When Harry Jones, Tom Reeses, and Alex Battle set out to found Motorway, a startup that connects car owners with dealers looking to buy and resell their cars, in 2017, it was the founding team's first It wasn't a startup rodeo. It wasn't even the second time.
Motorway was actually the founding team's fifth startup, Motorway CPO Jones said on a recent episode of TechCrunch's Found podcast. He added that the co-founders met in 2002 when they were all young, and Reese and Jones worked at the same startup and were able to grow alongside each other.
Despite their experience and success, two of the startups they founded were acquired, but Motorway pivoted to its current strategy early on. The company started as a price comparison tool for consumers to see how dealers value their cars. Jones said that while consumers were actively using the tool, the team realized that it wasn't going to make much headway with that strategy, so they pivoted to the current model.
“This shift was really important in how we evolve the company,” Jones said. “First of all, as a founder or entrepreneur, you have to get used to the idea of change.”
Jones also talked about how the founding team was able to bring the company's ideas to life, from curating travel accommodations to an office space search website and now highways.
“We try to deliver value to the market as quickly as possible by building something very small and crude, even if it's a one-page website,” Jones said. Ta. “If we pull the strings a little bit and find a string that's getting traffic and good conversions, we'll go further and build on it further. It's the same kind of thing we did with the freeway. That was the approach.
While many startups quickly expand to different regions and sometimes even disappear, Motorway remains committed to building exclusively in the UK.
“Our market share is still quite small in terms of overall car trade in the UK,” Mr Jones said. “There's a lot of headroom there, that's the first point. The second is that we feel like we haven't quite built out the entire end-to-end experience for Motorway yet. For us. It’s really important that we stay focused on that before we go outside the borders of the UK.”
Jones also talked about how the highways team has implemented lessons learned from past companies and what kind of cars they drive now.