Autoist: The KAYAK Of Car Search And More

As the Internet has become more specialized and more complex, online aggregators have become all the rage.

Sites like KAYAK help travelers find the best hotel room, rental car or airline flight at the best price by searching many sites all at once.

Thanks to companies like Autoist, the same process can be applied to searching for an automobile.

Autoist CEO Chris Loar spoke with Benzinga about how his company is helping to change the face of the car buying experience forever.

Benzinga: How did the idea for Autoist come about?

Chris Loar: A few years ago, we were sitting around and I'm going, "Holy cow, I can spend a couple of hours a day, easily, trying to find a car online. If I'm really looking for something, I could spend maybe five, six hours a day."

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these listing sites out there. They keep popping up all over the place. The more they pop up, the more challenging it becomes and the more diluted it becomes for the buyer.

So, I thought, "Why isn't there a platform that actually does the searching for you?"

That's what we're trying to create.

BZ: How is Autoist different from other search engines?

CL: Autoist is constantly searching behind the scenes to try to find (the specific car you are looking for).

If you're looking for a Toyota Camry, you can put in exactly what you're looking for – year, make, model, price, location – just like any other traditional site.

Then Autoist goes behind the scenes and is always looking for you, every minute of every day throughout the web, trying to find that specific car.

Any time a result is found, Autoist pushes it back to you. You don't have to keep running new searches. The software does the work behind the scenes.

BZ: So, Autoist is similar to travel sites like KAYAK, except for cars?

CL: I actually think Autoist is more powerful than KAYAK for cars. The magic with Autoist is, you can run that search for as long as you want, whether it's a day, a week, a year, 10 years— whatever.

You have to think of it as almost an engine behind the scenes, literally looking for you, on your behalf, at any given minute of the day and doing the heavy lifting.

BZ: In addition to a traditional car buyer, wouldn’t Autoist be particularly helpful for a car enthusiast looking for a specific car?

CL: Correct. Depending on the rarity of the vehicle, it could be within a day, it could be within an hour, it could be within a year. It just depends.

The interesting piece about Autoist is that it's always looking for you. It's always active. It's always searching on your behalf.

BZ: So, to be clear, Autoist is not a classified site, right?

CL: There are many great classifieds sites out there. We don't want to be a classified site, because there are already plenty of them.

We really try to separate ourselves from a traditional classified marketplace. We don't think we're that. We think we're an automated search engine.

BZ: You're in beta right now. What's the plan for going live?

CL: We're probably going to be in this beta period for the next couple of months.

With that said, we have quite a few users. We actually have a waiting list of people trying to get on. We're actively letting people on the site to play and test the tool. We want people on there.

So we're encouraging people to go on and play with it. Generally, the reason you do these beta periods is just to throttle people coming on and iron out the bumps.

We're seeing anywhere from 60,000 to 200,000 listings a day, and we're trying to track anywhere from 10–15 million listings at any given time.

We have a lot of data on our hands that we want to make sure is sound for users.

BZ: What about monetization?

CL: [laughs] I'll be honest with you. This really started as a pet project with some tech guys that just wanted to solve a problem. This isn't your traditional startup that works for monetizing.

Our focus right now truly is, we want to solve this and we want to offer this to users. Right now it's free. We'll always have something that's free.

Maybe in the future, we may have some premium features that are more subscription-based. We really think if we can focus on getting users to the site and getting people using this tool that the monetization will come.

At the time of this writing, Jim Probasco had no position in any mentioned securities.

Image Credit: Public Domain

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