Your Mechanic (YC W12) Wins TC Disrupt | Hacker News Reader

Your Mechanic (YC W12) Wins TC Disrupt

techcrunch.com

129 pointscwilson78 comments

We should all go talk about it on Shaker.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2012/09/techcrunch-disrupt...

I prefer Yammer

I was talking about this idea with my friend who is a master mechanic for GM, and he didn't like the idea. His reasons were:

- Working on someone's pavement outside is awful

- Car falls off the lift hurts mechanic, its homeowner's fault

- Oil and chemical disposal isn't accounted for

- People usually don't properly diagnose their problem, so you wouldn't have most parts ready.

- Most luxury dealerships will pickup and drop off your car for service in major metro areas. (his dealership picks up as far as 3 hours drive away)

His other suggestion was to build a barbershop model whereby the independent shop owner rents the repair bays to independent mechanics.

The "working on the pavement" point is spot on. If you've ever tried to do anything more than a simple job on a car without a good set of tools and a car lift, then you'll be completely aware of how horrible it can be.

For small jobs (change the brake pads, change the oil), this might make sense (but they're not the kind of job you tend to get ripped off on). For large jobs (change the clutch without good access?) it would simply be horrible for the mechanic.

There's a reason everyone who works on their own cars desires a pit or car lift.

i think its people like your GM friend that this startup is working to disrupt. a lot of backyard mechanics can do a great job very cheaply.

But isn't the master mechanic from GM the competition to this idea? Consider the "disrupt" part of the event.

No, I would like to think that a master mechanic's job might not be as simply as changing fluids, brake pads or diagnosing engine fault codes. Imagine doing engine repair or changing the clutch on your driveway without a lift? It would take many times as long for the mechanic to finish and he would rather just take 3 separate jobs in that same span of time.

Yes, the idea of the startup has its merit, but like the windshield repair service that was mentioned earlier, the services offered by the mechanics will probably only include the most basic of repairs.

with lifts and the right equipment a master mechanic could change oil in 5 minutes. without it, 20-30minutes of lifting up cars and manually disposing of the waste.

Master mechanic = rockstar programmer.

Backgyard mechanic = some guy who just modified the default theme on a WP blog and now thinks he's a programmer.

The difference in skill level between a master mechanic and pretty much everyone else is the difference between a rockstar programmer...and every one else.

exactly how i thought of it.

Yeah, it may be that your friend isn't properly thinking through why this will be such a big hit: it's fast and convenient for a large fraction of problems.

Because the huge thing about car trouble is the logistical inconvenience of getting it fixed. I don't want to have to buy a luxury car just to get a long ride back and forth from the dealership; I want someone to come and fix my cheap car in the driveway on my schedule or tell me why it cannot be fixed. I also want the power to bring in three mechanics back to back such that I can comparison shop without thinking about the pain in the neck of changing garages after a quote.

Even if this only hits 50% of problems, that's amazing. I literally have had a Check Engine light on for weeks; just went and tried out the UI and it was well thought through, with this particular problem front paged and my make/model in their interface. (They don't yet have guys who fix old Hondas in my area, so it stopped at the last step, but I'll tell everyone at work about it for sure to save people the inconvenience of a trip.)

And long term, with enough market pressure good mobile carlift technologies will develop (we have pickups, flatbed trucks, mobile firehoses, mobile food trucks, not so hard to build a mobile mechanical lift).

Yep, in the same way that the window repair at your house business is fantastic.

My car recently broke down and won't start, in my driveway. I plan to use this service to fix it.

at luxury dealers you don't even need to GO to the dealer, they come and pick up your car. they send a porter (who they pay minimum wage) to pick up your car and deliver you a loaner.

is this service actually going to let you comparison shop? a mobile mechanical lift seems super expensive for a regular joe mechanic.

I think the most important part is "oil and chemical disposal isn't accounted for", as disposing of oil and chemicals would be the homeowner's responsibility and would subject them to some very steep fines in many jurisdictions. (The mechanic would be acting as an agent for the homeowner; ergo, the mechanic is not responsible for chemical disposal.)

The pitch may be a bit awkward and I can't attest to the quality of other contestants, but I have a good impression overall from Your Mechanic.

Car repair is heavily stuck in the 20th-century model of businesses. Individual shops open from 8am to 5pm, you want to find someone good? Without Yelp you're basically relying on word of mouth to not get ripped off, or Yellow Pages. The main form of contact is calling mechanics up, driving around the city at 8am before I go to work and then dropping it off.

Sometimes I get in to my favorite shop and they have too many cars and can't help me. My options are now come back another day, or heading to a random unknown shop if it's urgent - risking the cesspool of bad mechanics. Google offers onsite oil change and basic maintenance, which is a much better experience than taking an hour + off to run back and forth in business hours. I've had to go to the shop many times in the past 9 months, and overall the logistics have not been a great experience. The only thing is I don't really trust Your Mechanic to offer me a reliable/honest mechanic - I've been relying on referrals, reviews and Yelp to find places, some good experiences, some bad. I feel like Your Mechanic's system may or may not be good depending on how ratings and the network effects work out.

Overall I'm excited for Your Mechanic to start making some changes.

Wow, is there anything google doesn't offer as a benefit? Something strikes me as odd about a Corp that has it's tentacles involved in so many aspects of daily life. Why not just offer higher salaries? Seems like all the perks are designed to make you feel dependent on google, make it inconvenient to leave, and live a lifestyle that benefits google. That's probably just my tinfoil hat speaking though. Just seems a bit creepy to be dependent on your employer for so many everyday things.

I'm sure all of the perks (and good salary, work satisfaction) are part of their efficiency optimization and retention play. If you don't have to leave for mundane daily things, perhaps you'll get more work done.

The on-site oil changes aren't free. I'm not sure if Google even spends any money on it. They basically just let a mechanic set up shop in the parking lot one day a week. It's nice because it saves time, not because it saves money.

How about you call ahead next time you want to drop off your car to see if they are busy or not?

For reference, the other finalists were:

Lit Motors (runner up): http://litmotors.com/

Expect Labs: http://www.expectlabs.com/

Gyft: http://www.gyft.com/

Prior Knowledge: https://www.priorknowledge.com/

Saya: http://www.saya.im/

Zumper: http://zumper.com

Interested if anyone had any thoughts on Prior Knowledge's predictive DB, Veritable.

https://www.priorknowledge.com/

Could it serve as a replacement to running mapreduce on large sets of data?

My personal opinion is that it might be too early for this kind of product to find a real market. The value proposition will seem unclear to almost every potential user.

They're not the only players in the field, by the way: https://www.numenta.com/index.html

Watching Lit Motors presentation definitely gave me the "I want one" face expression. I hope to see some of their vehicles on the street one day. The video in which their creation is being hit by a jeep was very impressive too.

Zumper gave a very good pitch too. They went straight to the point, showed a product that works well and solves the problem that I'm currently having. "Neighbourhood preview" is a great idea and I'm eager to see them starting it in London. Finding a good flat (browsing through all the scams and incomplete craiglisty ads) over there is a challenge!

Kinda OT, but how are companies usign Google Maps? Isn't it very easy to outgrow its limits?

The pitch did not impress me, it felt rehearsed, awkward, and lacking a "wow" factor. If I may be honest, not trying to be negative or troll, but most startups that pitched and demo'd at Disrupt don't excite me.

The exception was last year's BitCasa, who ironically lost to Shaker. Strange world we live in sometimes.

The quality of the pitch is only marginally related to the two most important questions about the company: Is it a good market? And will this company be a leader in this market?

Agree, maybe I am just being a curmudgeon today, but the kind of companies that TechCrunch chooses for Disrupt as a general rule of thumb, don't excite me.

It is a good idea though, peer-to-peer anything is the new hotness.

Peer-to-what-now? People in YourMechanic's market used to have to comb through useless Yelp ratings to find a place to take their cars to and leave them for a day or 3 to have basic repairs done. Now they can type some things into their Googles and have their cars fixed at home.

As a card carrying member of the "160k miles, last 20k with the check-engine light on" club, this is the best thing ever and I can't wait for them to get it to Chicago.

YourMechanic hasn't magically replaced the trust system. It's simply another competitor offering its services...if you trust them. It only takes one bad mechanic to poison the well with customers.

YourMechanic hasn't reduced the time it takes to perform basic repairs. The only practical difference is where the repair takes place and that you can schedule it over the web instead of over the phone. Existing mechanics already offer at-home repairs (albeit, at significantly higher rates than in-shop repairs) so YourMechanic's "innovation" is really just offering existing concierge mechanic services for a lower price.

Here's the thing: any mechanic worth his oil doesn't have the free time to drive to customers to perform repairs. He may have employees drive out to customers to pick up cars on his behalf, but he will remain back at the shop. Thus, YourMechanic will ultimately attract the types of mechanics who don't have the skills to set up their own fixed locations, i.e., mechanics who are mostly definitely not the cream of the crop.

That's an interesting observation that made me slightly revise my opinion of the concept YourMechanic (formerly extremely bullish). My garage charges labor at $125 per hour, which is not the cost to the owner (I'm sure the owner pays his mechanics $50 or less). Nevertheless, a mechanic has to pick me up and drop me off at the train station, which is not that much worse than coming to my house.

Incidentally, I'd never use an at-home service, even though it's very inconvenient for me to drop off my car at the garage, because the quality of car repair can be a life-or-death issue, so I'd rather that my mechanics have all the tools and equipment (car lift, adequate lighting, etc.) they need right at their disposal instead of being tempted to cut corners.

I'm amazed at the number of people who drive 20,000 miles with the check-engine light on, despite being able to financially afford to keep their car in good working order.

Your car's maintenance can easily become a life or death issue if you lose engine power on the highway, or far worse, lose brakes or a wheel. You wouldn't go to Dr. Nick Riviera would you?

The problems I see with services like auto mechanics, home services providers, etc. are three-fold:

1. The time it takes out of your day to fix the problem; 2. The knowledge disparity between the vendor and customer, exacerbated by the need to have the issue fixed quickly (no time to check veracity); 3. The fact that many of these services have business models that focus on upcharging after customer lock-in. For example, I've read that some quick lube shops are expected to get an additional 50% above the oil change cost out of each customer..

This service seems to help with the first issue, not so much the others. For example, if the mechanic comes over and diagnoses several, expensive problems and is now saying it will cost $X to fix, you either have to accept it and pay or send the person home, which wastes everyone's time. That recently happened to me with an electrician I found on a daily deals site. All I wanted was a pair of outlets installed, and he put together a work order for more than $1000 in "needed" repairs. I just asked him to leave. My house is still standing and my regular electrician disagreed about the necessity of those repairs.

It shouldn't be surprising that the best shops are always really busy and, frankly, I doubt they will have the time or interest in participating in something like this. (Not to be a downer, I love the idea...these are just the issues I see.)

It sounds like repair estimates are going to be freely available so I wonder if YourMechanic becomes a reference-able source of quote information for negotiating purposes?

No. Repair estimates are already freely available. Just google the parts you need to replace. The price you see (plus taxes) should be what you pay to your mechanic.

Unless you're getting major work done (i.e., dent removal), a reputable mechanic will only charge for parts, not for labor. If you've never actually had that experience with your mechanic, I suggest you look around b/c you've been getting ripped off.

My experience is typically the opposite: parts at cost and charges for labor.

Congrats to the team. I thoroughly checked out the site, and this is clearly backed by a smart team. I see dozens of subtle smart decisions, and no obvious mistakes.

Compared to YC companies, they are way ahead on SEO and other web marketing strategy. YC demo day companies tend to suck at SEO in obvious ways.

I would downvote this comment for extreme, petulant vagueness if I had the karma to do so.

Agreed.

If we are going to "pump" up the SEO factor, things like https://www.yourmechanic.com/book/#/addj=10021 for "Car is not starting" would not be in place.

Instead, maybe something like https://www.yourmechanic.com/fix/10021/car-is-not-starting

So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily hold this site up as heavily SEO optimized. Nothing against the company as they are a young company just not a good example IMO.

I don't think pumping is necessary. Their site is not a solution to the general case of "car is not starting", thus should not have a page for that. That would be gaming google, which is fine, but a bad first move for a startup.

I'll now call out YC companies to prove my point. I went to the techcrunch demo day round 1, and have a look at http://vastrm.com/ It is a complete SEO disaster. No reasonable advisor would have said that was a good idea for an e-commerce company.

we are getting there :). more like yourmechanic.com/problem/car-is-not-starting - some place where you can all the common reasons etc. There are a lot of things we need to improve.

I agree that I should be down-voted to the extreme. I chose the vagueness because calling out individual YC companies is now considered bad form. I was trying to be polite.

Compare their SEO strategy to a YC company that repairs iPhones, or the one that sells cars. If you don't know the urls, send me an email and I'll tell you the ones I am talking about.

The YC anti-SEO pattern exists, it is just not polite to call out SEO mistakes, because if anyone builds anything, then we must be supportive.

why not say what those "obvious SEO suck" are, instead of just being inflammatory?

Congrats to Art and the team! Well deserved.

When is Your Mechanic coming to SF?

Our plan is to launch service there in a few months. Thanks for asking!

Some config issues?

curl -I https://www.yourmechanic.com

  HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
  Server: nginx/1.2.2
  Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 05:05:23 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 168
  Connection: keep-alive
  Vary: Accept-Encoding

  $ curl -I -A Mozilla https://www.yourmechanic.com
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: nginx/1.2.2
  ...snip...

They're "blocking" curl for whatever reason.

Interesting.

I wonder how this is configured in nginx.

Edit: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-linux-appleosx-bsd-nginx-b...

On a different note, I think it's rather odd they find the time to block user agents but do not have HSTS set.

That is broken still. I doubt they can justify UA sniffing for the homepage.

Are mobile mechanics a new thing in the US or is this different? Lubemobile here in Australia has been around for 30 years and I'm sure there are competitors.

Is it just the collation and quoting that's novel?

No, mobile mechanics exist in the U.S. However, the service providers are either (1) very expensive, top-of-the-line, and operate on the concierge model, or (2) not worth the gas they spent getting to you or whose skillsets are limited to very basic repairs.

Type 1 will not use YourMechanic because it will cut into their profit margins significantly and they don't need a 3rd party middle-man to get business.

Type 2 will use YourMechanic. They can handle simple stuff, i.e., the stuff that will take a shop 10-15 minutes to repair. For anything more complicated, your SOL.

I'm just wondering here: Might it be hard to find a mechanic like this in February in Minneapolis?

This is the same thought that came to my head. Weather conditions would certainly cause a problem. Heat, rain, snow. How could a mechanic come to your office and do work on your car 2/3 of the year? the conditions won't permit it.

I suppose if everyone lived in San Diego, CA things would work out great though.

I suppose that the mechanic could come pick up your car at work and drive it to their garage/shelter - then drive it back (why don't auto shops do this now for a small fee?).

It could be problematic on the keys swap-over as you would still meet up. Though this just got me thinking, wouldn't having your mobiles RFID/NFC also do car entry & startup be cool! That must be in the works somewhere.

Alternatly some mechanics offer courtesy cars, so you can stay on the road while your car is being fixed.

awesome. I've used them, and the service was great.

I need serious repairs requiring a lift. How do they do this "on site"?

http://goo.gl/WT7YZ

Sorry had too. :)

I know there is a sunk-cost aspect to writing a comment, realizing it is "sup-optimal", yet posting it anyway. I implore you need to resist letting this fallacy get the better of you. Some of my best contributions to HN are when I close the tab before posting a bad comment.

There are portable hydraulic car lifts on the market that would easily fit in the back of a cubevan/small truck.

e.g: http://www.asedeals.com/images/MSC6K-portable-post-lift-5.jp...

Product looks really useful and I might end up using one of these sometime in future. The pitch really sucked with thick accent and would be lot better if it came in natural way.

Thank you for posting this!

Solid Gap. Anyone with a car can appreciate the problem !

Congratulations to Art. Great job!

the term "shade tree mechanic" comes to mind.

Congrats guys!

Lit Motors - YES, very interesting. This is something that I could see take off if the cost is not too high. There are so many commuters these days and so little carpoolers.

They are estimating a $24k launch price, which I think is optimistic. That assumes they have secured a supply chain, and know all their costs well.

I'm pretty tapped in to all things motorized. They needed to aim a bit lower, here. An up-market product is not going to provide much of a revolution.

Congrats!

I just put in an order to have my AC fixed tomorrow. Hopefully it works out, I hate going to mechanics, but my high mileage car demands that I do so often.

Just checked Your Mechanic. $40 for an oil change? no thanks. Not worth the convenience. It will fail at these prices.

Have you ever taken an Uber? People are paying double the cost of a regular cab and Uber is doing extremely well. People will pay for convenience. Personally, I've gone way over the time in which I should have changed my oil dozens of times simply because it's inconvenient and I have better things to do.

I'm also not even sure what an average oil change costs? Without that knowledge, because I haven't done it often enough to know, $40 actually seems perfectly reasonable.

I'll pay it. I don't have to take my car to a mechanic? That saves me an hour. The extra 10 dollars is an acceptable convenience charge.

(Now, I know you think, everyone can just change their own oil! But for those of us who are apartment dwellers without space for all of the tools? We're a bit stuck. That's not counting the places where we aren't allowed to change our own oil -- I'm not sure how Your Mechanic will work around this.

I'm more worried they won't be able to get the density required to make this worthwhile in the first place.

yea, it is really hard to compete on oil change price. 80% of our services are price competitive (even up to 30% less expensive).

How much are a few hours of your time worth? Even a one hour savings easily saves $40. Absolutely worth it for the convenience, would shell that out in a second if someone would come by and fix it while I coded.

Tell us, how much do you pay for an oil change and around how much do you get paid per hour?

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