From Automotive Veteran to SaaS Innovator: The Journey of Peter Carusone and VisionAST

I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Carusone, a 25-year automotive industry veteran and founder of the data analytics SaaS platform VisionAST. Carusone and his team of developers built the platform during his tenure as operations director for a dealer group in upstate New York, where his wife and four daughters still call home.

Thank you so much for joining us!

What motivated you to launch your startup? I’ve always had the mindset of “there has to be an easier way.” I know that makes me sound lazy, but the mentality of doing something because it’s the way we’ve always done it is a major impediment to innovation. In our case, extracting data from a dealer’s DMS software was extremely cumbersome and kept us from realizing the full potential of our data in terms of tracking performance, training, and team building.

What is it that excites you about what you’re building? The results we get for our clients. We look at their lift in profitability 90 days after onboarding and show our impact immediately — it’s very gratifying to help the industry prosper.

What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup? Setting the pace every day. I have a retail automotive background. Customers walked in the door or submitted leads online. Every day was an event. The pace of B2B sales is much different, but our success depends on maximizing every day, not only in sales but in product development, customer support, training, and marketing. I’m patient with people, but not with processes.

What are your future plans for your startup? Ultimately, we will be the gold standard in data and analytics. We will power other providers’ reporting as well as be a resource for the data we aggregate for businesses and industries that benefit from automotive trends and forecasts.

If you had to share words of wisdom with a founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be? Make sure you have passion for what you are building as well as the cause you are serving. There will be many off-ramps that you’ll be tempted to take because the work seems too hard. It’s the passion that will help you persevere.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-carusone-8b772912/

https://www.facebook.com/visionast

This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!