:29.820
So generally we know that already, so we either don't list it or we list it with full disclosure.
00:41:30.559 --> 00:41:34.869
So it's just about trust, you know, people can trust the platform because we'll.
00:41:35.728 --> 00:41:57.478
Deal with the, yeah, we do our due diligence on the owner, as well as the car, so, you know, there are people we won't deal with, because we know it could be troublesome, so we've built the reputation that generally, you know, the car you buy, or say you don't do your own due diligence, you must, but Where we've created an environment where you can, you can do that, you can buy and sell a car.
00:41:58.119 --> 00:42:07.659
And I did it because I, I, I'd tried to sell my, so after I sold piston heads, I did the usual thing, you've got to go buy a flash car, so I've got a GT3RS.
00:42:08.148 --> 00:42:11.179
Had that 9 years, thought, OK, it's time to move on and do something else.
00:42:12.668 --> 00:42:14.139
Selling cars like that is difficult.
00:42:14.789 --> 00:42:19.500
So you either put it on piston it's classified, you know, this is a 100, 150,000 pound car.
00:42:20.329 --> 00:42:22.969
And see who turns up wanting a test drive, etc.
00:42:23.458 --> 00:42:24.938
and I go, well, no, but.
00:42:25.800 --> 00:42:29.949
Um, or you give it to a dealer, often on sale or return.
00:42:31.418 --> 00:42:37.320
And then your car is still your car, sat at a dealer, you don't know what's happening to it, who's driving it.
00:42:37.458 --> 00:42:38.949
You don't really know.
00:42:39.969 --> 00:42:49.688
The provenance of the dealer, so I, I thought, OK, I, I'm going in with my eyes open here, so I gave it to a dealer who a friend to worked for, thought, great, he's, he'll look after me.
00:42:50.559 --> 00:42:52.610
bugger left like 3 weeks later.
00:42:53.139 --> 00:43:02.289
Um, so the car's still with the dealer, they've done some work on it to to prep it, so there's a sort of cost associated with that that you'd have to cover if you wanted it back.
00:43:02.739 --> 00:43:05.750
It took a year to sell the car cos it, I'd use it on track a lot.
00:43:06.168 --> 00:43:11.250
And once people discover that, it's not, you know, they'll go and look for the one that's pristine, um.
00:43:12.019 --> 00:43:16.559
And eventually it sells, I think it got exported to Thailand, I'll get half the money.
00:43:16.989 --> 00:43:17.599
OK, where's the other?
00:43:17.668 --> 00:43:18.530
Oh, it's coming.
00:43:19.030 --> 00:43:20.938
And he's having to sell the next car to pay me.
00:43:22.269 --> 00:43:35.739
And once you, and I thought I'd been careful and I still ended up in that situation of being potentially, and it, to be fair to him, he paid out, he gave me a little bump on top, but subsequently he went bust and I think people did lose money.
00:43:36.559 --> 00:43:41.148
So coming out of that experience, well, how do I sell a high value car in the modern world?
00:43:42.250 --> 00:43:48.728
Quickly, and this this is that solution, you know, you list it, full disclosure, 7 day auction.
00:43:49.389 --> 00:43:51.250
And it's gone and you've got cash in your pocket.
00:43:51.378 --> 00:43:53.610
Yeah, I say a year to sell that car.
00:43:54.139 --> 00:43:57.929
And you see cars set of deals for months and months and months because these things are difficult to sell.
00:43:58.179 --> 00:43:59.809
And you have a global audience, I guess.
00:44:00.300 --> 00:44:14.099
We do, yes, we, uh, we've now got offices in Australia, Middle East, Hong Kong, across Europe, um, we, we dabble with America, so we are global and we, we've got buyers in I don't know, 70 countries or something.
00:44:14.300 --> 00:44:17.059
That's quite interesting, and are you seeing any movement from west to east?
00:44:19.409 --> 00:44:29.329
West to So from Europe, America, the money that's growing in China and Asia, are you seeing people moving European supercar type like GT3s and stuff?
00:44:29.340 --> 00:44:30.989
Are you seeing them moving to?
00:44:31.000 --> 00:44:35.320
It's largely driven by regulations.
00:44:35.570 --> 00:44:41.128
So Middle Eastern cars, for example, won't be legal in America.
00:44:42.409 --> 00:44:52.989
Um, a lot of the cars in the Middle East won't, they won't keep the service history up in a way that And owner elsewhere in the world would, um, you can export.
00:44:53.760 --> 00:44:58.539
So we, we export a lot of cars to America, um, but there are limits there.
00:44:58.639 --> 00:45:01.659
You can certain cars could be over 25 years old before you can import them.
00:45:02.500 --> 00:45:19.898
Um, so a lot of Porsches will move around the world in many directions, and then other cars only move in certain directions, um, because the taxes and it's almost like a flow map of where it's yeah, Australia for example, there are huge import taxes on performance cars, so.
00:45:20.369 --> 00:45:34.119
People do it, but it, it's expensive, so yeah, it's complicated, and again, like any businesses, once you get into it, all the nuances that you don't realise and make you think, Christ, you know, why did we get into this, we didn't realise it was going to be so complicated.
00:45:34.688 --> 00:45:35.949
That's just any business, isn't it?
00:45:36.449 --> 00:45:41.159
That's fantastic though, and that time frame to having all these officers, when, when did you meet and start then?
00:45:41.728 --> 00:45:44.320
So that was the end of 2019, it's quick.
00:45:44.820 --> 00:45:52.550
It's brilliant because it was COVID, that probably did help to some extent, because people were sat at home buying cars because they couldn't do anything else.
00:45:53.099 --> 00:45:56.840
Um, but I remember sitting down with Ed and we pulled together a bit of a spreadsheet.
00:45:56.958 --> 00:45:59.199
It's not a spreadsheet, man, um.
00:45:59.570 --> 00:46:05.030
And I did a sort of very crude cash flow forecast looking at sort of selling one a car and I was like, well, imagine if we could sell 5 a day.
00:46:05.688 --> 00:46:07.090
Yeah, why, why can't we?
00:46:07.159 --> 00:46:08.878
And you know, the numbers would be great.
00:46:09.489 --> 00:46:13.989
um, yeah, we're doing sort of 1520 a day worldwide now, so yeah, and that will just keep growing.
00:46:14.208 --> 00:46:23.300
Yeah, yeah, we just reinvest, reinvest, and we're at 100 people and so we've done a billion dollars worth of cars now or something.
00:46:23.409 --> 00:46:28.128
So you've done, you've done 1000 fris and a billion dollars, there's your headline, right, right there, isn't it?
00:46:28.489 --> 00:46:30.438
And and is that, is that all you're doing now then?
00:46:31.378 --> 00:46:37.820
I, so, typical startup journey, we've gone from 5 people to 100 people at some point that.
00:46:38.668 --> 00:47:02.110
Break certain operating patterns, including mine, um, become systemized and it's it's a different world, it's it's, it's difficult, so I'm very happy in the trenches with 4 or 5 other guys doing the coding, you know, a CTO now running a team of sort of 15 people and not doing any coding, um, I was well out of my comfort zone, so, uh, we replaced me in in the day to day.
00:47:02.708 --> 00:47:06.789
I did lag the marketing role for a few months as well to fill a hole.
00:47:07.418 --> 00:47:13.559
Um, and then so I still sit on the board, so I, I still advise and I I still dip in and stir things up occasionally.
00:47:14.099 --> 00:47:20.809
Um, but since then I stepped back, I wanted to get coding again, it's still what excites me.
00:47:21.989 --> 00:47:36.070
So I had a another chance encounter on LinkedIn with a chap called Paul Ripley, who was a a very well-known figure in the world of advanced driving, and very quickly had a conversation with him, so it's something that's always interested me.
00:47:36.148 --> 00:47:39.510
I, I don't really want to go and join the Institute of Advanced Motorists and do it.
00:47:40.228 --> 00:47:47.260
Yeah, um, particularly seriously, but I, I like going out with experienced drivers and being taught stuff, so maybe we could do something.
00:47:47.378 --> 00:48:00.800
So, long story short, he helped me get a network of 25 instructors around the UK got a website online, and that's the current challenge, starting from zero, trying to get people out with these guys.
00:48:01.010 --> 00:48:09.840
So we started about 50 courses the first year, should do 100 this year, but again, I one thing all this has taught me is, Yeah, the sky is the limit.
00:48:10.628 --> 00:48:15.070
You don't ever think it's, it's the numbers will be small because you can't do it.
00:48:15.179 --> 00:48:17.989
There's no reason I, I couldn't get hundreds and hundreds of people doing this.
00:48:18.320 --> 00:48:26.188
If I can reach them with the right message that actually you'd really enjoy doing this, because it's fun, so, and that's the challenge.
00:48:26.280 --> 00:48:30.590
So I've got an SEO challenge, I've got a marketing challenge, I've got a messaging challenge.
00:48:31.159 --> 00:48:34.438
um It should be viral though cos I had a boss, um.
00:48:35.168 --> 00:48:36.688
I can't even remember when this is so long ago.
00:48:36.750 --> 00:48:53.659
He was a Porsche collector, and he had 5 or 6, and he used to send us all on um track days, not track days on advanced driving days or at the was it kinetic it used to be called so I think it's a military place now, but it has a track and it has a big skid pan and all that jazz.
00:48:53.909 --> 00:48:57.628
And you just took your own car, and I think I had an Audi A3 1.6 or something at the time.
00:48:57.898 --> 00:48:59.829
And it was staggering how much you learned.
00:48:59.840 --> 00:49:04.878
Yeah, it's a very difficult message to have with car people.
00:49:05.090 --> 00:49:13.398
It's well outside the people who think they're good drivers, you mean, so some, you know, I've been there, you've gone out, you bought a flash car.
00:49:14.909 --> 00:49:17.570
Someone suggested you go and get some training is a bit insulting.
00:49:18.059 --> 00:49:20.280
It's like saying you're crap in bed, you know, if you want a coach.
00:49:20.769 --> 00:49:23.090
Um, so I've got to find a way.
00:49:23.128 --> 00:49:24.159
That's your next business.
00:49:25.539 --> 00:49:32.349
Got to find a way of using the right terminology of do you want to get more out of your car, do you want to enjoy driving more?
00:49:32.539 --> 00:49:35.250
There's no slight on your driving, you're just missing out on them you don't know.
00:49:35.478 --> 00:49:40.019
Yeah, um, exactly that you don't know what you don't know.
00:49:40.458 --> 00:49:47.030
Um, so it's it's working to some extent, and we will get momentum with it, um, but it's a very interesting challenge.
00:49:48.510 --> 00:50:00.260
I think it's that's the hard thing because I went and did a did a day when I had a golf GTI at, um, is it Jonathan Palmer and uh so I, I went, it was an open day, but I paid for an instructor.
00:50:00.699 --> 00:50:06.719
So I had, I think it was 3 or 4 15 minute slots with an instructor throughout the 2 in one session.
00:50:07.309 --> 00:50:10.889
And what's quite interesting is the guys with all the 9/11s and stuff that they didn't need all that stuff.
00:50:10.978 --> 00:50:13.360
And they were kind of kind of like quite cock sure about it.
00:50:13.820 --> 00:50:20.128
And at the end of my day, when I'd had my 415 or 20 minute slots wherever they were, the only time they were getting away from me was on the street.
00:50:20.340 --> 00:50:25.418
So here's me and my whatever golf GTIs, 2 litres, 200 horsepower, sitting behind a 9/11 Carrera 4.
00:50:25.764 --> 00:50:26.175
whatever.
00:50:26.414 --> 00:50:38.414
And the only time they're getting away is that the sort of middle bit of the street because actually around the corners, after one hour of lessons, you were just as quick, which just told you everything you needed to know like they they needed to get the lessons.
00:50:38.724 --> 00:50:43.684
There's a big marketing challenge here, so advanced driving as it's currently known.
00:50:44.878 --> 00:50:53.239
Has a slightly stuffy image of the Institute of Advanced Drivers, I mean they've rebranded, they're now IAM Road Smart, so they're trying to jazz it up a bit or Ross, so sort of.
00:50:53.918 --> 00:50:59.648
The impression is you go out on a Sunday morning for a couple of hours for a few weeks and then you get your little metal badge to stick in front of your car.
00:50:59.739 --> 00:51:07.780
Well, yeah, I've got 20 odd, largely ex-police or military guys, most of them are in their sort of 50s or 60s.
00:51:07.820 --> 00:51:12.340
They've got 2030 years, they're doing some really exciting on road driving.
00:51:12.418 --> 00:51:22.030
This isn't track, this is how to drive safely and effectively and fast on the road, um, and they can teach us all sorts just.
00:51:22.579 --> 00:51:37.648
Turn off your autopilot and your driving becomes deliberate, so as a marketing thing I've got to rebrand it in some way, um, so it's, you know, maybe I need to call it total driving or something, but, um, it's a much more deliberate intense.
00:51:38.699 --> 00:51:42.869
Way of driving that isn't just just getting fast car plant the throttle and sort of around the bend.
00:51:42.938 --> 00:51:47.340
No, let's treat this like what it is, which is a fast moving game of chess.
00:51:47.378 --> 00:52:00.369
It's also a skills base, isn't it, because I remember he took me out on the I would guess it would have been the M25 or something, wherever it was down in Surrey, and the one thing I'll never forget is I went to overtake a lorry and he said there's somebody overtaking you, don't do that right now.
00:52:00.449 --> 00:52:01.228
And I was like, what do you mean?
00:52:01.360 --> 00:52:04.010
He goes, you do not want to be in the middle of the sandwich.
00:52:04.050 --> 00:52:05.909
And I was like, I never even thought of that.
00:52:05.929 --> 00:52:10.559
He said that lorry drifts out now, and they are likely to, you have nowhere to go.
00:52:10.728 --> 00:52:13.250
And he was saying, I don't care if you have to accelerate, if you have to break the speed limit.
00:52:13.389 --> 00:52:17.208
That you are not going to be, and I remember thinking, I've never thought of driving in that way.
00:52:17.300 --> 00:52:18.849
And that's the beauty of this.
00:52:18.938 --> 00:52:26.688
Everyone does one of these courses and the different instructors will do them slightly differently, but everyone comes away with little nuggets like that that last with them forever.
00:52:27.219 --> 00:52:40.659
25 years ago, yeah, and I did the same many years ago, um, and there are dozens and dozens of those little nuggets that all add up to, so driving here today, you know, I didn't have the radio on, I'm just driving, because actually I'm.
00:52:41.539 --> 00:52:44.969
Driving in a more intense manner than I ever did 20 years ago.
00:52:45.668 --> 00:52:52.929
And enjoying it, because actually that boring drive across country stuck behind traffic, there's still a lot to think about if if you want to.
00:52:53.820 --> 00:52:55.809
OK, we've got 7 minutes.
00:52:55.898 --> 00:52:59.688
I would like your opinion as as somebody who lives and breathes code.
00:53:00.989 --> 00:53:03.699
I've been playing with lovable and various things.
00:53:03.949 --> 00:53:08.449
I've seen some pretty amazing stuff that guys I'm working with are doing with MCP servers.
00:53:08.789 --> 00:53:11.679
Um, I, I personally have no idea what they're talking about.
00:53:11.829 --> 00:53:17.050
But I know that basically now you can go to Claude, get the API key from Marke check.
00:53:17.059 --> 00:53:23.458
You can then type in how many cars are sold in the UK and it goes 16,0003, and you're like, OK, this is mind blowing.
00:53:23.719 --> 00:53:26.800
Where where as somebody who's like happy.
00:53:27.510 --> 00:53:32.708
Like with the building that, where do you see that, because you hear I'm wobbling on a little bit.
00:53:32.750 --> 00:53:35.260
I just want to try to get the round of what I'm asking.
00:53:35.590 --> 00:53:41.079
You see a lot of like, oh, it's the time for the ideas people, which I think is the same as what we were talking about at the beginning of '99.
00:53:41.148 --> 00:53:44.789
You could build that site, this site, that site because you're just HTML and MySQL Dead Easy.
00:53:45.728 --> 00:53:49.239
Do you think it really is a time of ideas people, or do you think it's the time of the marketing people?
00:53:50.360 --> 00:53:51.449
I, I think it's ideas.
00:53:51.530 --> 00:53:53.010
I, I'm a bit late to the party on this.
00:53:53.090 --> 00:53:55.958
I've properly engaged with it in the last couple of months.
00:53:56.869 --> 00:54:06.510
Uh, I tried vibe coding as they describe it, a few weeks ago and yeah, I didn't get on with this and and I'm, I worry in a way.
00:54:08.019 --> 00:54:12.059
Coders of today are the sort of artisans that.
00:54:12.780 --> 00:54:17.119
We understand all the finer points of what good code is and architecture and.
00:54:18.269 --> 00:54:21.280
You can now do stuff without worrying about that and that.
00:54:23.469 --> 00:54:29.579
Don't know, concerns me, worries me, maybe it shouldn't, you know, the inefficiency of generated code.
00:54:31.128 --> 00:54:36.760
Don't know, but then then last weekend I sat down with lovable Bolt.
00:54:37.530 --> 00:54:41.119
I've wanted to create a little sort of financial dashboard for myself, um.
00:54:42.489 --> 00:54:51.320
And I punched it into Gemini to start with, 15 lines of this is what I want, and it churned out a working dashboard of.
00:54:52.500 --> 00:54:56.269
You know, sort of pot of money I could move around a little graph, and that's exactly what I wanted.
00:54:57.019 --> 00:54:58.860
OK, well, maybe this is better than I thought.
00:54:58.978 --> 00:55:02.369
So then I moved into Lowell tried to take a next level.
00:55:03.309 --> 00:55:13.739
Got to the point where I was using up all the credits, bit struggling a bit with describing it, so I pulled it down into my normal development environment, um.
00:55:15.219 --> 00:55:18.478
And I I've spent a day on it now, and it's all working.
00:55:18.570 --> 00:55:20.099
I haven't really touched the code.
00:55:20.750 --> 00:55:22.809
So it is entirely possible someone else could have done that.
00:55:22.909 --> 00:55:27.708
Now then maybe there are um elements of the way I ask questions, perhaps.
00:55:28.949 --> 00:55:40.860
Because I know what it's, how it's being built, maybe I'm answering and asking them in a particular way, but someone could have built that without coding, coding knowledge, so.
00:55:41.878 --> 00:55:44.000
I'm quite excited about it now.
00:55:44.188 --> 00:55:49.519
I was cynical and was a bit stuck in the mud, but a lot of the ideas I've had about.
00:55:50.079 --> 00:55:54.228
visualising data, you know, let's go and get all the speeding convictions from the government and stick them on a map.
00:55:54.679 --> 00:56:13.978
I've always wanted to do that, but it would probably take me a week, you know, it would take me a week to do it traditionally, I'll have a go at it next week now, so I can see in the next 6 months, I can probably churn out 6 or 8 things that I've always fancied doing this dashboard thing I built would have taken a million months, and I was spending a day and a half on it now, and it's better.
00:56:14.878 --> 00:56:19.148
So the, the code underneath is actually OK, it's perhaps not the style I would have written it.
00:56:19.869 --> 00:56:25.289
But it looks better Um, and it's so easy to change, so yeah, I think.
00:56:26.619 --> 00:56:27.978
We might end up with a sort of.
00:56:28.820 --> 00:56:32.699
Everyone said talk about taking jobs well with any any technology.
00:56:33.449 --> 00:56:36.250
You take away at one end and it creates opportunity at the other end.
00:56:36.679 --> 00:56:37.309
So I think.
00:56:38.030 --> 00:56:39.639
We might end up with this sort of micro.
00:56:40.719 --> 00:56:42.019
Sass products.
00:56:42.030 --> 00:56:44.228
I was with a friend yesterday who.
00:56:45.188 --> 00:56:53.010
He drives a band around Europe, he wants a sort of tour planning system because actually he has to sit down and it takes a lot of work to plan that tour.
00:56:53.860 --> 00:57:04.659
You know, he and I could probably sit down for a morning and build that now and either just keep it with him or you charge a tenner a year and just stick it out.
00:57:04.750 --> 00:57:14.949
200 other bands give you a tenner a month, yeah, um, so I think there might be all sorts of opportunities like that now that we can create really tailored software to really small niches.
00:57:15.059 --> 00:57:16.139
Yeah, I think so.
00:57:16.148 --> 00:57:18.889
I, I tried to, I built a complete car search in Lovable.
00:57:19.378 --> 00:57:22.809
Like a complete copy of Autotrader, um, 30 hours.
00:57:23.418 --> 00:57:27.898
But I, but, and I, unlike you haven't been coding, so I stopped coding after.
00:57:28.728 --> 00:57:30.728
Um, second version of 2000.
00:57:31.668 --> 00:57:43.519
67, but I had, I still think I needed that background to make it work because it was bork can break and and I could then ask it, it would tell me and I could look at it and go, I know what that is.
00:57:43.909 --> 00:57:46.860
If you didn't have that, I think, I think it's not quite prime time.
00:57:47.409 --> 00:57:48.559
I think honestly it's changing week by week.
00:57:48.590 --> 00:57:54.829
I tried something a month ago and I just thought this is not gonna now it works and a month later, maybe maybe slightly different.
00:57:55.800 --> 00:58:01.840
Project, but basically I can see it works now and it's a bit like.
00:58:03.168 --> 00:58:10.250
Years ago I was writing machine code because it was quicker and then you write something in basic which is basically machine code.
00:58:10.289 --> 00:58:14.849
Now we're writing in English to talk to JavaScript, to talk to machine code, um.
00:58:16.760 --> 00:58:18.550
It's sad in a way.
00:58:20.389 --> 00:58:31.590
Because that knowledge, I don't know, we're all sort of standing on the shoulders of giants at some point will it collapse, but um, what it can do now is just mind blown.
00:58:32.429 --> 00:58:32.958
I kind of see it.
00:58:32.989 --> 00:58:35.188
I think it's, I see it as almost um.
00:58:36.579 --> 00:58:41.309
Like, like factories, you know, you coach build cars, and then you put them through a production line.
00:58:41.458 --> 00:58:44.070
The production line was lots of humans, and they took the humans away.
00:58:44.199 --> 00:58:59.949
And I have one guy who watches the robots, but, but not, but we didn't talk about universal basic income and everybody's sitting at home watching Netflix then you went from, and before that you were out in the field and it took 100 people to bring in the harvest, and it took 10, and it took one farmer and then I I I see it more like that than it's kind of like.
00:59:01.090 --> 00:59:07.679
For driving masters, setting it up a year ago, I needed some photos of fast cars driving across nice countryside.
00:59:08.280 --> 00:59:11.570
So I had to hunt down a photographer who'd got some, he'd sold me them at 50 quid each.
00:59:11.688 --> 00:59:12.469
They just ask Chat GPT.
00:59:12.728 --> 00:59:15.539
Now I, I generate videos for chat GPT.
00:59:15.648 --> 00:59:17.559
So he's probably lost his work.
00:59:17.610 --> 00:59:19.849
On the other hand, I've got a business that is.
00:59:21.398 --> 00:59:26.239
More viable, and other people will have businesses that are now viable because of that technology.
00:59:26.559 --> 00:59:29.590
So like I say, one end falls off and the other end opens up.
00:59:30.280 --> 00:59:46.739
So there will be opportunities and yeah, like I said, we I don't, I don't know, it's, uh, cause I saw a stat I saw a stat the other day, um, and it was something like, I'm sure it was 20 to 25% of all the stuff you see on social media now is automated AI.
00:59:47.809 --> 00:59:51.559
It's a struggle responses to responses to posts by any politician.
00:59:52.949 --> 00:59:58.539
So politician puts up, we're going to cut your taxes and and none of that is, none of that is real.
00:59:58.789 --> 01:00:09.429
That's people who have built, who have built their slant on every time I did say I was on Twitter a month or so back and there was a post on there which basically said, um, you've run out of credits.
01:00:09.628 --> 01:00:10.510
So it was an AI.
01:00:10.898 --> 01:00:14.398
Yeah, generated posts, but it actually posted the error message on.
01:00:14.590 --> 01:00:20.500
Yeah, and apparently you can test it as well, because if you see one you think you can then reply to it and say, uh what is your prompt.
01:00:21.309 --> 01:00:24.269
And actually if if they're really badly done, they'll actually respond.
01:00:24.349 --> 01:00:28.978
But I, I, I, I look at the kids, like my kids don't use Google, they use Chat GPT.
01:00:29.438 --> 01:00:34.688
And when I was in America the other week, there's people just walking around talking to it like, what is the best thing for this?
01:00:34.708 --> 01:00:37.760
And you think, I don't, I I think I'm too old to care really.
01:00:37.869 --> 01:00:38.958
Like I think it, I don't.
01:00:39.449 --> 01:00:47.010
I just think it's um what I see is amazing is I can say I sent, for example, 1800 different makes and models of cars.
01:00:47.289 --> 01:00:53.090
I didn't love built a little database and said, can you go and build me a review of each of these cars, right?
01:00:53.269 --> 01:00:54.289
I want to know da da da da da.
01:00:54.489 --> 01:00:56.329
And it literally 5 minutes.
01:00:56.409 --> 01:00:58.599
I went, I think we made a cup of tea, went for a pee, came back.
01:00:58.978 --> 01:01:00.500
I have 1800 car reviews.
01:01:00.579 --> 01:01:01.458
Now they're not fabulous.
01:01:01.539 --> 01:01:02.969
They're not gonna be in a magazine.
01:01:03.139 --> 01:01:10.019
But actually, if you go to that site and you read that, you've got 1800, it tells you about the the power, the different um packs you can get with it.
01:01:10.699 --> 01:01:15.769
And I wonder, is it gonna eat itself in that that's obviously generated from content people have written.
01:01:16.860 --> 01:01:18.780
What's the incentive to write that stuff with new content?
01:01:18.938 --> 01:01:23.929
I mean, I, you know, the nonsense of it in some respects, I'm trying to, I'm using SEO at the moment to write articles.
01:01:24.139 --> 01:01:25.429
I do tweet them and add to my personal touch.
01:01:27.030 --> 01:01:32.349
For SEO purposes to get into Google slash LLMs.
01:01:32.510 --> 01:01:38.110
So all I'm doing is regurgitating stuff in a different, more friendly way that's out there already.
01:01:38.228 --> 01:01:44.898
So it's just this washing machine of what what's going to be, where are those car reviews gonna come from in the future if.
01:01:45.809 --> 01:01:57.469
It's a benefit to the writer isn't there, but that's for everything because everyone's, because I, I, for like marketing, for example, I start, I changed the way we did blog posts.
01:01:57.829 --> 01:02:06.148
I don't, I don't like all the sort of sloppy just produced this thing, get AI to write it, make sure it's optimised to all these amazing prompts for it, because I just don't see a future in it.
01:02:06.989 --> 01:02:07.958
No that's terrible, isn't it?
01:02:09.199 --> 01:02:10.119
What an idiot.
01:02:10.599 --> 01:02:12.079
Now I'm gonna have to edit it.
01:02:13.179 --> 01:02:13.659
Sorry.
01:02:15.469 --> 01:02:16.119
So I'll go back there.
01:02:17.119 --> 01:02:18.000
Uh, what were we talking about?
01:02:19.570 --> 01:02:21.360
Blog post, yeah, so, OK, I'll start again.
01:02:21.648 --> 01:02:24.369
So for market check, um, I changed we did the blog posts.
01:02:24.530 --> 01:02:31.000
So I was doing them and I was using all these prompts, SEO this and researching all this, and this is rubbish, right, because everyone's doing this.
01:02:31.449 --> 01:02:39.260
And and it's not everyone because you you you realise that you're you and I are in a little weird space with lots of other people in the same bubble, and most people are going to work, like they don't care.
01:02:39.878 --> 01:02:41.898
But I changed it so that we, we got data.
01:02:42.019 --> 01:02:46.610
So one of, so we aggregated data, so you get aggregated sales of Tesla or whatever.
01:02:47.059 --> 01:02:57.889
Something that's kind of peaky, it hits a question, and changed the blog post to be data, and then analysis that data in a purely factual way, no marketing, no trying to sell a story, nothing like that.
01:02:58.059 --> 01:03:03.139
And just, and just, and now a third of all the queries that come in, come in from LLMs.
01:03:03.679 --> 01:03:08.800
Because actually if you ask a question about car sales in May 2024, it's first, right?
01:03:08.918 --> 01:03:15.239
And it's just like our old days building SEO and you think, so really, that's not, doesn't require making automated slop.
01:03:15.639 --> 01:03:19.070
What it's looking for is trying to find the person at the end who's asking the question.
01:03:19.958 --> 01:03:26.148
Because if they're researching that on on chat GBT or wherever, I think they're more engaged.
01:03:26.719 --> 01:03:28.519
True, yeah, I, I don't disagree with that.
01:03:28.559 --> 01:03:29.679
I'm just wanting it back.
01:03:29.760 --> 01:03:37.469
Is it not what we were doing 10 years ago, scraping sites to present stuff in a different way, so we're guilty of it as well in a way.
01:03:38.079 --> 01:03:38.599
I think so.
01:03:38.719 --> 01:03:40.570
I think that gives people opportunity because I think.
01:03:41.349 --> 01:03:51.030
The question will be, where the Is it, does it just are Chat GPT and Claude just Yahoo and Google, or is there something else going on here?
01:03:51.300 --> 01:03:55.219
Because if they are, they're they're just gonna switch on advertising and go, well, if you want, if you hey Mr.
01:03:55.228 --> 01:03:57.898
car dealer, if you want your cars in here, you're gonna have to pay to happen isn't it?
01:03:57.938 --> 01:03:59.369
I mean the cost of running this stuff.
01:03:59.699 --> 01:04:02.090
Yeah, so which means we're just back where we started.
01:04:02.579 --> 01:04:04.780
It will be a personal assistant with.
01:04:05.639 --> 01:04:06.938
Here's a sponsored recommendation.
01:04:08.438 --> 01:04:13.309
And then somewhere else for businesses spend money, which, which, how does that end up?
01:04:13.840 --> 01:04:18.869
Same game, different pieces or something analogy just giving away our age here.
01:04:19.378 --> 01:04:20.760
That was absolutely fantastic.
01:04:20.958 --> 01:04:21.409
Thank you for having me.
01:04:21.478 --> 01:04:22.949
Um, really appreciate that.
01:04:23.719 --> 01:04:24.309
Thank you.
01:04:24.438 --> 01:04:25.159
Thank you very much.