Hello, loyal reader.

Last month, I discovered the age old practice of calling people on the phone. How quaint.

Since then, I've applied the insights I've learned from my conversations with strangers into a landing page, to help me articulate the concept and gauge people's interest. At first, it was just an email waitlist form, but now it's a dedicated page:

https://carpricevalue.co.za/sell-my-car/

The initial waitlist captured a measly 2 emails, but I think this was mostly a low-traffic issue.

I reached out to them to get more info, but they didn't respond.

I wanted to send an email blast to my main email list about my new "sell my car" offering, but I wanted to gauge more qualified/educated interest in the offer. So I just committed and built the landing page to explain the idea better.

Keep in mind, I don't know how to sell a car 🤠. However, I wanted to figure out if my current website audience were interested in selling their cars (i.e., can I attract the supply to meet the discovered demand).

I announced my offer and added it to my ongoing email drip campaign (now 5 emails long).

So far the offer was sent to 310 people, and 4 people signed up (i.e., ~1% conversion rate). Not too bad I think.

Oh shit, now I have to find buyers for 4 cars 😰.

What made things difficult was that all 4 cars were in 4 different areas across South Africa 😬.

I psyched myself up and started calling car dealerships.

Obviously, it sucked, but it also felt like a game where the objective was to get past the (evil) receptionist and talk to the right person. All I had to do was say the right words, avoid the wrong ones, and peak their interest enough for me to send them more details.

I discovered that WhatsApp is a big channel for car sales in South Africa.

I ended up making 51 calls and sending my list of available cars to 6 car dealerships (i.e., ~11% conversion rate). Good, but at what (emotional) cost?! 😭

Still no car sale though. 2 of the 4 people wanting to sell their car informed me that their car was already sold within 2 weeks after they signed up.

I mean, this is all cool information to gather (none of it statistically significant), but I'm eager to complete one sales loop and prove that this thing can actually work.

Conclusion

I realize that I'm building a 2-sided marketplace. Again, not an ideal product for a solo dev, but perhaps marginally better than a purely consumer product?

I'm unsure about how far I am from actually selling a car. There's probably some critical mass number of buyers/seller that makes this thing work. For now, my answer is: more!

I wonder if that "more!" is humanly possible for me to achieve, armed with just a phone and a dream. Or if it's something that needs to be amplified using paid ads 🤔.

If you're interested in what happens next, I'll email it to you next month.