Ep 256: Stan from PartsPass.app

Stan joins the Trailchasers Podcast to talk about the development of www.partspass.app - Parts Pass was developed from a mechanic's point of view, on the shop floor: Radically streamlining the frustrating experience of searching, comparing pricing, and scheduling delivery.




"Watching how customers interact with local box stores, I knew that they wanted a solution. And you can't rely on online suppliers like Amazon or eBay because it's just a search engine and you don't know who the suppliers are. You can be fly by night companies, cheap Chinese products, you really don't know. So boom, another opportunity, giving them a better quality product, giving them better customer experience and two-day shipping. So that kind of gives you a glimpse into what we do.

We took it one step further, really focusing on a better user experience. So we have artificial intelligence in the app, so now you can take a picture of the car, whether it's from the front or from the back, and that AI will decode the make and model. You can also select the manual entry so you can go year, make, model, engine size, and then search for parts.

Our team internally built this out in seven months and now every two weeks we're launching new features on the app because you can't get it perfect, right? The saying goes, if you're happy with your first version, you waited too long to launch. You have to be extremely embarrassed of your first iterations, your first version of whatever it is that you make, and then you perfect it as time goes on.

We're seeing an increase of mobile mechanic services as well. People are getting smarter with the affordability of these computers. YouTube is a huge tutorial platform that allows people to search certain terms. Like how do I replace an air filter? Or how do I change my own oil? Or how do I replace the radiator? So we're seeing a huge increase of do-it-yourselfers. People are holding onto their vehicles a lot longer. The average vehicle age on the road right now is 13 years old with over 130,000 miles new sale cars, sales of new cars are down, leasing is down as well."