Car Dealership Guy: From Anonymous VC-Backed CEO to B2B Media with Yossi Levi
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 25 July 2024
⏱️ 92 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Yossi Levi shares his incredible story: transforming a small family car lot into a $28 million dollar powerhouse, founding venture-backed Gettacar and growing it to $90 million in revenue, before returning the capital to investors and growing his anonymous Twitter account into Car Dealership Guy, a B2B automotive media empire.
Yossi takes us inside his early marketing strategies, the hard earned lessons from chasing product-market fit, and the playbook to building a lean, scalable B2B media machine.
Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (07:26) Helping at his dad’s used car lot (11:22) How car dealerships make money (14:32) $28m revenue with Facebook ads (17:48) Putting gifts in customer trunks and filming it (22:58) Starting Gettacar to sell cars online (25:04) When a VC pulled his first term sheet (31:08) Recruiting full-time hires with part-time consulting gigs (34:45) Personally guaranteeing the debt used to finance vehicles (36:50) Helping subprime consumers buy cars online (39:24) How 2021 tricked them into thinking they had a sustainable business (41:57) Why you can’t rush Product Market Fit (42:23) Pivoting Gettacar to a profitable, PE-backed business before winding it down (47:22) Starting an anonymous Twitter to share insights from his day-to-day (50:08) Turning Car Dealership Guy into a media business (53:38) Doxing himself with a 13-minute documentary (58:29) Why you have to consume to be a good creator (1:00:04) Screensharing CDGs content schedule (1:02:59) Why every employee needs to generate content or revenue (1:09:27) Creating a car / auto influencer agency (1:11:34) Building a B2B automotive ad network (1:14:50) Evolving into a holding company (1:20:27) Importance of moving fast (1:23:34) Why people actually like sponsored content (1:28:08) Wishing he pivoted to B2B faster
More on Car Dealership Guy: https://www.dealershipguy.com/
Referenced Who the F*ck is Car Dealership Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wTsAez_nMs Russ Flips Whips: https://russ.dealershipguy.com/ Freight Waves’ Craig Fuller on The Peel: https://youtu.be/oPPqO8eBq2M Epic Gardening’s Kevin Espiritu on The Peel: https://youtu.be/FefGL-qPzDo
Where to find Yossi: Twitter: https://twitter.com/GuyDealership YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CarDealershipGuy
Where to find Turner: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak/ Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is how we grew the business from nothing to $28 million a year, bootstrapped, fully profitable. |
| 0:06.7 | I would go to dinner one night with three of my friends. |
| 0:10.4 | One of them actually ended up starting my next company. |
| 0:13.0 | Two other guys founded GoPuff. |
| 0:15.3 | And one of the guys was like, what if you just put a gift in people's trunk? |
| 0:19.4 | I start putting random shit in people's |
| 0:21.8 | trunks, literally do the microwaves. I bring the entire dealership. I say, everyone, we're all going to |
| 0:27.4 | clap and say, pop that trunk, pop that trunk. So we videotaped these experiences and it went viral. |
| 0:33.7 | Snoop Dogg shared this on Facebook. It was all over the country. This type of marketing really |
| 0:39.1 | catapulted our business. And so the subprime consumer did not convert nearly as well, super low |
| 0:45.0 | conversion rate. This was our Achilles heel where we never found product market fit truthfully. |
| 0:50.9 | If you remember, 2021, 2020 car market was very, very hot. And that tricked us. That was |
| 0:57.7 | a curse. We thought that we were differentiated and we thought that we had better product market |
| 1:03.0 | fit than we really had. And we did it. Because guess what? When the market started cooling again, |
| 1:07.4 | the air quickly came out of the balloon. Once you lose momentum as a startup, it really |
| 1:11.2 | is a death spiral. It's just tough to rebound. So I started this anonymous account, Cardo |
| 1:16.5 | dealership guy. It was totally for fun. The thing was, as it grew, it kind of got to a point where I said, |
| 1:22.0 | wow, what could this be? It's clear that the market wants this expert-led insight platform. |
| 1:29.5 | And ultimately, that's what gave me the appetite for what I'm doing today, which is building |
| 1:34.8 | car dealership guy as a vertical B2B media company. |
| 1:38.3 | It's focused on automotive. |
| 1:39.3 | It did not start like that. |
... |
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