Truecar.com is going public | Hacker News Reader

Truecar.com is going public

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42 pointsbinarytrees27 comments

TrueCar sounds like a great idea (the dealership system is horrible).

But we just used TrueCar when shopping for a new car and instantly got spammy, sleazy emails and phone calls from dealers before even completing the process (which we never did).

It wasn't fun. I really wish we didn't give them any information. So I don't have high hopes for this business succeeding.

What really needs to happen is that people need to be able to just buy a car like they buy everything else without salespeople in the middle. Why can't I buy a new car from the manufacturer straight from their website? Seeing all the trouble Tesla is having fighting the dealership model is discouraging...hopefully it will improve, I'm just not sure TrueCar is the answer.

>when shopping for a new car and instantly got spammy, sleazy emails and phone calls from dealers

As a dev who works for company in the same vertical, this is the modus operandi of every dealership in the country. Their online strategy is "Get email addresses from boomers, then spam their inboxes into submission!" As if boilerplate ridden automated emails and $5 off your next dealership tune-up could influence buyers on a once-in-a-decade purchase.

[1]http://www.arcleu.com/how_not_to_advertise_your_websites_liv...

This is a solid venture backed company that has been generating quite a bit of revenue for some time now. This exit will provide its investors with a solid return. Odd how little attention a company like this gets from the tech community.

Bernie Brenner, the guy who heads up their business development, wrote The Sumo Advantage which one of the best books I've read on BD. He very clearly identifies the role of BD and how it is distinctly different than sales. I'd recommend it for any startup looking to partner with large established businesses to spur growth.

Thanks for the book suggestion. this looks very interesting.

It's a good company with a good service (I used them last year when I was buying a car--walked in with their piece of paper and said 'if you give me this price I will buy this car now, in cash.' That was the end of the negotiation. Drove out of the dealer a couple of hours later (yes, it still took a couple of hours to get the transaction complete.)

But I don't think the tech community should be all excited about this company. It's not a 'tech' startup per se, it's just a normal marketing (lead-gen, specifically) company that happens to use the Internet--and using the Internet to do business has not been something to get excited about for at least ten years now. It's not like Oculus or WhatsApp or Airbnb or even Uber. There's no technical innovation at play here, there's no business model innovation at play here, there's no new market segment being addressed, it's not disruptive or even radical innovation. It's not innovation driven, it's just a good company delivering a good product. It's not a 'startup' the way we use startup in the tech community, it's just a plain old business.

The startup community cares more about potential imaginary metrics than actual metrics that show a business is profitable now.

When I was a freshman in high school, every other Tuesday I went to TrueCar's SFRuby meetup. Everyone I met there was super nice, and it helped me stay sane while I was in high school. Thanks for that. Glad to hear they're doing well!

http://www.truecar.com/S1/

Truecar.com used to charge dealers between 400$ and 500$ for every deal that would close (sale). Since then, I believe that they changed it into a monthly subscription, or a combination of the two. The problem is that Truecar is yet another middleman, and yes, it's much better to sign up with a new email address because you will get all the spam in the world.

It is much better to get "certificates" on Truecar with a fake name/email, then go to the dealer and say: give me this car for 500$ less, or I'll walk away.

I didn't buy a car yet, but I got two real offers from dealers just like that.

Truecar is a middleman... Middlemen tend to go away. I am not optimistic about their future.

Scott Painter is an underrated guy. TrueCar almost went out of business due to dealer backlash, and now just a couple of years later, they're going public. Kudos.

There was some discussion around Truecar and how they pivoted in this Planet Money podcast - http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/03/14/290241292/episode-...

If anyone is curious about what price they actually go for or how their financials turn out next year, you can get sec filing alerts from a website I made: http://www.wellreadinvestor.com/companies/35427

hmm, I used it, and didn't have the problem. I was only contacted by the dealers I requested, and one I told them I was interested in a different car, they left me alone.

also, when selecting your dealers it was pretty obvious that they were going to be contacting you, no?

2013: $134M revenues and $25M loss.

Amazon 2012: $61B revenues and $39M loss.

To say, net income may not be the best indicator of success for high growth tech companies. They reinvest every dollar to continue to spur growth.

19% vs 0.6% makes the two not really comparable.

Not to say you don't have a point (net profit isn't the only factor), just that your example is weak.

Look at the cash flows from operations. This is a big indicator of whether the core business is profitable. I have not looked at Amazon, but non-cash write-off usually play a significant role in lowering net income.

If you operations are sucking up cash, then the sustainability of the business depends on ability to inject new cash from somewhere else.

TrueCar.com for dummies: use spamdecoy.net for email and Burner for phone number

What valuation are they shooting for?

Are you ready for another pump and dump?

starts beating chest and humming

This is not a good Hacker News comment. It's glib when it should be substantive, and tries to drum up indignation when it should be reflective.

One of the best things PG ever said about HN is that comments "should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something". I intend to add that to the site guidelines.

Please re-read what you post and, if doesn't have this quality, edit it until it does. If, after editing, there is nothing left, you should have no trouble deleting it (or just not posting). In my experience, this approach works—when one remembers to take it.

One thing that I'd love to see is a system for adaptive edit/delete windows. Right now it seems to be a fixed length of time (I want to say an hour?), but I think it'd be conducive to better conversation to have flexible windows, where -- and maybe this isn't the right approach -- the window is extended by X minutes for every reply, or something along those lines.

It'd certainly flatten threads a bit, especially in the case of someone posting a factually incorrect comment and correcting it after the fact.

In which case the original comment should stay as on so anyone can see what happened, but use strike-through formatting

I thought it was funny.

It may have been, and I like to laugh too. As with any optimization problem, there are tradeoffs. It's not that you're against the things that get traded away; you're for them. But you're for something else more, if you can't have both.

In HN's case, we're optimizing for signal/noise ratio. The trouble with humor on HN is not that it's bad, but that—if you have a lot of it—you also get a lot of noise. There actually is a genre of humor that does well on HN; you might call it high-signal humor. It's rare, but it exists. This comment wasn't that.

There are other places to get internet humor, like Reddit comment threads. When I read those I'm astonished at how good they are at what they do. HN is never going to be that, and we shouldn't allow an imitation of it to detract from our core.

If you didn't jump on my back to force some community guidelines down our throats, I would have been at the top of this thread with high XX-range karma. :-(

But it's okay, I understand the concern.

But it's okay, I understand the concern.

Thank you for saying so.

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