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So, the story of this business is that it was started by a father and son duo.
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The father's name is Ray, the son is Zach.
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The father, he basically managed car dealerships for years, and he was like, "Oh, there's like I know the ins and outs."
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And his son, I think was 24 or 25 at the time, and his son always wanted to start an internet business.
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And he also liked YouTube, and he was like, "Hey Dad, what if I just ask you some questions on YouTube about like, you know, how do properly negotiate at the car dealership or how much profit car dealerships make, so we know better what to ask for."
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You know, things like that. Love it. Going to work?
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Yeah, and within, I think something like eight weeks, they got 13,000 followers on this YouTube page.
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And they were like, "You know, we were going to buy all these fancy cameras, but then we just got like our iPhone and made it kind of janky."
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And it just it people kind of liked it, and it was during the pandemic, so people were watching a lot of that stuff.
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And so, they parlayed that into starting a business called CarEdge.
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And so, if you go to CarEdge. com, what's it say? Do you see the headline?
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Uh yeah, it says, "Your personal car shopper is here.
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No hassle, always fair prices."
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So, basically, they will help you buy a car.
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So, the way it works is there's this thing called an auto broker or a car broker.
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I think you got your car now from a friend of ours who's a car broker.
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The industry is typically like mom and pop, and a lot of times, if you Google like car broker New York City, you're going to go to like kind of a mom and pop website, and you get on the phone or send an email to this person.
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You tell them what type of car you want, and they have relationship with tons of dealers, so they know they know the ins and outs of the car business.
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You pay them a fee, $500 to $2,000, and they typically will go and buy the car for you, but the savings that you get in the price of the car is typically better than the fee that you pay them, and so it's no big deal, and they do all the negotiating for you, so it's not uncomfortable for you. Whatever, cool.
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What these guys did is they took like kind of a startupy internet vibe, and they created a nice website for it, where you go to their website, and they you could you could search different cars and well, rather they have a variety of products.
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they have a variety of products. So, like one they have got this thing it's I think it's like 80 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month and they will just like give you tons of information, like a database on what the profit margin is on
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different cars, so you can go and negotiate them yourself, or you can spend a thousand dollars and tell them the car that you want and they go and buy it for you and they'll even organize it so it gets shipped to you and they do all the organization and all that work. And if you don't save at least a
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And if you don't save at least a thousand dollars, you just get your money back.
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And they built this massive business because if you go to their YouTube page, I think they now have 600,000 subscribers on their page and it's this really cute dynamic between a father and son.
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All the pictures on the site by the way are like the dad giving the son a noogie.
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It's like just a just wholesome, just so wholesome.
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And that father and son like dynamic for the brand, it makes you like them a lot.
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And they're like, you know, there are a bunch of car podcasts, but we basically what they described what they wanted to do is they they probably have no idea who we are, but it's what you and I do of just kind of like riffing a little bit less professional.
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You're the father, I would assume. Am I? You're older than me. You could be the dad.
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You know how there was this big viral thing where it was like um you know, PewDiePie versus T-Series, like who can have the most subscribers on YouTube? Yeah.
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guys currently have 533,000 subscribers. Your boys have 529,000.
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We are 4,000 subscribers behind CarEdge.
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I'm just going to leave that there for our loyal army who doesn't want to see us lose to this father-son car buying duo.
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Go to YouTube and subscribe. All right. Yeah. Back to the snippet.
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They this business is now doing so he he has a a video where he breaks down the revenue.
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So, he pulls up their QuickBooks and you can see it, but he blurs out the numbers and I messaged him and I was like, "Hey, uh I have this thing, this podcast."
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Like and he goes, "Yeah, you know, I've heard of it."
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I go, "Just can you tell me the numbers and I can talk about it? And he And so he did.
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And so this business is now doing roughly $10 million a year in revenue.
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I think it's only 2 years old or so and it seems like a great business.
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These things could be really cool, I think.
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Honestly, I thought it'd be almost bigger because looking at the traffic, they get almost like 2 million visitors a month to their site.
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And so that is a huge amount of traffic to your website for this thing.
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So I am I'm extremely impressed.
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This is only 2 years old? Ish.
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Yeah, it could it could be three, but yeah, something like that.
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Is this something you normally do when you buy cars? You use car brokers?
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I haven't, but I've heard of them.
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We actually talked about it years ago of of people who you know, we brought this up in one of the early episodes.
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I've never actually used it, but I remember last time I bought my car, I was in the dealership for like 4 hours like signing paperwork, wiring the money.
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It took forever and I was like, I'm never doing this again.
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And so I just started Googling car brokers.
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I was like, I want to try one and that's how I found these guys.
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And were they YouTube first?
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So it was an audience first? YouTube first. Yeah, YouTube first.
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plan to launch this as a service or did they just start it's just let's make a YouTube channel?
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The kid, Zach, has a blog where he's been blogging since he was 22 and he previously he ran some small information business that was doing like 150,000 in revenue and it's cool.
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You can see him blogging as he goes and he's like, I've I've always wanted to learn how to make money on the internet and start an internet company.
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And so you could see like he had like two or three businesses that weren't huge or anything, but it was very promising for a 21-year-old.
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And I have a feeling, I kind of like clicked their LinkedIn's and looked around.
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I think the mother passed away from cancer.
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And so I think there was like a a feeling of like Zach, the kid, was like, you know, I want to be with my father more.
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Let's see if we can do something together.
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Yeah, he's he's got some cool blog posts.
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So you're getting your first customers is really hard.
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And he talks about the getting their early customers for this.
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And then another one is from 10 to 14,000 subscribers in 3 weeks. Here's what we learned.
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Here's what happened and here's what I learned.
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And then I haven't read these yet, but I'm just looking at the titles. These are cool.
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I'm going to check these out.
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Yeah, this is a cool kid.
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I think now I think he's only 25.
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I think I think he's young.
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Um and it's just a really promising business.
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And on some of the blog posts, he talks about how he's like, "Now I have to project financials so we can decide when to hire people."
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And so you're actually seeing him do this in real time, but he's not in you and I's world.
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And so it's a really fun business to pay attention to and see what this guy uh what what is he going to build. Isn't How cool is this?
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Father-son businesses like um or just like, you know, parent-kid, but in not in a uh succession, you know, hand-me-down type of way.
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So, couple examples of this.
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We had Al Done come on and talk about Missouri Star, the the the biggest quilting store on the internet. And it's Al and his mom.
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And he's like, you know, Al and I I think his name Her name is Jenny. I don't know.
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He's like, "Yeah, like She Same thing, YouTube channel where she makes content and she's the star."
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And Al was the like, "Cool, I'll figure out the internet and like e-commerce part of this and let's make this a thing."
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And this is a nine-figure business that sells quilt supplies to other moms across the the country. It's amazing.
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And it's Al and his mom that do that that business together.
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Or And Al does a thing that I love.
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When he refers to his mother, he doesn't say, "My mom."
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He goes, "Yeah, I was just hanging out and mom wanted to like quilt."
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You know, like when they use when they use mom as like as a proper noun.
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I love I'm like, whenever I hear someone do that that like when they just refer to them as mom, not my mom. Yeah. Jenny. Jenny Done.
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So it's Al and and Jenny.
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They basically created and she And her YouTube videos are great, by the way.
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I've I've like randomly watched these even though I have no I have no interest in quilting, but I'm interested in her videos cuz she's so wholesome and she's so good on camera.
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So I think that's a great example.
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We had the the guys from FarmCon and AgSwag.
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Same thing, father and son doing business together, but not in a um legacy, you know, you could take over my business, but they started new businesses together.
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And I just think that's so cool.
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You know, if my kids want to do something like that, that'll be a blast.
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All right, if you like that clip, there's a full conversation with a lot more just like that.
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Just follow my finger, it is right here.