Zach Shefska - Founder of CarEdge

A Distribution-First Startup

I’m excited to share our next Idea Maze interview, this time with Zach Shefska, the founder and CEO of CarEdge.

The CarEdge mission is to bring transparency and efficiency to the automotive industry through a combination of free educational resources, paid products for consumers, and by providing dealers with alternative ways to operate their businesses.

This interview is different from our first few episodes because CarEdge is a much earlier stage business, at least in a conventional sense. The product and business model is quite a bit less concrete, and there are lots of unknowns about how the next few turns of the idea maze will unfold.

But in another way, CarEdge is much further along than most companies at their funding stage (and even later). This is because of the company’s strong distribution and absolute user scale. The company is profitable, serves thousands of paying customers, and has a growth curve that would be enviable to most startups at their stage. This was achieved because CarEdge is, in many ways, a distribution-first startup. Building reach and an engaged audience in their category was essentially move number one in the company’s journey, with some of the other turns unfolding as a result of the audience that Zach was building.

I often use the phrase “traction creates opportunity”, and this is a company that is really putting this idea to the test. It started as a media property that today generates millions of monthly views, and is now leveraging this market position, first-party industry data, and user love to forge the other building blocks of the business.

This is certainly a unconventional way to build a company, but it’s not entirely unprecedented. Most companies follow a linear progression of problem → product → business model → distribution. But some founders flip the script, or at least incorporate strategies around distribution much much earlier in the journey. One example that comes to mind is HubSpot. During the company’s humble beginnings, it benefitted from the fairly large reach of one of the founders’ blogs, along with a freemium “website grader” product. The company had a coherent vision around developing software for inbound marketing, but for quite a few years, Hubspot’s distribution strength significantly outpaced its actual product offerings.

CarEdge may be a bit of an extreme example of being distribution first, but I think a LOT of founders could learn from this example. I’d say that at least 80% of founders under-invest in developing their strategy around distribution and GTM, and very few companies successfully emerge from the idea maze without really nailing distribution.

On top of all of this, I think you’ll find Zach to be a real gem of a person and a young entrepreneur that you’ll want to follow for many decades to come. I hope you will take a listen and continue to follow the CarEdge story. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe and help others find our podcast by leaving a review!