Carfix

The idea of Carfix stumbled upon us when we thought about the issue of cars and traffic around Wellington. We found that it was very difficult and time-consuming to actually find the time during the week to get your car serviced or even just to get its warrant of fitness. Not only this, but a lot of people are not very familiar with the technical side for cars and so they can be charged much higher for unnecessary fixes or jobs which are not required. As a result, the customers could lose not only their precious time but also could potenially be ripped off on pricing espcially when there could be better deals out there.

The solution to this problem was Carfix. Carfix is the type of service that takes the idea of uber into car services. Carfix would handle everything you need, from giving you a fair price to making sure that they are doing the job correctly and as specified. Carfix makes sure that you don't have to worry about making time to go to the car repair places, especially on weekends when its packed full of people. Carfix picks up your car from where you are, goes to a mechanic if not your preferred one, makes sure that you get the best price and returns your vehicle on the same day.

The business model behind Carfix would be taking a discounted price from the mechanics as well as a small service fee from the customers that use our service. This is done by establishing a partnership with the mechanics and firms. This works great for customers that require more attention and work on their vehicle. This is because, with more work, there are more costs, with more costs, there would be more discounted fees from the mechanic which means more profit. With a large amount of quantity we believed that this was a good business model to have, however, we had yet to fully foresee the results of this business model. An example of our business running is that we could get a warrant of fitness for around $40 - $45. At around this margin, we could set a warrant that starts at $69 which is just $5 more than the regular cost.

Throughout the process of getting Carfix up and running, we had to do a lot of validation. We went through car records and the history of how many cars need servicing, the timing, quantity and such. We found that over 40% of cars fail their warrant of fitness meaning that they require extra repairs resulting in more work. We had also gone out and asked the people of Wellington, online and outdoors on the streets to see if they would like a service like Carfix. We found that our assumptions on the problem is true but also gave us meaningful feedback on how the business would run such as creditability. This was eye-opening for us and actually was one of the main reasons why this business was quite hard to move in. However, a lot of people did support of our idea as well as mechanics because we had partnered up with a lot of different companies such as Brendon motors, pitstop etc. We could get discounted fees through this as a way of bringing more customers to the mechanics.

Throughout the journey, we found that there could definitely be more improvements to the business model such as bringing in loyalty programs or a referral system as an incentive for customers to bring in more customers to Carfix. However, throughout the validation process, we found that the market in Wellington was not good for the business as there where many mechanics in the area, especially around Wellington city. This made it easy for people to bring their cars into mechanics in the morning before work and pick it up either after work or on the next day. As a result, we found it very difficult to continue the business and would be better to expand or move to another location such as Auckland.