AutoMudo.com
A search engine and marketplace for new or used vehicles.
It's been a frustrating battle to get moved back to the dotCOM version of our site. Shorty after launch in 2019 we discovered facebook was wrongly blocking automudo.com. After several attempts to reach out to facebook with no response, we decided to switch to an alternative tld, and relaunched on automudo.io.
After 8 or 9 months, we were finally able to open a line of communication with facebook. The site had apparently been wrongly flagged by their AI, it of course didn't violate any community standards.
I'm happy to announce we are back on automudo.com . It will be interesting to see if we get a shift in traffic patterns. On the .io url we were getting lots of Indian traffic, and currently we only target and cater to the US and Canada.
AutoMudo.io has just done our first partnership. We've partnered with VinAudit.com to provide vehicle history reports for all US based listings to car shoppers for only $9.99.
We had been planning to provide vehicle history reports since an earlier iteration. A placeholder had been on our search results, and we noticed a number of users where clicking the disabled link so we decided it was time to explore this.
The addition of an affiliate partner also adds a secondary source of revenue. We feel it's important to diversify and not be 100% reliant and paid advertising.
Although the program is only available for vehicles based int he US we hope to expand it to Canada in the near future.
IN our effort to make finding the perfect car easier we've launched 2 new ways of finding vehicles.
The first, https://automudo.io/cities, creates landing pages for popular cities in North America. It allows users to focus on finding a vehicle in their close geographical area.
The second, https://automudo.io/makes-and-models-by-popularity, ranks vehicle makes and models by popularity and allows users to quickly see all the popular makes and models for sale around the world.
Our goal with both of these is to increase search traffic and make our app easier to find vehicles.
Automotive dealers can now easily syndicate their inventory to AutoMudo. The program helps dealers with brand awareness and increasing lead traffic. The basic program is free, paid advertising is available.
Car dealerships can find out more by reaching out to one of our dealer partner manager @ https://automudo.io/dealers
Our founder finished YC's Startup School 10 week program! We devoted a solid 10 weeks of full time commitment to build and grow while we went through the program.
We re-launched our beta after a complete rewrite of the front end, and then focused on growth, where we had some ups and downs. We're still trying to find the perfect product market fit and acquire users.
We learned a lot about growth, finding product market fit, and to keep re-launching. I would highly recommend participating in the program and group sessions to every founder.
We successfully launched our proof of concept on automudo.com.
I decided to call this a proof of concept since I had never built a highly available search engine before.
I used elasticsearch on the backend it's fast and scalable. The front end is built in react with Reactive Search. The development time, including the web crawlers was about 2 weeks.
I almost had idea paralysis, I had too many ideas and couldn't focus on one.
With the help of some friends and family I wrote down all the ideas. Than quickly assigned some criteria each idea, based on, affinity, market size, time to launch, competition, etc.
The top idea was a search engine to index and search multiple automotive classifieds websites.
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