Yossi Levi turned his dad’s car lot into one of the best ways to buy a car online. Now, he runs the largest B2B media company in automotive.
This is the inside story of Gettacar and Car Dealership Guy.
I met Yossi when he first started his anonymous Twitter account, CDG. He’d raised $50 million over a few rounds to transform his family’s small dealership into Gettacar, scaling to $90 million in revenue across the US. But as Yossi admits, they never truly found product market fit, and the company had to pivot multiple times after the pandemic highs.
At the same time, the anonymous Twitter account he made to share his insider takes on the car market had caught the attention of everyone in the industry. He eventually wound down the company, returned capital to investors, doxed himself, and went all-in on Car Dealership Guy.
Our conversation goes inside his early marketing strategies for Gettacar and CDG, the hard earned lessons from chasing product-market fit, and his playbook for building a lean, scalable B2B media machine.
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Timestamps to jump in:
7:26 Helping at his dad’s used car lot
11:22 How car dealerships make money
14:32 $28m revenue with Facebook ads
17:48 Putting gifts in customer trunks and filming it
22:58 Starting Gettacar to sell cars online
25:04 When a VC pulled his first term sheet
31:08 Recruiting full-time hires with part-time consulting gigs
34:45 Personally guaranteeing the debt used to finance vehicles
36:50 Helping subprime consumers buy cars online
39:24 How 2021 tricked them into thinking they had a sustainable business
41:57 Why you can’t rush Product Market Fit
42:23 Pivoting Gettacar to a profitable, PE-backed business before winding it down
47:22 Starting an anonymous Twitter to share insights from his day-to-day
50:08 Turning Car Dealership Guy into a media business
53:38 Doxing himself with a 13-minute documentary
58:29 Why you have to consume to be a good creator
1:00:04 Screensharing CDGs content schedule
1:02:59 Why every employee needs to generate content or revenue
1:06:53 How he built the #1 automotive podcast
1:09:27 Creating a car / auto influencer agency
1:11:34 Building a B2B automotive ad network
1:14:50 Evolving into a holding company
1:20:27 Importance of moving fast
1:23:34 Why people actually like sponsored content
1:28:08 Wishing he pivoted to B2B faster
Referenced:
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Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Yossi, welcome to the show.
Yossi Levi:
Turner, thanks for having me on.
Turner Novak:
I'm excited to have you on. You have a pretty awesome story. Usually, I don't have the guest start out with “tell me your background”, tell me your story, but yours is awesome. You joined your dad's dealership, first job I think that you had. Can you take us back into those days and fill us in on what happened?
Yossi Levi:
Yeah. My story is pretty unique, in that I've focused on different parts of the same business. I went from a traditional family dealership. This is not like a dealership like what you're likely thinking. This is a side lot with 10 to 20 cars, just to make ends meet. Very small operation.
Turner Novak:
A small, small family business. Yeah.
Yossi Levi:
Exactly. It starts there. It pivots to a venture backed tech auto retailer. I'll explain that story and what happened there.
Then it pivots from there, to what I'm doing today is Car Dealership Guy, a vertical B2B media company. I'll explain what that means as well.
My experiences have gone in all different directions. I would tell you that it was never my intention to do these last two businesses.
For me, it has been just a constant exploration of what am I curious about, which has led me to working on very different types of businesses. We'll talk about that as well.
Turner Novak:
Awesome. Going back to the dealership days, the lot, a couple cars. At what point did you first start working with your dad?
Yossi Levi:
You have to think about my background. I came from a lower middle class, we eventually grew into middle class type of family. I didn't have all the options in the world. I didn't have the confidence or the capital to say, "I'm going to go build a rocket ship company," or something like that. That was not my background.
For me, it was okay, let's be practical. What's in front of me? What are the options? Where can I potentially add the most value?
I was able to do take on these opportunities, where maybe I didn't love it, but I knew that I would learn something, and it would eventually lead to the next step in my life and career.
Turner Novak:
It's kind of like the cards you were dealt almost. You were just taking what was in front of you on the field, playing the game. Not necessarily taking crazy risks that didn't make sense.
Yossi Levi:
The cards I was dealt, that's what I embarked on. Even if you go back to my time when I was an undergrad, I said, "Okay, what are the practical opportunities here?" My father had this small used car lot. He needed my help.
My dad is first generation immigrant. The whole internet stuff, marketing, that wasn't his forte. He was great at buying the cars, selling the cars. We had a small family car lot. I committed to a university that was local, so that I could go back and forth between school and work. That was really what I focused on doing early on. I got involved with that very actively in college.
Now, I never wanted to be in the car business. Again, it goes back to that practicality. It was hey, this is what the family needs. This is a real opportunity where I could pay off my college debt pretty early because I can bring real value.
And by the way, I have a head start. I was already compounding in college. I was compounding my experience and able to earn a decent living when I'm still a university student. I don't have to do these other work study, and all these other things to make money where you really don't make much.
Turner Novak:
What was the first thing you did? I think I've heard you say you did basically everything except tuning the cars, fixing the cars.
Yossi Levi:
Really, like you said, everything but fixing cars. From sales, F&I, which is the finance manager of the dealership, to buying cars, which I became very active in buying. To being a service advisor, to being a service manager. Everything there was simply what needed to be done.
I never woke up in the morning and said, "I want to go do sales, or this." It was, "Hey, this is what needs to be done. This is a family business. Go figure it out." Or else, the business stops. That was what really got me into the business and got me active. I learned the nitty-gritty of the business. It's stuff that there's no replacement for it.
When you get on that lot, and your father looks at you and says, "You see that person down there? Go sell them a car." You're scared as shit. You're young, maybe you've never sold something. It's uncomfortable. You're in Philly. Some interesting characters come on your lot, there's no shortage of that.
I say it was such a good bootcamp and university. We used to call it Harbison Avenue University. That was the street that the dealership was on. We would laugh about it. "What school do you go to? Harbison Avenue University." It's understated how much you learn actually just doing.
I'll talk about, later in this pod, about how that's parlayed into a multi-million dollar media business. But again, it's just learning and acquiring that knowledge, it's just so, so valuable early on in your career.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Then, just speaking about the dealership business model. If you've got one lot like that, how does it generally work? Can you just talk through what are some of the big problems you're usually facing? What drives the most value of the business? What are the margins? All that kind of stuff.
Yossi Levi:
Automotive is the second-largest consumer vertical in the country. $1.2 trillion a year in sales, between new and used vehicles. It's no surprise that so many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and founders go after automotive, because there's a lot of money in it. Dealers spend lots of money, budgets are very fat. Spend tons on marketing, on software, blah, blah, blah.
The dealership business, it's an interesting one because there's almost nothing like it in the country anymore. Where it's still a very much mostly family owned operation, very entrepreneurial type of business. If you imagine what supermarkets were 50 years ago, or hardware stores, things like this, this is what the dealership business still is today.
A big reason for that is because it's a lot of franchises. Franchises can only issue specific number of franchises in every state, in every region, in every city. There's franchise laws which protect the dealership system. There's pros and cons to all this stuff. But the bottom line is it's still very much very fragmented, more than many, many other industries.
At the dealership, you typically have multiple profit centers. You can sell cars. If you drill into that, you can make money on an actual car, then you can make money on additional products, such as warranties and whatnot. You service cars. You sell parts.
You have what's called reinsurance businesses, where if I sell you a vehicle service contract, like a warranty, I can actually participate in the underwriting profit or loss of that warranty that I sold you. That's called being a reinsurer as a dealer, and most dealers do it at scale. It's very profitable if done right.
Again, that's just to give you four examples of how diversified the dealership business is. But how there's just multiple profit centers to where it really creates a pretty well diversified type of business and brand.
If one profit center is not doing too well, maybe market forces or that new car business is slow, well you know you still have service to buoy you. It's pretty neat in that, for an entrepreneur, it's a great type of business where you're actually taking less risk to a certain extent, because you are pretty diversified.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because everyone has a car. Everyone is going to be either buying, or fixing, or getting insurance, financing their purchases. Cars, you need to get a new one every X number of years. You get it fixed every whatever number of years, or months.
Then when you're sitting there, the lot, I think you mentioned before, 10 to 12 cars. You were kind of doing everything. What did you like the most? What was the most fun for you?
Yossi Levi:
I think about this sometimes. I'll never go back to the day of having the privilege of being that newbie, not knowing anything. Having the time to really just explore. Today, obviously my time is more valuable, and what I do today, I have other responsibilities.
I think if I go back to my late teens, early 20s, it really is how much can you learn. It sounds trite, but it's just so true. It's how much knowledge can you absorb that will pay dividends in the decade to come. Because that is what I was optimizing for, and I'm glad I did. Of course, I made money, and of course it was great. But at the end of the day, I always optimized for just learning, and that was through doing.
I didn't have all the answers. I got thrown into different challenges and I had to figure it out. It was really stressful at times, especially when there's a customer. Remember, this is retail. I would have customers in front.
When I got thrown into finance, I had customers in front of me. Dude, I had no idea what I was doing. None. I would just pick up the phone. I'm calling the bank reps, who I need to send deals. I'm like, "Hey, what do I put on this screen?" I have a person literally in front of me, and I'm asking a bank rep. Dude, these bank reps, I still know some of them. They're like, "Hey." What do I put on this line?
I made lots of mistakes. This is truly how I learned most positions. Remember, there's no one that could train me. My own father didn't know how to do certain things. We had a dealership. We were all just figuring it out. This is how we grew the business from nothing to a couple million dollar a year business. We eventually scaled it to $28 million a year, bootstrapped, fully profitable. It was a great business. At that point, we obviously had a 25, 27 person team.
That was really the first step-up, where we really started focusing the business. I was wrapping up my undergrad. We just starting bringing better talent. Even that, I didn't entirely know what that meant yet. But I did know that I did have enough of a hunch of what we needed. Alongside my father, we started pretty heavily recruiting better talent to help us grow the dealership.
Turner Novak:
Then, I think when you probably graduated college, working full-time, really leaning into things, mid 2010s, roughly?
Yossi Levi:
Correct.
Turner Novak:
The internet was just kind of becoming a thing, but it was still not common to sell cars online, right? It was less than 1% market share, probably?
Yossi Levi:
Oh, yeah. If you think about it, what really catapulted our business was when we started doing Facebook ads. What I did was I had a very different vision. I don't know why I had this vision. I always felt like the traditional dealership ads were icky. I just didn't like it.
Turner Novak:
What are they typically?
Yossi Levi:
"Hey, come on down, $99 a month," this and that. Not to say that some of those don't work, and not to say that some of those are not true. But I felt like we were more than that.
I always had a knack for marketing. If you just put me on the lot and said, "Go do whatever you want," I just gravitated to the computer and to the Facebook ad platform, and stuff like that. That was where my interests led me to. I don't know why.
I was always interested in, how can I hack the brain of a consumer to come buy a car from me? Now remember, it's a dealership business. I have 40,000 other competitors. My cars are arguably no different than theirs. And they probably have better banks than me.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, all the same.
Yossi Levi:
Yeah. Super difficult to differentiate. Why would they come buy from me?
By the way, this was the initial foundation for Gettacar. Which was the mecca of differentiation in my mind, at least initially. But we'll talk about that soon.
For me, I said, "Okay, let's try these Facebook ads. But let's do something differently." No dealer was running Facebook ads. None. I'm telling you. 2014, 2015, no dealers were running Facebook ads. Period.
Turner Novak:
Was this where, you had a page, and it was “Yossi's Cars”. It was like, "Come on in, visit today!"
Yossi Levi:
No. What I did was I started videotaping the experiences of customers. Just people buying a car, and putting that on Facebook.
Now I'll tell you a story. I go to dinner one night with three of my friends. One of them actually ended up starting my next company alongside myself. Two other guys founded a company called Gopuff, which you know about, you've heard about.
We're sitting at dinner. We're talking about what can I do that will just differentiate the business and be unique. We're just at dinner, we're all drunk, we're just talking. One of the guys was like, "Hey, what if you just put a gift in people's trunk and just see what happens?" The second I heard that, I was like, "Wow, that's interesting."
What I started doing was I got connected to an electronics supplier in New York. I ordered three palettes of closeout electronics. Basically, imagine that all these electronics that the retailers didn't want, or maybe there was overstock. Just shit, headphones and whatever, microwaves. They arrive at the dealership two, three weeks later.
I start putting random shit in people's trunks. Literally, dude, microwaves. There's videos of this still on Facebook. People are coming, they just bought a $30,000 car, or $20,000 car. They're going to the car. I bring the entire dealership, these people think I'm crazy.
I say, "Everyone, we're all going to clap and say pop that trunk, pop that trunk." Dude, they opened the trunk and they see a microwave. They're going nuts because just the experience, the energy. Where does that happen? What dealership does that happen?
We videotaped these experiences, we put them on Facebook, and it went viral. I think Snoop Dogg shared this on Facebook. I think some other rappers. It was all over the country, it went viral. This took time, obviously.
We just doubled down on it. We trademarked Pop That Trunk and we started a whole thing, where we become known as the dealership that pops that trunk.
Again, it was just this type of marketing spin and trick that really created a lot of buzz and really catapulted our business. It was just that creativity and doing something that was so unique, but also created that curiosity. Everyone that's scrolling on Facebook would be like, "What's going to be in the trunk? What are they going to show next?" That was a very pivotal moment for the business.
Turner Novak:
Plus, they probably wanted to be in one of the videos, too. Not just what's in the trunk but, "I want to buy one of those cars now. I want to go through that."
Yossi Levi:
Yeah. It created this status where, in Logan, the local market, the people's friends would be like, "Hey, you bought a car from them, right? Oh my God, we saw you in the video." It was a cool thing, that experience. It's similar to VC, where it created FOMO, created curiosity, and people came flocking in. Human nature is human nature, man. It works in different ways.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You alluded to Gettacar. At what point did that happen? Was this in that dinner where you're like, "Okay, what can we do to differentiate?"
At what point did you start realizing that I should try this ... Well, I'll let you explain what Gettacar was. What was the point of going that extra, extra leg of differentiation?
Yossi Levi:
Remember, I was operating a traditional used car dealership. At this point, we were doing close to $30 million a year in sales. We were profitable. Probably netting, I don't know, $1.5 to $2 million a year, 5% net margin or so. It was a nice, healthy business. Things were going well.
But we were plateauing. There was two options for me. It was either grow the business just traditionally, like open new locations and whatnot. Or try something very different. I knew I could grow the business traditionally, but it didn't really interest me. I felt like if I'm going to spend my next decade building something 20 years, I really want to do something that I just really believe is the future.
I started doing a lot of homework on this online car buying stuff. Carvana had just gone public, maybe it was getting ready to go. It was still very nascent, a couple hundred million dollar valuation. Vroom was growing, all these competitors.
Turner Novak:
What year was this? '17, 2017?
Yossi Levi:
Yeah, this was '17. This was early, mid '17 when I started to research. Remember, online car buying has technically been around for two decades. eBay Motors, online car buying. But it was never super ubiquitous, it was never well branded and marketed to the consumer. It was a whole different thing. Plus, the experience was subpar.
I started doing this homework and I said, "Man, there's something here." But the challenge that I ran into was where am I going to get the capital to build out this crazy online platform, even if I want to do it. How am I going to do this? Two, if I do something, I've got to go all-in.
Given my network, and again having been so exposed to a VC and all these things ... Again, I had no idea what venture capital really was, but I was exposed to it through my immediate friend group. I started realizing that, if I have this big vision and I want to build something, I could leverage VC to do this.
Now remember, at this time, I didn't even have a financial model. It was a family business. I didn't know what the fuck this stuff was. The way I knew how much money we made was the cash balance in the bank, literally.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Is it going up?
Yossi Levi:
Yeah. It was that unsophisticated, but it worked. Now look, I did have a very simple financial statement from my dealership admin system. But again, it wasn't a model. There weren't growth targets, none of this stuff.
I built out this entire plan. It took me six to nine months. I was building the wire-frames, and the business model, blah, blah, blah. I said, "I'm going to build a better way to buy a car. I'm going to do it online." Here was the key insight.
I knew that my customers, the majority of them were coming onto the lot. And remember we were in a city lot, a city car lot. We didn't have a lot of parking space, so 80% of our inventory was at some random off-premises parking lot. And when you came onto the lot, you're like, "I want to see that car," we just sent someone to go bring it. Right?
So what that taught me was I was, do people really need to see it? If the car's not here anyways, can't I just sell it online? Why do they even need to come into the store? And that was my thesis. That was the insight.
I said, let's just do a better way to buy a car that I'm not landlocked to my growth and where I could sell anyone a car anywhere because anyways, they're not even buying a car that's on the lot when they arrive here to begin with.
So that was the initial insight and that led me to say, okay, I'm going to build Gettacar. Which was this online auto retailer. Can I tell you about the VC experience? This is pretty interesting.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Yossi Levi:
Until today, the messiest VC raise I've ever done, and I've done three, was the first round of funding for Gettacar.
Now you'd think like, hey, this would be the easiest experience. It's the first round of funding. SAFE note, no board, easy-peasy. But remember I was a traditional business. I was profitable. There was assets on the balance sheet, but I was a traditional business nonetheless.
Turner Novak:
So are you using the existing dealership entity and raising money with that or starting a new company, new entity?
Yossi Levi:
No, we used the existing, which obviously was a huge advantage because investors saw track record. There was a real life business. Needless to say, we were targeting a moonshot. So the existing business, after I'd say one and a half rounds of funding, no one really cared about it anymore. Even after one round, it was kind of like no one cared about it anymore. But it did provide some comfort for the initial investor.
But that didn't make it any easier because remember, I came from, it was a traditional business. Investors were kind of a little confused, but they all knew that, hey, there's a real track record here. And I was intro'd to an investor for the first one through my network for the first round of funding.
They flew me out to Santa Monica, sat with me for six hours. It was just a really lousy experience, very bad experience. Till today I've raised plenty of other rounds of capital, but nothing was like this. Needless to say though, I got a term sheet. It was a $9 million term sheet.
And two weeks or so before closing, the investor pulled the term sheet. I was shocked, right? Because we were already in diligence, it was confirmatory, whatever, but they pulled it two weeks before. They tried to do some really shady stuff.
Turner Novak:
So did they pull it, but they were kind of trying to then walk you down and get better terms or something? Or were they actually out?
Yossi Levi:
That's what they did. So they pretty much came at the last minute, and this is wild, but ready for this? They were like, "Hey, we want the real estate as part of the deal."
We owned the properties which we leased to ourselves at below market rates, literally below market rate! I wanted to put this good foot forward, like, "Hey, we don't care about a couple extra thousand dollars from real estate. We just want to build a big tech business." Needless to say, they're like, "We want the real estate as part of the deal."
I was like, "Fuck you. That's not happening." Obviously that's just stupid. What's that Warren Buffett quote? Never gave up something that you need for something that you want but don't need, or something like that. You know what I mean? I would never put my family in that position. It was a non-starter. Imagine I come to you, I'm like, "Hey, I need your real estate portfolio." Absolutely not.
Needless to say, there was another investor where this had really piqued their interest. I kept in touch with them. And luckily I did because guess what? Two weeks later I had another term sheet. A month later we had closed with that other investor on a bit of a smaller round dollar wise, but way better terms that actually made sense and we were off to the races.
So this was really my start with Gettacar. That whole fundraising process, it was super uncomfortable for me. I didn't know much about it yet. I was learning, but I just absorbed all that knowledge and just really understood how this works as much as I could. Found a very, very good lawyer, which I highly recommend. I think, luckily I had a great lawyer since really day one of this stuff, which helped a ton. And then I was off to the races.
Turner Novak:
So you said a firm in Santa Monica and they pulled the term sheet. I think I have a guess of who it is. I won't say it, but that's crazy.
Yossi Levi:
Yeah, I don't want to bad mouth the actual firm name.
I think the point being here is it's not a deal till it's done, number one. That's for sure. Trust your instincts. I had a bad gut feeling having met these people and the whole thing was messy.
It's like a car sale. When someone comes to buy a car from you, whenever you get the customer that has a problem from the beginning, it always ends up being a problem. The hard deals are the least profitable. They suck. The easy deals are always the most profitable. It's like a truism in automotive, and it's just true in life. Trying to force something that's not meant to be, it just doesn't work. So that didn't make sense.
I had met with Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital. Super nice guy, and this was early in the process and he really took interest in the business, but he had good feedback.
He told me, he's like, "Yossi, I don't know what your terminal value is." He's like, "I don't know how you get valued in five, 10 years when you go to exit. Are you valued as a tech company, as an auto retailer?" He's like, "I can't pencil this."
And that was actually really, really good feedback back then because he was right. Our valuation fluctuated hundreds of millions at our peak, which we'll talk about. But I remember he also told me, I sat with Josh and he said, "Yossi." He's like, "Are you sure you're ready for this?" And I said, "Well, what do you mean?" He said, "Right now," he's like, "You're driving a Harley, a 1977 Harley Davidson. It's great. You're about to be an F-16 jet pilot." That's the difference, right? Traditional business venture, it's like a whole different ball of wax. And I told him, I said, "Josh, I'm ready."
And in hindsight, I guess I was. I mean, I really did embark on it and went all-in, but I won't forget that. I won't forget that meeting because it's learning from these type of people. Speaking to investors and smart investors, it's always great.
One, from the questions they ask you. Two, they get straight to the point. The velocity of the conversation is quick and it really helps you focus on what matters. It's like what is going to be the terminal value of this? By the way, I had no idea. I didn't even know what terminal value meant.
Turner Novak:
You Google it right after?
Yossi Levi:
Yeah, When he told me that, I was like, "Oh, shit. He's right. What will these be valued at when it's not just like, hey, here's a couple million dollars check on a phony valuation because you're a seed company. It doesn't mean shit yet."
So all these things sat in the back of my head and just helped me make better decisions as I scaled the company.
Turner Novak:
So, scaling the company. What came next? You closed, it sounds like, 7, 8, 9, I forgot which number you said, but a couple million bucks. Got it on the balance sheet. What happened next?
Yossi Levi:
We ended up closing a $5 million round. I think it was at a $20, $25 million valuation, which was fair. It was great valuation. Again, we had some profits. So we were good. But we were pivoting the business.
The investor was taking a risk, and I appreciate that. This was actually Headline that invested at the time. So I really respected that they were willing to bet on me and I was off to the races.
The first thing for us was how the hell... Well, the toughest part, let me say, two tough parts. Who am I building this with and how the hell am I buying inventory? Right? Inventory is expensive. I just raised venture, not for inventory, for product development and stuff like that.
So here's how I tackled both problems. Number one is with people. Again, I had no network in the community so I literally just went to LinkedIn and I just started messaging people. And for months, I would just message former chief technology officers, VP of operations, all these people. It took time.
But that is how I hired my first executive team. Everyone was cold linked in messages. My CTO came from Vroom, who was a competitor. He had actually just left Vroom because a big PE company took a stake in them so he was out and it was a perfect, but he felt like his job was still not finished. So he came to us. My head of operations came from DriveTime. Again, similar idea. DriveTime was Carvana's parent company.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that was pre Carvana. Yeah.
Yossi Levi:
Yeah. So he kind of felt like Carvana went and was the flashy new thing, but they kind of got left behind, blah, blah, blah. He came to me. So I kind of found all these people that had chips on their shoulders.
I love Josh Wolf's line, where he's like, "Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets." It’s just so true. I found these people that were motivated, excited about the opportunity, among several others, and that solved my people problem. Now, that took a while. These people started consulting, then they saw me raise the funding, then they got more conviction and then they joined.
Turner Novak:
So is that a good tactic then early on, consulting versus full-time?
Yossi Levi:
I love trying someone out as a consultant first. And when I say consultant, I like to give them real tasks. Not like, "Hey, let's strategize." That could work sometimes, but it's like, "Hey, what can you really do for me? Hey, can you find me this? Can you do that?" Really bring value. It's just a good way to build trust, see how they work. The response, the responsiveness.
My head of operations, I flew him out to my dealership just to come help us. I was like, "Yeah, just come. Just do something. Literally just come and bring value."
Turner Novak:
Part of the interview process?
Yossi Levi:
Yeah. Well, and it was even before, it wasn't a formal interview. It was like, "Hey, I need to hire a head of operations. You don't know me. I don't know you. We're getting to know each other. Just come out here, spend some time at the dealership, bring value. That's it."
And he did, and I paid him just first couple of days, which was fine. But he brought real value. He took a look at this process, this team and that. You could just tell he knew what he was talking about.
It was a nice way to de-risk that initial hire because I've made lots of hiring mistakes as well, and they cost you lots of time and money and it can be very, very detrimental. So that was really how we did it.
Also with the CTO, I was like, "Hey, build me the plan. Show me the plan. What are you going to really do?" Right? Whenever I hired an executive that was not able to really articulate a plan after looking under the hood a little bit and understanding the vision, it never worked out because they didn't know what the fuck they were going to do.
So it's like, "Hey, show me the real plan. Build a plan. How are you going to do this?" And the real executives can deliver a real plan.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because that's just step one of actually doing the work.
Yossi Levi:
Yeah, exactly. It's step one. It shows you that someone knows what they're talking about.
The second tough thing here, and this applies to capital intensive businesses, is just we needed debt. And it's really tough at this point. Fast-forward like six to 12 months, we were using some of our capital to buy inventory, our capital and balance sheet, but it was time to get financing nailed down.
On top of that, we were already cashflow negative just because we had built an engineering team, we were building tech. And remember, automotive is again a ~5% net margin business. So we became cashflow negative pretty quickly as we started building a team, and so basically we had to figure out how am I going to get debt?
And I was able to find a partner, Ally Bank, and it was a very scary moment in that I had to personally guarantee everything.
Turner Novak:
What does that mean? For people who don’t know.
Yossi Levi:
So it just means that, look, we needed debt. We couldn't just rely on venture capital in order to grow our business, and the banks that were willing to provide debt to us did not feel as comfortable with our business. And they said, "Hey, we need some guarantee."
So I had to put up collateral, like my personal assets from personal real estate that I owned, which I'd built up over a couple of years. I built up some stakes, bought some properties with my friends. But it was scary that I knew that, look, I'm going all in.
Would I do that today with three kids? Absolutely not. I wouldn't need to do that today anyways. At the time I was single and I said, "Look, I've already raised a VC. There's no going back. I'm all in. What's the worst that happens? I'll have to declare bankruptcy or something. I don't know, but I'm all in."
So we ended up taking this term sheet from Ally for debt. I think they gave us a $5 million line, but it did come with a PG, which took me about two and a half years to get removed. So the other learning there was, be very thoughtful and cautious about the initial deal you get into. Because once you get into that deal, it's very, very tough to change terms down the line without some immense amount of leverage, which we didn't have.
And so that term stuck with me for years and I lost lots of sleep because of it. It ended up working out. But needless to say, it was a rough journey to grow, having that sort of added pressure knowing that this could really hurt not just me, but my family and other stuff like that.
Turner Novak:
So you had a bunch of people hired. You had the capital all set, ready to go.
What was kind of the hole in the market that you saw? Because it seems like there were sort of some other companies that were kind of doing online car buying. But it wasn't really mature yet. What happened over the next year or so right after you got everything set up?
Yossi Levi:
So our angle from a marketing perspective was, can we appeal to the subprime consumers? We knew that the subprime car buying consumer journey is different than the prime because a subprime consumer first needs to arrange financing, then the vehicle. They're shopping for financing first.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's all about can they make the payment basically.
Yossi Levi:
The financing is way more important because, no financing, no car, right?
A good credit consumer shops a bit differently. First they want to know what's the vehicle. Then the price. Then, the financing is a given.
So we said, "Hey, if Carvana is sort of moving upstream in the market, going after better customers and all that, why don't we dominate this lower tier market? Where they still want to buy cars, they can still buy online, but maybe their credit's not as good." So that was the path that we sort of doubled down on.
Now what we quickly realized was that, and this was partly a mistake here, but we were offering, I think, experience and service that was appealing to other parts of the market.
For some reason, the subprime consumer still wanted to come to the dealership. They were more inclined to want to kind of work with someone hand-in-hand. They had less confidence in their ability to get approved for a loan.
And so the subprime consumer did not convert nearly as well, super low conversion rate. We were, as we call it, full gas in neutral. It wasn't really working.
So we had to really pivot. We said, "Hey, we're going to move a bit more upstream and go after a consumer that's a bit more qualified, who there's a higher chance that we can actually sell them a car."
This was sort of our, call it our Achilles heel, where I wouldn't call it we never found product market fit truthfully. I don't know if that's exact way to phrase it was. I would say it was more so we never were able to really differentiate meaningfully in the marketplace to where buying from me was a better experience than buying from Carvana.
Again, I know I kind of just jumped three and a half years forward. In between all that, we grew the company, we raised a second round of funding of $18 and a half million. We raised a third round of funding of $25 million. Each of those rounds was at a $75 million and a $200 and $215 million valuation respectively.
So we had great traction, even though we weren't fully differentiated, if you remember 2021, 2020 car market was very, very hot. The tail was at our back, and that tricked us. That was a curse in hindsight because what happened was the market was so hot that we thought that we were differentiated, and we thought that we had better product market fit than we really had.
And we didn't. Because guess what? When the market started cooling again, the air quickly came out of the balloon.
So what we realized there throughout that journey was that we were able to raise the money and we were able to grow driven by the market tailwinds. But as a business, we were not actually better than the competition. We weren't offering something more unique. And so when the tide came out, we very quickly realized that what is going on? Why are sales dropping? And we started scrambling to figure out how can we fix this.
Turner Novak:
So this was probably mid 2021, like June, July? I'm trying to remember what was the top of the car market.
Yossi Levi:
Yes, exactly. June 2021 was the first month I think that we missed budget drastically. I think it was about 30% or something, top line. And we had just raised another round, our third round. We closed it February 2021.
And it was the worst year ever. The following year and a half was. We're like, "Wait, what's going on?" Right? We had grown, grown, grown. We had all these tailwinds.
I just think that in hindsight, what I love about how I've built the next company, which we'll talk about soon, is Car Dealership Guy, is that I was never under any pressure. It was all organic. There was never any paid growth behind it.
I just think it's undervalued. The ability to truly figure out your product market fit, your differentiation, is just undervalued. And to take your time to just find who really loves what you have to offer, get someone to say, "I love this product. I love this service."
Do it organically. Keep iterating, talk to the audience. These things are just invaluable. And in hindsight, we grew too quick. Because had we taken more time, sometimes I ask myself, "What if we didn't raise capital so quickly? What if we didn't hire such a big engineering team so quickly, so we didn't need as much capital and we just spent another two years perfecting the online car buying process and then raised capital?" And say, would we still be around today? Would we be a billion-dollar company? I don't know.
But I know that it's all lessons that I've taken with myself and having learned that you just can't rush that product market fit finding process because it is so critical. And if you don't have that very strong foundation, everything beyond there is not going to work either. From my experience.
Turner Novak:
So I know, I guess kind of wrapping up the Gettacar saga of your life and getting into Car Dealership Guy, how would you talk through that last year, two years, three years, just kind of wrapping it up and transitioning?
Yossi Levi:
It was about a two-year wind down. First of all, we didn't rush to wind down right at first. We said, "Okay, let's get profitable." So we started raising some capital to go actually acquire profitable dealerships and do this PE conversion model.
Turner Novak:
Yep, I remember this.
Yossi Levi:
Which we were going to infuse them with technology.
We had raised, or we had term sheet commitments for, like 60% of the capital. We couldn't get the remainder. We were already under agreements to acquire two dealerships. One of them was like a week before closing we had to pull out. It was pretty bad, very rough months. But we had to pull out then from that idea.
So that was like a six to nine month period where it's okay, maybe the venture idea won't work, but let's leverage what we have. Our issue is customer acquisition.
Let's leverage the traditional dealerships that are ingrained in their communities to take advantage of them as channel partners. We'll acquire them and we'll acquire profitable revenue. We will be profitable within two years. Amazing.
Did that for nine months. On and off, on and off. Just didn't work. We couldn't actually wrap up the acquisitions.
Once you lose momentum as a startup, it really is a death spiral. It's just tough to rebound.
So anyway, that didn't work. And then from there we said, okay, maybe we just pivot to a completely different model. This was a year later.
But by that point, I think now we're in mid to late 2022. By that point, we had lost talent. Things just got tougher and tougher and tougher.
And it got to a point where we said, "Look, we're not best positioned to compete in this market. We still have a pretty sufficient amount of capital on the balance sheet. Let's return to capital to investors. Let's just not throw good money after bad." But if we don't think we can properly create value, I'm not going to waste investor capital on just coasting year for another year.
I'm just not going to waste time on something I don't believe in anymore. And I'm not going to waste investor time or capital. It just doesn't make any sense.
And it took me a long time to swallow that pill. Because remember, I had dragged family business into this. I had friends that invested. It was really difficult, but I said, "This is simply the right thing at this point. Let's give back the remaining capital and we'll wrap this up the right way and we'll have to move on to the next thing."
I felt like we tried everything we could at that point, whether it was PE, and then of course pivoting to a completely different model. And it just didn't make sense anymore.
And then the problem was, here's another problem. Given the fact that we had grown so much at a certain point, at a certain point, we were doing close to $90 million a year.
So 2021, we did close to 90 million a year in sales. We had 200 employees. That was the year we all also raised another $25 million round. We had sold about 3,000 cars and we had our own reconditioning center.
So we were fully vertically integrated. We were buying the cars, transporting them, fixing them. I mean, it was a lot of moving pieces.
And at that point, our cost structure ballooned, right? Because remember, when you're a family business, you don't have a VP of finance, all these fancy roles. Once you raise capital, it's a whole different ball of wax, right? You need better reporting. There's LPs. And so our cost structure also ballooned.
And so it was really tough to now go back down to being run like a family business again. Couldn't really do that as a VC-backed kind of dealership. It didn't make sense. And so that was the other issue we had with downsizing where our cost structure just didn't warrant it.
It kind of needed to be like owner operated and we were past that point. And so all that culminated to, it's just the best thing to just wind down the business.
We even, by the way, we even tried running a sales process and when we did all the math of how much capital we would burn, by the time the business would be sold, investors would get back less capital.
So all these things combined, the board ultimately decided that, hey, this is the best thing for the business. So that really wrapped up the Gettacar saga.
After two years, I would say it was mid to late 2023, so just about a year ago from today, a little bit less, where I said, it's time we appointed someone to just handle the wind down, and I was going to go figure out my next thing.
Turner Novak:
The reason we're here, Car Dealership Guy. I remember, man, I can't even remember. I think you followed me at some point and maybe replied to me, one of us DMed each other or something. I mean, this was a little ways back. I can't remember exactly.
But can you just take us inside the decision to start Car Dealership Guy and then we can go from there.
Yossi Levi:
When I was going through all this wind down stuff, remember I'm a builder, right? I'm a creative, I'm a founder. It was really uncomfortable for me suddenly doing PE, but I just had to do what I had to do to keep the business healthy. It's like a baby you can't just ... It gets sick, you got to help it.
And one of the things that I was lacking was creativity. That's what keeps me going, wakes me in the morning. I need to do something creative and artistic, which I've learned that about myself in the last couple of years. I actually didn't even know that about myself.
So I started this anonymous account, Car Dealership Guy. It was totally for fun. I just said, Hey, I'm just going to build an anonymous account.
I'd actually seen another account doing this, Strip Mall Guy on Twitter, and I said, I've done a couple of things in automotive, right? I've built a pretty big company. I've run a small family dealership. I know a thing or two.
Let me just share some insights. So I started doing this one day on Twitter and it took off. It was unbelievable.
Turner Novak:
What were you tweeting?
Yossi Levi:
So it's funny because I've sort of reinvented myself. I've now been tweeting for two and a half years, and I'll explain kind of the reinvention process.
But when I started, I just tweeted insights from my day to day. I was anonymous. I was anonymous because I had stakeholders, I had employees, executives. I was like, they're going to see me saying something dumb. I didn't want to take that brand risk. And I was like, yeah, whatever. Let me just jump in this trend. We'll talk about how that changed.
But needless to say, I just started saying, hey, these are the profit margins at a dealership. Or, here's the best way to buy a car. Or, here's what I'm seeing at auctions right now. Prices are declining. Really boots on the ground type of insights, and people really took interest in it.
And it sort of created this persona for me online, where I gained a thousand followers, 5,000 followers, 10,000 followers, 20,000 followers. And I was like, wow, people are really interested in this.
And the tipping point for, or I would say when growth really started taking off was when Zero Hedge, this Twitter account, retweeted a post of mine about market.
I tweeted about, Hey, I said the car market is slowing down. You heard it here first. You won't see this on the news. Do you remember that?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, I feel like that became one of your staples where you would say something. You'd say, “the media's not talking about this”. And then two, three, four days later, it would be front page of the Wall Street Journal and you would always come back and say, you heard it here first. I feel like that happened once a month at least.
Yossi Levi:
And you know what? It's like the growth of Car Dealership Guy has just been crazy. And we'll talk about the, like I said, with the reinvention. But it basically started like that. I just started sharing my personal insights and the media was all over it. People started calling me.
Now remember, here's the funny part. When I launched the account, I was still running Gettacar, and a couple months in, a couple board members were like, oh, who is this? I'm like, it's me. They're like, oh my God, no way. They were laughing and they knew about it, but it was never meant to be a thing. It was like, I'm having fun. I'm sharing insights. There was no monetization. Never in my wildest dreams that I think I would run a media company or do any of that stuff. I had no experience with that. It was just me having fun.
The thing was, as it grew, as this accountant grew and grew and grew, it kind of got to a point where I said, wow. I said, what could this be? It's clear that the market wants this expert led insight platform. What could this evolve into?
And ultimately, that's what gave me the appetite for doing what I'm doing today, which is building Car Dealership Guy as a vertical B2B media company, again, of course focused on automotive targeting B2B. It did not start like that. It did not start like that at all.
I started by appealing to consumers. Then I pivoted to appealing to investors. And then once I had enough notoriety and I was a much bigger account, the industry started to take notice.
And I did two things. I followed my curiosity. Which was the most interesting stuff I can share, and the most unique content is content that's suited for dealers by me, who I've been a dealer number one. Much higher barrier to entry, much more specific scarce insight.
It's not like here are five steps to buy a car. You can Google that and find 10 Joe Schmos. I was sharing really unique stuff.
And the second thing was, how can I build a platform that delivers content to a high value audience? I'll explain that shortly. This is why I really went all in on B2B.
But before I get into that, that was what led me to growing Car Dealership Guy and the reinvention of continuing to say ... My Trojan horse was the consumer. That was how I wedged into the market. But I very quickly realized that there were other cohorts of audiences that were interested in my content and there were better potential content and business opportunities within those audiences.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I remember some of your first couple tweets. Just remember thinking like, oh, this is a clever, smart account and angle. Because everyone has a car, everyone buys a car. The content was interesting to every single person basically you were just, whether you're trying to get a deal, you're looking for financing where the rates are going. You're looking for advice on the market in general. Or if you're an investor, you'd say things about, I think just generally speaking, auto is kind of a leading indicator in a lot of cases.
So just generally the content had a very, very broad appeal. And I remember thinking like, oh, such a smart idea. So I think that's why I was started paying attention and it was like, oh man, this guy knows what he's doing.
Yossi Levi:
Yeah, I think people just really appreciate someone who's been there, done that. I have some battle scars to show for. But I've also, like I said, I've detailed cars. I've been in the boardroom with billionaires and in between. And so I think just having that type of well-rounded experience. I've obviously built a big company, relatively speaking, I've closed a big company. It just shows you a lot. It teaches you a lot.
Also intrinsically, I love the number side of the business. I love the macro. I loved seeing where we're going next. Remember, that was one of the fun parts of my job as a CEO of Gettacar. I have to really understand where's the market going? Where do we want to expand into? What type of inventory do we want to carry? Inventory is everything for you in a dealership business.
So all these things really taught me a lot, and I just started sharing it with the world on Car Dealership Guy.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, and then you at one point doxed yourself. You were completely anonymous. No one knew who you were. I remember, I feel like there was murmurs you were the CEO of Carvana or something. I just remember the hypothesis and theories that people had were kind of all over the place. Why didn't you stay anonymous?
Yossi Levi:
So one interesting thing about Car Dealership Guy was it grew way more than I expected. And it got to a point that was almost awkward. Big people in the industry were reaching out to me. The biggest CEOs were engaging with my content, listening to my podcast. And I didn't know what to do.
I said, okay, if I'm going to build a real company now, if I'm going to go all in on this and build a vertical B2B media company, people need to know who I am. I felt like it doesn't make sense. People are going to think I'm going to have to, I have something to hide.
And I would get all this hate mail like, oh, people that knew who I'm like, oh, you're a failed founder. But little did they know that I didn't have an insecurity about that. Actually, I took pride in that almost in the sense that I actually have experienced things and here's what I've learned from it.
And so I said, how can I leverage this to use it to my advantage? How can I take this, shut up all these haters, number one. But two, how can I tell the world my story without it ... I can't just come out and be like, oh, here I am. This is me. This is what happened. I felt like I wouldn't be able to convey a true story if I just tweeted out, put up a quick video.
I needed a very thoughtful way to own my narrative. Go direct to my audience. Tell my story, and explain to people why I do what I do.
And this led me to saying, how the hell am I going to dox myself? And I decided to do something that I've never done before. But I decided to actually produce a 13-minute Netflix style documentary. So I hired a video producer and I said, our job is to tell my story. I want people to know the ups. I want people to know the downs. I want people to know everything. I want people to know my story and how I got to this point.
We spent four months producing it. We went to the dealerships, we drove together, we flew to Florida, we did all these things where we got all this footage. We got some really big industry CEOs in the video. We had my dad in the video, we had my former employees from Gettacar.
I mean, it was great. It was truly phenomenal where we just had, we created this really deep documentary. Again, only 13 minutes called “Who the F*ck is Car Dealership Guy?” on YouTube, where it just spoke about my story and the ups and the downs and showed videos and pictures.
And boy, let me tell you. That was the best thing I ever did. Because it was like overnight, the entire industry knew who I was. They knew my story. They appreciated the candor. They appreciated the story arc, right?
I mean, it's the ultimate American story. The comeback. We were up to a $200 million valuation, almost a hundred million in sales. Then boom, we were down in the dumps. And then we got back up.
And I'm so glad I did it that way. Because I'm telling you, I would sit at night and I'm like, how the hell do I tell people who I am now? People are going to think I'm crazy. I was a traditional dealer then I built a venture backed auto dealership. Then I built a media company now. People are going to be like, what the hell is this guy doing?
And so it was the best decision to go and just create a real video to tell that story.
Turner Novak:
You really owned the narrative and basically you got to do the unveil or the dox exactly how you wanted. I've known multiple people who they've been doxed. They've had an article from a more traditional publication that gets published. And it's just not the story that they want to tell. It's always great to own the narrative.
We'll throw a link to it in the show notes, so people want to check it out.
Yossi Levi:
I'd built lots of relationships on social media and Twitter over the preceding two years. And so I took advantage of it at that moment. I DMed everyone a week in advance. And I said, Hey, I'm doxing myself in a week. I would appreciate if you could just comment or share this video.
The video ended up getting 1.4 million views on X. And so it was a huge, massively successful PR campaign. Overnight, it told the entire world, who the fuck is Car Dealership Guy? And why I'm doing what I'm doing.
Turner Novak:
I remember when you first told me about it. I was like, I don't know about that. And then I watched the video. I was like, wow, that was so good. This was a masterclass in how to do it.
And speaking of masterclass, I think you've done a really good job at a content creation. You're so good at making things that people want to watch, want to listen to, want to read.
What do you think is the secret? Or maybe, what do you think you do differently than everyone else? And what do most people get wrong when they make content?
Yossi Levi:
So I think it's a couple of things. I think first of all, I genuinely am a student of social media. I actually want to learn. I'm curious. I constantly follow creators like yourself and others where I just see what are they doing? How are they writing? How are they spacing? What type of lowercase, uppercase buzzwords, bold, not bold, video, picture.
I think the first step is you generally have to be curious and you have to consume a lot. It's a misconception that I don't consume a lot or create. You have to consume a lot. You have to see what's out there, and that's how you get ideas.
Nothing I do is original. Or very minimal. What I do is I find great ideas, and I repackage them for my purpose. I think that the first step is just understanding the platform, what works, what doesn't.
Second thing is creating or really understanding your audience. What do people want? What is the content that they want? I know my audience. They want actionable insights and tips into the car business.
I have different cohorts. I have consumers, dealers, but I know that dealers want scoops. They want market intel. They want to be able to make more money, save money. They want an edge on the market.
Consumers want to know where can I get the best deals? What's hot, what's not? Stuff like that. Investors want to know what's happening with the market. Is it heating up? Is it cooling down?
So if you truly understand what people gravitate to towards and what resonates with them, what they want, and you can deliver that value, it makes your creation process pretty easy.
What you see here is sort of how I plan my week. So basically, first of all, let me preface this. We literally break the rules here every day. So when you see me rogue tweet all my off the cuff tweets and all that, they're not in here. This is really our plan schedule.
But basically this just allows me to say, Hey, I know I have six, seven different things I want to post every week. Or, buckets of content for different audiences and whatnot. And I basically designate blocks to them so that it doesn't conflict, because now I have help in posting the stuff. I have a team and whatnot. But this just shows you how I think about it.
It's very organized. Again, this does not include my off the cuff tweets, which I do almost every day. This is the programmatic content that I know, Hey, I do a podcast. I want to clip that podcast. I need some times to post that on a scheduled time, right?
Sponsored data posts, these are posts where brands pay us to share their data. Now, people love this because one, we are sort of this data aggregator. Two, it's great for consumers, but on the other hand, we also get paid to share this data. So it's a win-win, right? I get access to the best data in the industry, the most relevant recent insights and brands pay me to post that and distribute it to my audience. And so we have these sponsored data posts, which are phenomenal product.
So this is basically our rough schedule just to give you a glimpse into how I think about the week. We built this in notion, but it just gives you an idea of how we think about just our posting regimen and schedule.
Turner Novak:
Cool. So for someone who's not on video and just listening, it was basically - you've got it broken out every day of the week. And you make roughly five posts a day, and they all have a different theme, and you don't do too many of one type of post per day.
So you said you have a team at this point. I'm curious, how did that evolve over time? What was the first hire, couple hires? Did you make any mistakes? How's the team kind of evolved over time?
Yossi Levi:
So from a people perspective, I would tell you that I've actually made very minimal mistakes with Car Dealership Guy thus far. And the reason for that is because I've hired in a very disciplined, low risk way.
So number one, everyone came from my audience, with the exception of one person who came with me after Gettacar.
Number two, every single person started out on some consulting basis. So if you were a writer, you started off as a freelancer. If you were a salesperson, you started off selling a couple ads. If you are a content person, you started off helping me with content. So every single person gave me that proof of work before they started, and we were able to really de-risk the relationship and know that they're qualified and culture fits and blah, blah, blah.
But here's what I'll tell you, every single person I've hired, remember, I'm bootstrapped, no capital, raised, nothing like that. Every person I've hired either generates revenue by selling or creating content, with the exception of one person that I just recently hired. That's it. There's no exceptions.
You have to either sell something or create something that we can sell very quickly. And it keeps the company very lean, very disciplined. We don't have fluff. We don't have dead weight, baggage. It's very, very disciplined, and I think that's a beautiful thing because the first hire I brought on was the first full-time hire was a salesperson. I said, Hey, show me what you got. You eat what you kill.
The second hire was a content person. Right now, we're selling a lot of shit. Well, guess what? We need to create more stuff. So come in, relieve me of my time so that when brands need stuff sponsored, you can handle that.
And then the snowball kept rolling from there. Then another content person, of course, in between, I had plenty of subcontractors for video production, audio production, some back office stuff. I had plenty of subs, but there was no like, Hey, let me hire you on a salary and you'll maybe do that. No. Performance-based, has to generate revenue, has to be practical. There has to be a path to monetization within a 60 days period.
I hire a writer. Amazing. What can you do that we can sell? Boom, let's launch a second newsletter on a Saturday. Wow. It's a home run. We test it out. There's product market fit. Amazing reviews, people love it. Great. Now you're full-time, do this every single week. We go sell it out. Very, very, very disciplined, and it's how I've grown a team.
So today, to give you quick context, we are, I mean, we're doing in the millions, like seven figures of revenue, all brand deals. We have a video person, like a video editor, audio engineer. Again, not full-time, but work with us very closely.
We have a sales team of, we have a sales person, a lead sales person, a customer success, two BDRs on a freelance basis. We have a back office person sort of like you call it CFO, but really finance, legal strategy. Whenever we want to launch something new, they're really helping out with ops. They built out our operating system on Notion, they do our analytics. They do a lot of these things.
And then we have two reporters that are creating content because we also launched a news site. I'll talk about all my media properties shortly. And recently hired an admin. So you get the idea. We're growing now, but it's still very, very disciplined. And making sure to maintain a very lean team so that we have that flexibility as we continue scaling.
Turner Novak:
Yes. You mentioned there's more business lines. What kind of came next?
Yossi Levi:
There's more media properties. The mission of the brand has always been to bring transparency to the car market, but I did several things. I knew that a creator and online creator, your time is limited. There's only so much time that you can truthfully bring all your energy, create amazing content, keep your community engaged. It's just hard to do it over an extended period of time. I'm talking about years. And I sort of felt that early on. I love what I do, but I also knew that, hey, I can't do this for a decade. I can't create content at this velocity forever.
And so I knew two things. I knew that I had to problem solve. How do I bring more leverage to the equation and how do I create different lines of business? And for me, the first step was I don't want to rush to monetize.
Rather, I want to rush to build my distribution because I knew that the more distribution I build, the more leverage I'll have later down the line when I want to launch new lines of business and whatnot.
And basically what I've done was over the last year or so, I basically have launched multiple media properties. So today I run the number one automotive retail podcast. It's called the Car Dealership Guy podcast. It's mostly listened to by dealers and industry professionals,
Turner Novak:
And it's still good as a non dealer, non-industry professional. I've listened to maybe 10 episodes over there. I know you've had it for about a year, so you probably have, I think you do once a week, right?
Yossi Levi:
Yeah, twice.
Turner Novak:
Oh, you do twice a week now?
Yossi Levi:
Well, by the way, you just answered my ... That is exactly why I do twice a week, because not every episode is interesting to every single person. And this is, it's like The Pavlovian Theory. I want people to know that every week they can listen to Car Dealership Guy. And the only way to maximize the probability of that is to do at least at least two episodes per week.
And then I know that my likelihood to hooking you at least one time a week is pretty high. So I do two per week every week, no exceptions. And I try to really create different types of content. So if maybe one is a dealer episode, one is like a tech episode, one is a VC automotive VC episode one is whatever, like industry practitioner.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You've had Federal Reserve members or something, or you have more of the banking side, the economic side. I'm just thinking through some of the ones I've listened to over the past year.
Yossi Levi:
Yeah. I've had, like I said, VCs, I've had founders, I've had dealers, I've had GMs, I've had the entire ... But anything to do with automotive retail.
But again, to kind of close the thought. So I did the podcast. Then I launched a newsletter. Then I just started launching other platforms, because now I had more content help. So I launched and went bigger on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts and all that.
And then I said, oh my God, I'm already creating all this content and people want more. Let me just launch a news site. I'm already delivering the news. Let me do it a little bit more officially, informally. So I hired two reporters and I launched CDG News, which is the goal is to be this unbiased central site for all automotive retail.
So that's really the entire platform. But I did something further.
I also knew that I don't want just content just to be reliant on me. So what I did was early on I had a lot of people reaching out to me in automotive space like, "Hey, how do you do what you do? I want to sell ads. I want to do this. I need to scale up my production in automotive." I was like, "Hey, I can't really help you."
But it sort of hit me. I said, if I want to grow and I want to have more leverage, how can I help these people? Having no knowledge or experience in the talent management space, I sort of hacked my way to figuring out how to launch a talent agency. I did that earlier this year.
What that really means is that if you're an automotive creator, you basically come to me and you sign with CDG talent and we basically help you with anything. But at its core, we help you with monetization. Right?
We're experts at biz dev, we have connections with the industry. We're going to get you monetized as effectively as possible at the highest CPMs. In addition to that, we can help you with production, back office, legal, everything else.
Turner Novak:
So who is a classic case of one of these creators that's come on that you've worked with?
Yossi Levi:
So our flagship creator that we signed a couple months ago was Russ Flips Whips. So he's the most viewed automotive creator on social media in terms of actual views on his content. He's a salesman from a Lincoln dealership. Again, Russ Flips Whips. You can find him on TikTok, Instagram. He signed with us earlier this year.
He's been a phenomenal success. We've closed for him multiple six figures of deals. He's just been really, really great. Super talented. We're going to be co-launching businesses with him.
But again, great example of like, hey, a way for one, me to gain leverage where the dollars coming in are not just relying upon me and my content creation abilities. And B, to really bring value to an amazing creator, but also remember he's a creator. He doesn't have time to deal with everything and stuff like that, and the back office and doing deals. We do all that for him. And so it's been incredibly successful and we're super glad we did it.
Turner Novak:
So an example would be, of how this all works together, is I'm just thinking about an automotive advertiser like Geico or an insurance, or maybe like cars.com, or something like that. They'll sign a deal with CDG. They might advertise in the podcast, they might do a sponsored data post, but then also one of the content creators might make a video about their experience using cars.com or buying a Ford or something. I guess I don't really know who all the advertisers are.
Yossi Levi:
Yeah, so it's a good way to think about it.
When you think about us, think about it like this. We want to be this ad network. You should be able to come to us and we should be market movers. Where if you are Chevy, hypothetically, and you have a new car coming out and you want to sell that car and you want to get it to the world, you know that today if you come to us, we can get you in front of tens of millions of monthly impressions on that announcement in very creative ways through our audience. And so, that is really what we're targeting.
We want to be market movers within automotive. Again, massive vertical. And the more creators that work with us, and by the way, they want to work with us because I am a creator, we have the content machine, we have the other creators.
So it's kind of that flywheel. You want to work with the brand. You don't want to work with some cheap knockoff like, "Oh, let's launch an automotive vertical." They don't actually care about automotive. They're not going to be living and breathing it and innovating. They're just going to try to monetize you. We actually live and breathe it.
But if you think about it, that's really the division. It's all roads lead to CDG. And it's really the model that we're building. It's to build this ad network that is going to be a market mover in automotive. And so, that's sort of how it works.
And you said it correctly. When you come to us today, you can choose from a menu. We just signed another great creator in the collectible space, which we're going to be announcing soon. We're working on assigning a creator in the EV space. So we're looking for complementary creators that are the best at what they do in automotive and that can work with us, leverage our platform, our shared services if needed, but also let us bring them deals at above market CPMs because we have that consolidation of power and essentially become that "market movers" in the automotive realm. That's basically the vision.
Turner Novak:
And it gives you more scale too, just generally what you can offer to the advertisers. I think about who is the classic Superbowl advertiser? It's the biggest eyeball, serve it up on a palette type of option you have as an advertiser. Basically, it's like beer and cars. And then maybe, yeah, those are probably the two biggest Superbowl advertisers when you really reflect on it.
Yossi Levi:
But I'll tell you something interesting. So something that's interesting about B2B that I've learned is there's a saying in B2B, which is the best way to retain a client in enterprise is to sell them something new.
And what that means basically is you always want to have new things coming out, new opportunities to get them exposure. And so, the beauty of this model is we're constantly coming out with new creators that have new pools of audiences. And it gives our advertisers new opportunities to get in front of new audiences and get their product or service out there.
The biggest thing that someone may be wondering right now listening to this is like, "Okay, how the fuck do you do all this?" Right? You're running this ad business, you're running this talent agency and blah, blah, blah.
I had this issue. I said, "How am I going to do this?" I believe you can only do one thing at a time effectively as a CEO. You can't run multiple companies. You can't be a part-time CEO. You got to go all in.
And what I did several months ago was we made the conscious decision to become essentially a holdings company. So what does that even mean? It basically means that today, I spent the last year building this distribution foundation of car dealership guy. That is at the top.
So at the top there's car dealership guy, there's the ad business, and it's really the distribution network. Underneath, there's multiple lines of business and they each have their own operator who has a direct incentive in that company. It can be some long-term incentive, it can be equity. Right? But they have a direct incentive in that company. So CDG Talent, as an example, has its own operator. I am not the day-to-day operator of that company.
What I am is the CEO of the holdings company and operating the ad business day-to-day, which is really our marketing foundation and funnel. But the actual operator for CDG Talent is John. That's not me. Right?
And so, this is how we've been scaling up. We're now working on launching our second business. We're actually launching a subsidiary, which we're merging with another company in the marketplace to launch a commoditized service business. And we're even in talks about our third business.
And remember when I say launching these businesses, here's the neat thing about it. I get to keep doing what I'm doing, which is my superpower, which is marketing, right? I am focused on what I am the top 1% at. I am not focused on signing talent or doing recruiting. It's actually the second business for launching or recruiting company.
Turner Novak:
That's what you were telling me about the other day.
Yossi Levi:
Yeah. So I'm not the operator. I'm finding the best people for these things. I found the best recruiter. John is phenomenal to run the talent business and there's other businesses we have in mind. But I'm finding the best people, letting them do it.
And guess what I'm providing? I'm not just providing distribution. You could say any creator could offer that, although there's not many successful automotive creators. But you could say any automotive creator could offer that. But I'm also offering shared services. So I literally bring you, I guess we're like an accelerator or an incubator or whatever you want to call it, but you sort of come to me and you say, "Hey, I'm going to team up with CDG Ventures." And with us you say, "What are you the best at?" Right? So Turner is the best in the world at farming.
Well, great. Come to us. All you need to do with us is farm. We will handle legal. We will handle accounting. We will help you with everything behind the scenes. Oh, and by the way, we're going to take care of distribution. You just go farm.
And so the likelihood of success is super high, number one. As a founder, because I have an audience and I get to launch multiple businesses, I get to build a diversified portfolio, which historically has only been something that VCs could take advantage of. They have 20, 30 different investments. Guess what? That founder only has one company.
So I get to build a diversified portfolio of investments. I get upside in all those investments and I get to focus on what I'm best at. It's truly a win, win, win, win, win. And you don't know what business is going to take off. You get multiple shots at goal on doing multiple things while leveraging your distribution and doing what you are the best at day in and day out. That's what I do today.
Turner Novak:
Is there any benefit then if somebody wants to advertise to the B2B dealership audience, but then they also take advantage of the recruiting kind of vertical, and then maybe in the future when you've got 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, there's a third thing. So it's almost like you're selling once, but then you benefit multiple times from multiple lines.
Yossi Levi:
And that's where the operating leverage comes in. So the way these companies work ultimately is everything reinforces each other. Every brand reinforces the other brands.
So the recruiting clients might use the advertising, and of course you give everyone great deals. They're your clients, you incentivize them to use your other products. But it's no different than if Salesforce has me as a customer and they want me to use Slack. It's the same exact idea. Right? I have the customer and then you cross pollinate all the businesses.
And so, that's the vision. Our goal to run a negative CAC business. Because if you think about it, it's not only do we have zero CAC technically. But it's actually a profitable media business. And then we also supplement it with our other businesses and messages for other businesses in order to offer that distribution at an extremely below market rate, which is zero. Right?
So it gives us a moat for other businesses by expanding the margins and giving us a direct go to market channel that is just completely proprietary and focused on the exact audience. And so ads we sell to industry vendors that want to sell to dealers, and then services we offer to dealers. That's sort of how, not to say that we don't offer some services to vendors as well. Recruiting for example. You can offer that to vendors, but essentially it's like the services are for dealers and the ads are for vendors. And that is sort of how our business is structured.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. What are you most worried about? I mean, just where are the places that this could break do you think? Is there not enough opportunities? Is it autos to cyclical of an industry? I'm just curious, where do you think this could go wrong?
Yossi Levi:
A couple things. I think number one, it's important to launch these things quickly, but also not too quickly. So on one hand, I need to have a good foundation. If I don't have a strong community, people don't trust me. Why would they use my services?
Turner Novak:
And that's comes back to the you're sitting on top, you're consistently cultivating the relationship.
Yossi Levi:
You're built by one brand. You can also die by one brand. Right? Now, the businesses, they don't leverage the same brand and whatnot. There is some distinction and that's intentional. We don't want every single person representing all these subsidiaries to be walking around with the CDG logo. But there is enough of a connecting thread. It still has the CDG prefix.
So we kind of co-associated every brand with our holding company, but not fully, fully, fully. You also don't know what, if you exit one of these companies one day, you're not going to license your brand to some third party.
So that's the model we landed on. I don't know if I would say I worry, but necessarily because I really do feel like we're in a great position. But I do think about, I want to launch these businesses fast enough to where I am not burnt out from the content creation, but also not too fast to where it's hasty and it comes at the expense of quality.
So I believe that as a creator, you have a finite timeline. You might be able to only create high quality content for three years, two years, five years, everyone's different.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think I saw seven was the average you hit Burnout was after seven years. I read it right when I was at seven years and I was like, "Oh man, this is not good."
Yossi Levi:
Yeah, well, so you have to diversify. You have to leverage your current audience to build these service businesses, which is cyclical. If the market slows, then people aren't advertising. Your content might not be as good one day. So you have to hedge.
And so as a creator, remember lightning doesn't strike many, many times. I mean, it can happen once you can lose momentum, you have to strike the iron while it's hot and try to take your audience and convert them into other types of businesses as well. So I think that's what I focus on a lot. And again, I wouldn't say it keeps me up at night, it's just what I'm focused on. I think we're doing it very methodically, finding the right operators for the right businesses and growing the holdings company.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I mean, it's a really cool model. I think we've had a couple people taking this almost B2B creator model. And, I don't know if holding company is the right word for it, a little bit different. But we've definitely had a couple on the show. I think Craig Fuller at Freight Waves, Kevin Espiritu at Epic Gardening. Totally different industries, but gardening that you mentioned was actually one of the past guests. He has a really interesting business.
Yossi Levi:
I'll say one more thing I was thinking about this. You had asked me, what is an opinion I have that's maybe contrarian. I don't think I have many. I'm not like Peter Thiel or anything like that. But what I will tell you, I do have one, which is that it is completely false that people don't like sponsored content.
Turner Novak:
Really? Yeah. That is a hot take.
Yossi Levi:
Yeah. 50% of my content is sponsored and people still love it and engage with it. And why is that right?
It's because it doesn't feel like an ad, because it's not. Well, technically it is. But I'll share real insight, I'll give you value. And then at the bottom I'll say, and if you want to learn more, go to this website's company. And by the way, this was sponsored by this website. But no one cares because I'm offering you value. I'm not telling you come to my website. Like, no, I never do that.
It's always value first, ad second. And so, I think the fallacy is that you can't scale with ads or that's not like a sustainable model. You could say anything you want in the world. People love ads, but people love good ads. That's the difference. You put out shitty ads, people are going to hate it. You put out relevant ads, people are going to love it and are not going to complain. And that is what we've rooted the business in.
We bring the best brands in the market, they give us the best data possible. And we share it with the world, and they pay us to share with the world. And everyone's happy. The brand gets exposure, the people get proprietary insights and we get paid. And it's just like everybody wins.
And so, if you can create content and have a way to monetize it, but make it not feel like an ad, I think that is the pinnacle. And again, we're living proof that you can do this and have a multimillion-dollar business from selling ads by sharing relevant, insightful content.
Turner Novak:
If we go a little bit deeper on that, I agree with you that a lot of this sponsor content, it is just bad content. You lead with almost like the drudge of this is an ad. What do you think the secret is then to actually making good content that's sponsored?
Yossi Levi:
Look, you can't put lipstick on a pig. So number one, you need good insights. We've probably spent the most amount of time working with our clients on finding the best insights they have.
Turner Novak:
So what's the best angle or hook?
Yossi Levi:
Well, that's copywriting. We'll get to that soon. But first it's like what's the content? Is it actually interesting? Is it actually relevant? Give me a real data point. We look for extremes, right? Not necessarily a bad extreme. It can be a good extreme, but are we at the peak level of subprime delinquencies? Give me an extreme, something that's newsworthy number one, right? No different than being a journalist, which I'm not a journalist, but you get what I'm trying to say. You have to act, you have to find that nugget. That's number one.
So first we look through the data that our partner sent us. Then this is where our core competency comes in of copywriting. Right? You've got to put a very relatable hook.
So for example, if supply and demand in the car business is shifting, then we might lead with, and this is a real post we did, which is the era of deep vehicle discounts is coming to an end. And this is referring to the 2010s as an example. I'm not going to say vehicle supply and demand is shifting. People are going to screw right by that and go, "What the fuck?" Like I have no idea what I'm talking ... No.
Turner Novak:
That sounds like a Wall Street Journal headline of the era of deep discounts is ending.
Yossi Levi:
Well, by the way, headline writers are perfect for this kind of stuff. This is what you need to do.
You have to take every insight, encapsulate it into a headline that's like dumb simple. It all comes back to five different things. And then, you elaborate underneath the context, the data, the insight, and then you plug the company at the bottom. But that's it.
So the secret you ask is actually get good content and you got to know how to copyright. You have to, as Henry Belcaster says this very well, he kind of contextualizes it, but it's like you got to leave with the setup and then you go into the conflict and resolution.
So if you can deliver an insight and be like, "Hey, the era of deep vehicle discounting is over, talk about what's happened over the last couple of years. But then this happened and now we're going into this new era of blah, blah, blah. That's a phenomenal post and it's going to get a ton of views. People are going to engage with it. It's going to get people to share and blah, blah, blah. And no one cares that it's sponsored. I say that again.
It's all about the quality of the content. And you can build a very great negative CAC business this way, which can then funnel and fund your other businesses.
Turner Novak:
That's a lot to think about.
Yossi Levi:
I'll leave you with one more gem. If I could, I would probably have pivoted to B2B earlier. Because B2B is an audience that will always want to consume insights, because they want to learn. They want to get better.
If I'm a car dealer, I want to consume the latest news insight every single day, every week. If I'm a consumer, I might buy a car once every six years. I might follow a car dealership guy for three months, four months, but then I don't care anymore.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you're going to unsubscribe from the newsletter because It keeps showing up and you already got your car.
Yossi Levi:
Exactly. And so the best type of audience and follower you can have is going to be a B2B follower.
Not to mention that they're going to have higher lifetime value. They can spend more on your products and stuff because business. A thousand times better.
Consumer is great if you can get to massive scale like an MKBHD or Marcus Brownlee or a Kylie Jenner, whatever, name any big consumer. You got to get to really big scale to do consumer well. With B2B, you really don't.
You could be a massive B2B platform with 20,000 followers. You just have to have incredibly strong content catered towards a niche. I just think it's understated.
You do have to know what the hell you're talking about, which means you actually have to have done something in the real world. Don't just say, "Hey, I'm going to start talking about painting." And I have no idea what I'm talking about or like SaaS.
But the point is that opportunity is there to specialize and be something very important and meaningful to a niche, as they say riches are in the niches. And so I really, really believe in that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, if you just think like 10 customers, they each pay a hundred grand. That's a million dollars in revenue versus how many small, you're selling some for 10 bucks, how many do you need to sell to get a million in revenue? It's like the 100x more efficient customer or 1000x? No, my math is probably off.
Yossi Levi:
A lot of X.
Turner Novak:
A lot of it. Yeah. Well, this has been awesome. Thanks for coming on the show. This is super fun. I hope people learned a lot.
Yossi Levi:
All right, T, thanks for having me on, man.
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