Pick your fights
Today, Vimcar is a grown company: there is a team of 60, several thousand customers served daily and one of those filtered-sparkling-chilled-water faucets in the tea kitchen. When we started Vimcar back in 2014, I joined a team of five. This is my look back at key moments in our journey: from first idea to launch and all the confetti in between. I left Vimcar in 2016.
This is part 1: Pick Your Fights
The lore of the „disruptor“ has been told up and down the country: Savvy startups with The One Idea, so radical, so unconventional, swoop down onto an entire market, bringing the same to a screeching halt. While befuddled legacy industry players are still rubbing their eyes, the genius founders of Disruptify Inc. celebrate a colossal stock market opening day, and, in a rain of champaign, unveil the vending machine for a mysterious, ironic little hardware gimmick that gives shade from the multi-billion dollar slew of a market they just set ablaze.
I love stories like that. At the same time, I would like to introduce a disruptive new line of thinking to those wishing to venture along the same path: It may pay to look closely at who and what it is you wish to obliterate with your product. Hoping to challenge entrenched market principles, guarded by seething multinationals with claims staked a century ago? Have these guys lost sight of their fundamental mission to serve users and the universe? Are they disrespectful to the gods of good design? Great. Go, get them.
Are you, however, just trying to throw sand into someone’s face? Think again, perhaps. Here is why:
Even though Vimcar employed clever connected hardware at the core of its first product, we saw it as our mission to first and foremost solve a fundamental UX problem: Digital car-interfaces suck. With design freezes applied to the entire interior years prior to a new model leaving the plant, those little screens and knobs around the dash will inevitably look and feel tardy, even if manufacturers threw their very best at the in-car digital experience. Which they don’t, of course. Take a seat behind any wheel of the latest, most-spaced out fruit of our famed German engineering prowess and the time it takes to figure out the „onboard entertainment system“ along with its proprietary navigation app is, well not exactly entertaining.
Digital car interfaces are still treated as an afterthought. They look and feel like the sad evolution of the car radio: gimmicks to appease the very few „digital natives“ who might perhaps consider investing in a car. Which they, in turn, do not. If you want to dive deeper, Geoff Teehan, Director Product Design at Facebook, is laying it on pretty thick in this wonderfully angry post: https://medium.com/habit-of-introspection/the-state-of-in-car-ux-9de33c96403d
Manufacturers, despite every single one of them entertaining their own versions of „digital innovation labs“, far away from the stifling realities of Wolfsburg, Stuttgart, Munich and the likes have so far proven unable to respond to the digital ecosystem drivers interact with on a daily basis. Mobile apps on offer regularly present users with the option of flashing the lights or turning on the heater from afar. At the same time, they fail at even attempting to build a bridge between using a car and how we work and live today. Even worse, though: to this date, there is not a single open standard for digital integration with modern vehicles. BMW is testing paid access to their car data stream, along with IBM. Certainly not „open“, but an opening salvo in the battle on who actually owns automotive data.
Manufacturers claim safety concerns when explaining the lack of digital gateways in and out of their products, and rightly so — yet, the hope of landing a „breakthrough“ with proprietary gimmickry is all too obvious to ignore: The same car makers who try and regularly fail to make navigation systems people would actually want to use are now dreaming of entire digital ecosystems for their platforms. While that is cooking, and it has been for a while, everyone else just whips out their smartphone and launches the map application of their choice. It’s ridiculous: €500 phones with open platforms trump €50–500k four wheeled computers nobody can develop for.
And still: big lazy OEMs will remain having the upper hand in the market for native automotive data for now — a fact that was staring us in the face every day when building Vimcar’s first product. OEMs are governing the platforms Vimcar’s business model was going to be based on as a third party. Gaining access to these platforms would have made for an infinitely smoother product experience — and potentially serve us customers on a silver plate. We, on the other hand, knew a common problem drivers had with their business driving and were developing a neat little app to fix it. A match made in heaven, right? Yes, meetings were taken between virtually any of the large German car brands and our teams. Tests were done. More meetings were convened. No progress was made. Ever. To nobody’s surprise.
Ok, let’s back it up. Here we were with a pretty nifty idea for a service at the intersection of driving data and personal finance. The car-industry showed no intention of sharing access, neither to their tech, nor to their customers — let alone offering a competitor product, for that matter. This was the right fight to pick. Picking it, however, would have meant brute-forcing our way into the global car industry. Doesn’t sound like a clever idea, right?
So we changed tack. Work on a MVP continued, regardless of how car data would eventually be obtained. And in late summer of 2014, a new gateway to our users emerged, and a really freaky one, too.
Talk to the freaks.
The cliché goes that tax advisors are a pale and dusty species, definitely on the opposite end of the industry-sexiness spectrum, about a light-year away from any of IoT-buzzwords traded like gold at the time. They also owned something the shiny car industry lacked then and lacks even more today: Trust.
Personal relationships between tax consultants and clients turned out to be a lot more valuable than those between drivers and car brands. Tax consultants actually enjoyed their clients’ trust to a degree that can only be compared to the rapport between a doctor and his patients. On top of that, tax attorneys knew our users’ pain. They were, in effect, sharing the very pain we were offering a solution to, since sloppy documentation of business miles by their clients would mean more head-aches for them: Vimcar would effectively stop drivers from botching mileage-reports and thus make their tax attorneys’ lives a lot easier.
So in the juicy space of personal finances, taxation, tracking and all the privacy concerns that come with it, we had suddenly identified the one most influential gate-keeper on buying decisions: it was tax advisors who would eventually make a call on the trustworthiness of our product. This discovery immediately outweighed any technological access car makers could or could not have ever granted us. We turned around and directed our entire marketing efforts at the tax industry.
And they had no idea what hit them. Never before had a tech startup entered the quiet and measured world of German taxes. Instead of clamouring for attention in the quickly overheating space of connected car services, Vimcar suddenly found itself to be the soul contender for attention in a market it was basically creating from scratch. Pursuing partnerships with the most prominent industry associations and law firms took upwards of a year and proved an immense struggle: virtually anyone we met in this space was extremely cautious, if not openly hostile towards our advances. And understandably so: In a business where, again, trust is your most prized resource, I, too, would show apprehension towards a hot shot gang of twenty-somethings walking in from the street, picking up finance vocabulary on the fly.
Yet, while building and testing our product, we slowly turned stiff, correct tax attorneys first into listeners, then supporters, then fans. We showed up at every convention, we presented in countless board rooms, we booked full page ads, we even printed a guide on how company car taxation works, as a free give-away for clients. The leaflet is in its third print run now, with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands.
And the tax people began to trust that, indeed, we had not come to pick a fight. Instead, we came out offering an awesome solution to a painful problem their clients encountered on a daily basis. Slowly but surely, in an industry as dire in need of a digital revolution as the car industry, Vimcar was established as a sign for progress. Vimcar was developing into a marketing asset for tax attorney offices around the country.
Three years on, our service has revolutionised the taxation of company cars, ushering a previously painful and error-prone task into the digital age. Vimcar offers transparency, reliability and above all: a user experience that cuts a nasty documentation job down to seconds. Fixing this seemingly minute issue was not worth the car makers’ attention. Today, Vimcar is market leading, serving tens of thousands of happy customers every day. And our suit of user-oriented applications to make the management of business driving smoother will only grow from here.
Bottom line
Picking one fight defined what we wanted to stand up for and shaped the product we wanted to build. Avoiding another battle by instead pushing as hard as we could for cooperation and acceptance turned out to be one of the most effective strategic decisions we ever made when starting out.
So here it is: pick your fights when building products. The good news is, as long as you keep your users’ love and happiness at the top of your agenda, you will know when to blow stuff up and when to play nice.
Read on: How to make a market — including a download to our original user interview guidelines
