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Comment by ahi | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this will save people some googling.

7.6 million passenger cars sold in 2006 in the US * ~$30 per buyer = $228 million is pretty much the hard limit for yearly revenue at least without going international. Maybe 10% of all sales is an ambitious yet attainable goal so $23m in revenues?

I think it's a winner, but it could easily pull a digg and take too much vc for its own good.

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I wouldn't worry about that. If they control 10% (or even 5%) of all car purchases in the US, they're going to be well positioned to do a ton of other interesting things.

Precisely. There are a lot of other possible revenue streams, even if we never charge the dealers (which we'd like to avoid because we are a consumer advocate and don't want to be beholden to the dealers).

This seems to fall victim to the classic "if we only get X tiny % of some big market worth Y, then..." fallacy. The real question is how strong their product offering is and what a realistic estimate of their popularity would be.

Sort of. X% of the market is a terrible growth strategy, but it's a decent gut-check to size a market. The previous poster was complaining that this gut-check wasn't big enough. The problem with that is thinking that a company is stuck with today's business model forever. If that were true, Google would still be selling search appliances.

Their Plus pricing plan costs $79 usually, and the sign up page says 90% of the people choose that, which makes sense intuitively (With more dealers competing, chances are, I'll save more than $40 by going with the plus plan).

So at the very least the revenue estimate doubles but you think $23M in revenues is something to sneeze at?

By comparison, Digg's revenue for 2008 was $8.5M. There was another thread on HN today about how Digg scaled up too fast which is probably true because they lost > $5M in 2008. In the end, the bottom line number is what matters.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/12/20/diggs-sorry-revenue-stream-...

I think his point was that they may be taking too much VC. They have already taken $6 million.

Fair enough. That could be a risk.

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