You sold this first business. Matt : I had no idea what I was doing for sure. Andrew : Did you feel a little resentful to your parents. Matt : No, I think was just part of my life, right? This is what I did. Andrew : Where did you grow up? Matt : I lived Kansas City area for since I was five so for over 30 years now.
Andrew : All right. Matt : No, not necessarily. I mean, I went to college, I went to DeVry to study computer programming. Matt : Yeah, yeah. They have campuses all over the country. Andrew : And is it a four-year institution? Matt : Yeah but you do it in three years. Matt : No. There were a lot of high school students that went there sure but I mean there were also people who were sort of career changers, you know, that were.
Andrew : And is that what you were? Matt : No, I mean I did it right out of high school. Andrew : Because you wanted to do what with that? Matt : Computer programming. Andrew : How did you know that you wanted to do that with your life?
Matt : You know, when I when I was younger, I always just loved computers. I always played on computers, all that sort of stuff, and my dad actually went to school for computer programming but never actually used it.
But when I was five, six years old, I played around on like Commodore 64 computers all that stuff. And even back then to actually use them was sort of a little bit of programming to like run an app and stuff like that.
And yeah, I just always loved computers so that was just kind of. Andrew : So then you took on a job back in the year , am I right? You were a senior application developer. Matt : Yeah, I worked for a couple of different companies. I actually dropped out of college and got my first job which is why I went to college, right? Was to get a job. And I worked at a couple of different companies before I ended up starting my own company.
Andrew : Do you talk about what those companies are you tend to be private about it? Matt : Where I used to work? Andrew : Yeah. Matt : Yeah, so I started out working in the ticket business. And so, it was like an online reseller of tickets, you know, for like Kansas Chiefs tickets or Royals tickets, you know, on the secondary market, right?
But one of the things that we did is I spent a lot of time building bots to buy tickets from Ticketmaster and crap like that so. Which is a lot harder to do and supposedly illegal now but people still do it. All right. Matt : They do. They have they bought a couple of different companies that do the kind of secondary market of that now for sure. Andrew : Okay. Matt : I did, I did. Andrew : When?
Matt : Like nine years later or something. Andrew : Why? Why did you bother? Matt : You know, I only needed like 16 credit hours or something. So I finally figured it was a reason to pay off the student loans. I might as well get it. I took some night classes and weekend classes here and there kind of along the way and chipped away at it and then eventually just kind of finished it.
Andrew : All right, you co-founded VinSolutions. Where did the idea come from and where did you meet your co-founder? Do you know any software developers that could help do this? I can upload some files on the internet. Seems easy enough.
Andrew : I see. And then how did it become more than that? Matt : Well, you know, immediately this person had like 10 or 20 customers and he was using it himself and it made him a little bit of revenue and it just kind of slowly grew.
It was definitely sort of a side project for a year or two. You know, I was putting in a massive amount of hours into it but I was still working my full time job. And it just kind of slowly took off and grew from being a simple product that, you know, the initial concept was basically syndicating inventory data and photos of cars.
Andrew : And so just to be clear about that, a dealer has a bunch of cars on his lot, and he wants other websites to know what he has so that they could help move it, is that right? And if you think about it, you have to take say, 10 photos of a car but you got cars to take photos and then you got to upload those photos to cars. Andrew : And that was all.
Who wrote the original software to do that, to syndicate it? Matt : Me. That was me. Andrew : That was you? I know that with Stackify, it was a slower growth. It feels like you had to work harder for it. And you kept it simple, and then you kept growing and growing and growing. And I heard one of the reasons why you guys were bought out was that you had such a good collection of tools all under one roof, am I right?
So we started out doing the simple inventory management and then it grew into, you know, websites for car dealers and full CRM system for car dealers. Really kind of ran the whole sales and marketing that the salespeople would use, the dealership use. Andrew : How do you figure out what to add and how to get them? Yeah, how do you figure out what to add? Let me instead of double barreling the question. Matt : Well, so a lot of it is just from the data that we had.
It was easy to build additional products on to the data. Like the inventory is the heart of the data, right? And same thing when we started doing the CRM related stuff. Or did you do it back then in a formal way? I mean, almost everything we did was based on customer feedback. And most of our employees were all people that had worked in the car dealerships too. So my main business partner that kind of came in later down the road who became the CEO was, you know, had worked at car dealerships and stuff before and like all of our employees had worked at car dealerships before, every single one of our salespeople, all that stuff.
Our tech team, not so much but, you know, being able to get their feedback and guidance on what the product was supposed to do plus our customers, of course, so. And back in, let me see, , it was redirecting to site called VinStickers? Did you guys have a different name at the time?
Matt : That was the original, yeah, that was the original name. So it was originally called VinStickers, and what we had, the original product did the inventory related stuff, and as part of that, we had the ability to print window stickers that they would, you know, put on the on the car windows that would say like how much the car is and what equipment was in the car. And so, VinStickers was the original name, and then when we decided to do all the CRM related stuff, we changed the name.
Andrew : So first, it was stickers then it was taking all the photos of your cars and moving them online and so on and so forth. Right, yeah. Andrew : Interesting. Do remember VinBuddy was? Matt : You know, it was a mobile app that I built.
Andrew : Now, by the way, this is long before the iPhone came out. This is before Treo allowed apps. Well, do you remember what device this was? Matt : So they were Dell, Compaqs, and small devices, yeah. Compaq Pocket PC. So I built a mobile app that ran on, it was like Windows CE or whatever it was called then. And yeah, this was when they had like a 1. Matt : Right. And the camera quality was terrible. That was your answer? The alternative was what? I think I know why. Take it out to your lot, take photos and upload them on to the website.
They have to upload each set of photos under one. And so, later on, we worked with, there was a manufacturer Rico that made a camera that would let you, on the camera device, specify like what the stock number was so then they could put in the stock number basically as they took the photos.
And then when we uploaded all the data, it knew what photos went to what car. And so, we later adopted that few years later. Andrew : Was that VinCamera?
You were in the experimental stage, right? Matt : Though we were, I mean, we were a growing company at the point. Going after more and more types of customers, find a way of getting a bigger share of wallet.
Was that your strategy? I mean, I would say we were doing both. I mean, we were constantly adding additional product features and function at the same time while, you know, adding additional customers depth.
Andrew : And the reason I was saying it looks like you guys were experimenting is because you guys even offered VinBrochures. Matt : Sure. Yeah, we offered everything. VinBrochures are printable brochures of a car.
Andrew : How did you end up getting a share of the business? What was the process for that? Matt : Well, you know, me and another gentleman were the original founders. And then like most companies, you know, we had, the original gentleman that we started it with exited the business about probably about three or four years in.
And we bought him out and then had some other partners come in and yeah, had a whole sort of stuff go on, you know, from the perspective. The company should have failed two or three times just because of partner exists. Give me one reason why the company should have failed.
Matt : Just issues. I mean, you know, we had two different CEOs. You know, never really had an investor. Andrew : So how do you deal with that? I mean, you know, one of the biggest mistakes we made is we had, at one time, we had five partners, and the operating agreement was up in such a way it was took a super majority, so everybody had to agree to do anything.
Which makes it impossible if you have one of those partners that nobody wants to be partners with anymore. So yeah, like a lot of companies, we should have failed because of weird legal problems. Andrew : You know what? And then he walked into Y Combinator, got funding for, got this whole support for, he was asked to leave. You should see this is a good thing. Matt : Yeah, I mean we, you know, we alternately bought out the people that left.
So, you know, their price was sort of a fixed price. Andrew : Because of the agreement you had. I mean, they needed us to succeed so we could afford to, you know, continue to basically pay them out.
We were sort of making payments even have the cash to buy them outright. But they needed us to be successful. Andrew : So your agreement was. Was it a fixed amount or fixed amount base sum revenue?
Matt : Yeah, it was a fixed amount. Andrew : Fixed amount. Andrew : So you all five went in there knowing if we need to break up, here is the amount that someone has to get in order to leave? We had it we had to go through mediation to figure that out later, but we had to figure out later. Andrew : Wow, yeah. All right, you know, what else and some kind of like hunting through your past.
See, the research is actually showing up. Or all over the country. Why did you have to hire people in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana? Is it because you needed someone to go into the dealers and sell and make a commission?
So good question. So the business was a software company, and our office was all in Kansas City. But one of things we did for a while for probably a year or two is we had a services division that would go out and take photos for the dealers.
Andrew : I see now. Matt : And so we would physically go on the lot, you know, once or twice a week, take photos of cars. And we had employees in.
I want to say, it was like 15 to 20 states at one time that were doing that. Matt : It was probably a mixture of the two when we were doing that. You know, later in the years, we did have a few. Andrew : So how did you get customers? How did you get all those dealers to trust you to buy your software, to try your software, to do the handheld thing?
Matt : Well, you know selling to car dealers is so much easier than selling to software developers by the way. I want to talk to that guy. Matt : Exactly. Andrew : And so the demo was look at how I can sell more cars for you. Ken Wiebke brings VinSolutions agile development and architectural experience, along with experience providing guidance on best practices and ensuring quality and consistency for development teams.
Ken is particularly experienced in architecting larger scale distributed computing systems involving complex integration and transaction management scenarios. Sean brings cross-industry experience to VinSolutions, with particular success in partnering with operational leaders to deliver exceptional results.
Prior to joining Sprint, Sean held several key finance leadership roles at Raytheon Company. Mark joined VinSolutions in as Director of Performance Management, after serving as one of the early Performance Managers at sister company vAuto. Mark brings a strong background in the retail car business with a focus on customer retention and leading and establishing teams. Prior to vAuto, Mark spent a lifetime in the car business in one form or another. Previous roles have taken him from sales manager and director of marketing in the retail car business, to National Sales Manager at Starcraft Automotive and one of the first District Sales Managers at AutoTrader.
Mark attended the University of Missouri. Skip to content Our Team. Tracy Noonan Fred. James Maynard. Senior Vice President, Product. Post Valuation. Last Financing Details. Developer of Internet-based customer relations management CRM , Internet lead management, and inventory control solutio. Mission, KS. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat n. West Middlesex, PA. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliq.
Canton, NY. Add Comparison. VinSolutions Competitors 9. VinSolutions Executive Team 5 Update this profile. VinSolutions Signals. Growth Rate 0. Weekly Growth 0. Size Multiple x Median. Key Data Points Twitter Followers 5. Similarweb Unique Visitors Majestic Referring Domains VinSolutions Investments 1.
0コメント