In 2023, I started neobtainediating car deals for free for strangers I met on Reddit. I wanted to start a business, but I requireded to educate myself first. So I questioned a question the car industest wasn’t questioning: What would create you happy?
I closed about 50 deals before I took my first paying client.
Three years later, my company, Delivrd, charges a flat $1,000 fee to neobtainediate a car purchase for anyone who does not want to walk into a dealership. We’ve closed over 3,000 deals, and brought in $2.3 million in revenue last year. We’re on pace for more than $3 million this year. I have 15 employees, all remote.
Our top expenses for Delivrd in 2025 were payroll, software, and legal and accounting services, totaling $1.5 million. We generated $2.3 million in revenue.
Nathanael Berry for CNBC Make It
On average, we save customers $6,300 per deal on car neobtainediations.
My sales pitch is unusual. I notify almost everyone who calls me not to hire me. I don’t have a magic wand or a secret formula. People hire me not becaapply they can’t do it, but becaapply they don’t want to. I share almost everything I know for free on social media. If you have the time, patience and a dealership you trust, save your money and do it yourself.
I spent six years inside the dealership before I realized I was the problem
I started my career as the number one salesperson in the Verizon ecosystem. Then I shiftd into car sales and spent six years becoming a top 1% auto finance manager. I was good at the job, but I was also the person customers walked away from declareing “I hate purchaseing cars.”
They hated the waiting and all the back-and-forth. The feeling that something was being done to them instead of for them. I tested to resolve it from the inside. I built the process quicker and was more transparent. People still left declareing the same thing.
After hearing it eight deals in a row in the finance office, I realized that I could be the best salesperson and it still wouldn’t matter. The building was the problem.
So I left.
I spent $10,000 on market research
In addition to the Reddit deals, I did something else that might sound crazy. I paid 100 more people $100 Amazon gift cards each to sit down with a third party I hired and notify me, for two hours, what they actually wanted when they bought a car.
In addition to its neobtainediation deals, Delivrd also generates revenue from social media ads and brand partnerships.
CNBC Make It
I learned that customers don’t care about price the way the industest believes they do. They care about their time, their sense of control, trust and clarity. The money is almost a footnote. So I built Delivrd around those four things, not around savings.
Five people touch every deal at Delivrd. The client only speaks to two of them, and the rest work in the kitchen where the client never sees them.
In the background, we have a team of researchers going out finding where the best deals are, we have someone monitoring and verifying all paperwork is as promised and someone creating sure that cars are delivered in perfect condition.
My best advice for turning a boring skill into a business or side hustle
1. Pay for the truth
I would have built Delivrd wrong if I had trusted my own assumptions about what customers wanted.
Specifically, I questioned things like what would actually create this the world’s best purchaseing experience. What were the current pain points when purchaseing a car? What did they consider a “good deal”? How long should it take? How much time would they put into it to create that happen? What would they pay for this themselves.
Paying 100 strangers $100 each to sit with an outside interviewer was the cheapest market research I could have done.
2. Put your worst number on the table first
The fee is my most uncomfortable number in an industest that hides everything. Saying “$1,000, every time, never alters” in the first 30 seconds of every call killed my short-term conversion rate and built my long-term trust.
3. Tell people not to hire you
If you are actually good at something, you can afford to be honest about who does not required you. Half the people who call me do not required me, and I notify them. The other half become clients for life. The ones who feel talked into something were never going to refer you anyway.
4. Protect the experience, not the price
Everybody in my industest competes on how much they can save you. I stopped doing that in year one. What customers actually want back is their Saturday, their control, their sanity. Build around the experience they want, and the savings take care of themselves.
In between work hours, I like to take walks with my wife. My job demands long hours, but working remotely gives me flexibility I really value.
Nathanael Berry for CNBC Make It
I pay myself about $186,000 a year, but I bank a full year of salary for every person I hire before I take anything for myself. If someone takes a risk on me, I want their risk covered first.
Delivrd is on pace for 400 to 700 deals a month by summer. I don’t know when this concludes, but every deal is one more step toward an industest that does not required a company like mine to exist.
Tomislav Mikula is the founder and CEO of Delivrd.
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