 Hi, folks, welcome to another episode of The Economy and You. And today, of course, is an interesting day. It's the day after the most scary day of the year, which is, of course, Election Day. So I'm everybody out there that's suffering from PTSD. I totally understand. So today, we're going to be talking about entrepreneurship. We're going to sort of move away from politics now since the election's over. And today's guest is Richard Vubrigi. Richard is an entrepreneur in the greatest sense of the word. He started his own online website. And Richard, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yes. And I'm getting over a cold, just so you know. OK. So it makes you feel any better now that you've shaken my hand. But welcome to the show. And you have started to come. You were an entrepreneur in the true sense of the word. You started several different companies over the course of your life. Yes. And then your last venture, which is when we're going to talk about today, is a platform called AutoRepairConnect.com. Yep. Now this is an online business. First one? First? First online business. First online business that I've done. Yeah. Why? Well, it all started from an automotive background. I had an auto repair shop in Cupertino when I was in the mid-80s. And then I had a truck accessory store. And I spent a lot of money on advertising. We used to spend $6,000 a month with YellowPages.com. And when it was still the print book where you had the big ad. So we were in five different books. And it was just a lot of money. And so you ended up paying a lot of rent, $10,000 a month in rent, $6,000 a month to the Yellow Pages, $30,000 a month in payroll. And at the end of the month, you've really worked to make everybody else a paycheck, to give everybody else a paycheck. So the business I wanted to start, I went to the internet, was I wanted no rent, no advertising, and no employees. And so that's why I ended up, and the only thing I knew was automotive repair. Oh. And so I thought, well, I'll build a directory for automotive repair shops in the auto body, window tinting, we have almost 20 categories, and covers everything from auto repair to window tinting and everything in between. Okay, so you started this how long ago when did this adventure start for you? Well, I had the idea maybe 10 years ago. And I hired my first website developer right out of college, he had him on an H1B visa when I was living in Sunnyvale, California. Let me guess, and he had an accent. Oh yeah, yeah, his name, he was from India. His name was Atul, he graduated as master's in computer science and came to work for me. And we spent about eight months together building out the platform, the dashboard, just the whole product we built in about eight months. And this was your first iteration? Yes. Yeah, and how that worked out for you? Well, he didn't have a, even though he had his master's in computer science, he didn't really have enough experience to build an enterprise level platform. So the caveat here is just because somebody has a big fancy degree doesn't necessarily make them a great coder. Yes, yes, he experienced counts for a whole bunch in this business. That's true, that's true. So now, but when you decided to do this, I mean you still had your accessories business at the time? No, I had been out of, I had been, oh maybe three years out of that business and I traveled a little bit in the motor home and tried to figure out what I wanted to do. And for some reason I came up with this idea and said, I'm gonna give it a shot. Okay. And I've been doing it for a few years now. Had the website built twice and then had it redesigned once. And now I'm just getting ready to start marketing it. We marketed it a little bit earlier in the year, but now it's time to really push and do a hard launch and really take it across the United States as a nationwide platform. So an online directory like this, it's a nationwide directory? Yes it is. Okay, so if I'm in the automobile repair business, there's yellow pages, there's Yelp, there's lots of others Craigslist. Right. So why would I want to be listed with you versus as a directory rather than those guys? Well, we're doing things a little bit different. Yelp, yellow pages, they have hundreds of categories, maybe 500 categories. And Yelp has great reviews. The users love them. Sometimes some of the businesses aren't as much in love with Yelp as the users because it is an expensive platform to be on. How much do you pay for like a Yelp ad? I think, well, they started about $300 a month and I have no people that have paid up to $800 a month. And so the biggest problem is, are you really getting your money back? And that's where in any business, Yelp, yellow pages, my business. Or Google even if you're advertising to Google, yeah. You really need to know as an advertiser if you're spending hundreds of dollars or $1,000 a month, you want to know that your advertiser is working. And so this is the big problem that online websites have is to be able to show the results to the people that are paying them, their advertisers. You need to bring them new business or your platform doesn't work. Well, you know, there's an old expression in the world of advertising, right? Half the money I spend on advertising, I waste. The problem is determining which half it is. Right, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now you started this platform. What have been some of the biggest challenges that you've had with this since you decided to do this? You had some challenges with programming? Yes, it's when you build something like this to really make it so it can be done, you need the advertisers to be able to sign up online. So there's a lot of admin dashboards, advertiser dashboards, manager permissions, and there's a lot of pieces to it. You have a Google Maps API, and we have a Yelp API. We show Yelp reviews on our sites. Oh, you have Yelp, Yelp reviews. Yes, we do. Okay, all right. And then we have an API for data and another API for Facebook. And so there's a lot of pieces to it. You have email integration, a lot of integration. And so you have a lot of people that have done some coding, but they really haven't done the integrations. And so until they've done one, it is a learning curve and everything that needs to be done. So sometimes I heard somebody the other day, they asked him what was the toughest part of his seven years in business. He says every part of it, and that's how I kind of feel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Every step of the way it's been. It's a slog. Yeah, it is, it's a challenge, but I'm kind of stubborn, very stubborn, and I just want to do it. You must be a former Marine. I gave that away. Yeah, yeah, because Marines tend to have a tendency to be fairly tenacious. Yes, yes, we do. And in business. Uh-huh. Yeah. So now what is the end game with this for you? What do you see as the end game? Is the platform done, or do you still have more to do with it? Well, the platform, we're getting ready to market it. Of course, on a platform like this, you never really finish. You're always doing work on it. You're getting feedback from the business owners, your advertisers, and feedback from the users, and you want to make sure that you're building the best product. Yelp has 300 programmers, and they're always new iterations of the new products, new features. So it'll never really be done and built where you can just kind of walk away and say, okay, we did a great job. But we just want to provide the best advertising. I've got kind of a catch word I use. We want an affordable, an affordable long-term advertising solution for our advertisers. We don't want them to come in and pay us $500 a month, which we're not even close to that. Our platform, I won't say the price, but it's very, very reasonable. And we have to prove to our advertisers, to the shop owners, that this works. If it doesn't work for them, why would they pay us? And then I think that gives us the advantage compared to some of the larger companies, where they've got Yelp has 300 engineers every day working on their product, and they need to pay these people big money. But Yelp has a bit of a reputation of being kind of a bully. That's, yeah, I've- You know, if you don't do advertising with them, and you can sort of get bad reviews, and it makes it very difficult for you to sort of get out from underneath that. Yeah, there's been a few things with Yelp, a few lawsuits and stuff. Nobody's really won the lawsuits, but there's been some unhappiness with the Yelp, the advertisers. And so we don't want to be in that situation. We want to make sure that we put our advertisers first. We want them to get business, because if they don't get business, there's no reason that they should be on our platform advertising, giving us money. And that's, when you've got 300 people working for you, you need to get money first. Money first and worry about getting them business second. That's really the difference between a funded startup like Yelp and some of the other larger companies, and where we call it bootstrapped when you started on, you're not funded. So you're bootstrapped in- Your funding is your friends and your family. Yes, and hard work. And so we have to prove to the people that are paying us, we need to send them business every month. We can't just say, oh, thanks for your money and not send them business. That's our, our business is sending them new business. That's really our business. So what are the things that your site talks about is having an active referral service? Yes. What is that? People come to our website, there's a lot of auto repair shops. By the way, how many repair shops are in your database? We have about 500,000 auto repair shops in our database. Well, no, we think about auto repair shops. That's not just auto repair. Auto repair, auto body, window tinting, auto glass. Yeah, towing in there. Towing, auto detailing. We have, I can't even remember, old radiator shops, auto glass. I think in muffler, yeah, in muffler. In muffler, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's like total of half a million companies in there. Yes, yes, there is. Wow, that's a lot. And so you basically, you've covered, you sort of built out a platform. Right, we are the only people that have, we're the only. It's nationwide, it's communities across the United States. Yes, we're the only website like it. There's a few others, there's Repair, Pal, Open Bay, and a couple other ones, but they've got one category. We've got the full spectrum, everything automotive. So when you come to our website, you can find anybody that you're looking for. So where did this sort of epiphany come from, that this was the thing that was missing? Well, nobody was doing it. And I saw the need for it because the people that were doing it are charging $500 a month, $300 a month, and it's just as a former business owner, I know it's not easy to, you're making money, but to just keep on paying for advertising and enriching somebody else when you're still just trying to pay your bills. And so it came out to make a better solution for the advertisers and for the users. Because the users, since we are a platform where they can come straight to our website and find anything on auto repair, we have a much better search feature because we're just automotive. And we have everything in the right category, they're not searching the whole web for it. They can write to our website, we have all 500,000 of every business in the United States. Now, so when I took a look at the site, one of the things that I noticed, like with Google, you sort of get, you get sort of auto repair, but then you get other stuff sort of intermingled in with it. And then some of the stuff, the data's good, some of it's not, but of course, with your platform, one of the things that I noticed is that it seems to be fairly coherent whatever shops are in specific category, it lets you find it more easily. Yes, we spend a lot of time cleaning our data and we make sure we get the radiator shops under radiator and the auto glass under auto glass and by every category. So when you are a user and you come to our website, you find what you're looking for and you're not calling, we can also search by vehicle make, so you can work, you can search by auto repair. Oh, that's right, you can search by the type of vehicle. Or BMW, Mercedes, so you can find, I actually find a specialist on our website too. Oh, I think they're scrolling our website now. Okay, now I did notice like you've got things on here, like collision repair, transmission repair also. Yes. Emission testing, okay. So you've got all this stuff on the site and then it also has all their contact information. Yes, it does. But not just like on Craigslist where you get a sort of Craigslist email. Right, oh, good. And maybe somebody will get back to you. You asked me about the phone number on the website. That's where I got off the... Well, I'll tell you what we're gonna do. Let's talk about that. We're gonna take a short commercial break and then we're gonna come back and let's talk about the phone number and how people can contact you. I'm Chris Letham and this is The Economy and You. Today's guest is Richard Vubregi and we're talking about his company called AutoRepairConnect.com. We'll be right back. Aloha. Hey, Standard Energy Man here. Make sure you tune in on my lunch hour every Friday from noon until 12.30 at least. Maybe I'll go a little long if you got good stuff to share with you. But we'll talk about energy, all kinds of energy. My favorite is hydrogen and my other favorite is transportation and hydrogen. But we'll talk about all kinds of energy. Be with us every Friday at noon, Standard Energy Man, aloha. Hi, I'm Stacy Hayashi with the Think Tech Hawaii show Stacy to the Rescue, highlighting some of Hawaii's issues. You can catch it at Think Tech Hawaii on Mondays at 11 a.m. Aloha, see you then. Aloha. My name is Reg Baker and I'm the host of Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're a show that broadcast live every Thursday from two to two 30. We highlight success stories in Hawaii of both businesses and individuals. We learn their secrets to success, which is always valuable. I hope to see you on our next show. Aloha. Welcome back. I'm Chris Ethan with the Economy and You. Today's guest is Richard Verbrugge with Auto Repair Connect. He is an entrepreneur, an online entrepreneur. And you know, we love people who are doing e-commerce here at Think Tech Hawaii. So Richard, we were gonna talk about, when we left, we were gonna start talking about this sort of phone number or active referral service thing that you do. Why is that, say, different than Yelp or some of the other services? What does that entail? We're the only one that is doing that because you get a lot of people that they own a car, they don't really know a lot about cars. And so your car breaks and you're not sure what it is. So we've got a phone number on our website where the people that are looking for auto repair or window tinting or transmission repair, they can actually call us and we have an expert on the phone that will talk to the people and say, what's your problem? They won't diagnose your car and fix it for you over the phone, but we can refer you to one of the shops, even if they're not... But you call the shops first. We call the shop and make sure that they can do the work. We vet the shop to make sure that they're capable, They're capable and able. Capable and able and they have, that they've worked on a Volvo before. You don't wanna take your car to a shop that hasn't seen a Volvo in two years. You wanna take your Volvo to somebody that works on Volvos, you're Toyota to somebody that works on Toyotas and every make. I think that's the biggest problem with poor repair jobs is a mechanic. As a former mechanic, I've worked on a couple cars in my time that I wish I wouldn't have taken the job. And that's where I got myself where I had an unhappy customer. So we're trying to alleviate that. So the customer calls us, we refer them to a shop that we know that can do the work, that has good reviews, that has been in business quite a while. Cause that's the difference between you. Yelp isn't necessarily gonna say, oh, he did a great job on my Mercedes or my Jag. It just says it's sort of a general sort of, we liked you or we didn't like you or satisfied or we're not satisfied. What you're really talking about is a more definitive statement of yes, this is somebody that can work on this type of vehicle and has experience or certification and or both. Exactly, we know who's a member of the Automotive Service Excellence, the Mechanics. We know who is a member of the Automatic Transmission Rebuilders Association. We know the member shops and all the associations across the United States as far as auto body associations, iCar, all of them. We know, so we know what the best shops are and we know the shops that are fair, that price are, they're do great work and are fairly price fair. We don't, you know, nobody's, there's might be a very small percentage of auto repair shops that aren't scrupulous or that are unscrupulous, but what we find is usually if somebody is getting, they take in a job they can't fix and that's where the problems arise. So we're sending you to a place, to a shop that we know can fix your car. Okay. So that's the bottom line. You want your car fixed and our repair shops want a job that they know how to fix, so. So that's, I think one of the values of what you're trying to offer here is that you try to have a value-added service. Yes. To beyond, say, just an online directory. Right, yeah. We don't like to be called an online directory. We're more of like an act of referral services. So an act of referral services may be a better way to refer it. But you do have the ability, people do have the ability to go on the site and search for whatever it is that they're looking for. Yes, they can search, read reviews. They can call the customer, the advertiser, the auto repair shop owner themselves. Okay, all right. And so, what is the sort of the game plan then after you sort of get this thing going? Because you said this is just in the beginning stages? Yes, it is. Okay. And so there are other things that you intend to add to this platform? Yes. In the beginning right now we're, we have 23,000 cities in the United States and there's about a thousand major cities in the United States with more than 35,000 people in it. So our first goal is to get one auto repair shop, one auto body shop, one window tinting, one radiator shop, one of every, one of every city. So we have, so we have a good vetted repair shop. And then as we vet more shops, we put them on our site. So we have on our shop, we have ones that are verified and ones that we haven't verified yet. Okay, can you share with me your secret marketing strategy? Your super secret marketing strategy for your business? No, I can't. Okay. We're working on that. You're working on this super secret marketing strategy, okay, all right, okay. So what do you envisage as you're the ideal, if everything goes well, what do you sort of envisage for yourself? Are you gonna stay in Hawaii? Cause you know, so many companies will start here and then as they start to grow, they find themselves wanting to get more financing so they end up back in the Bay Area. Well, I just moved from the Bay Area. I lived in, born and raised in Cupertino and I lived there my whole life. And I moved to Hawaii. I needed a change. And as far as funding, there's, you can do a lot more when you're funded a lot quicker. But if this was a big money-making business, there would be people already funded in doing it. But it's something that I plan on keeping as large as we can make it because we're just automotive. And be able to be the premier site where people, a household name, where they say, oh, check out Auto Repair Connect. That's where you go to look for it. Well, and being able to give people expert advice, I think one of the things we talked about earlier is be able to give people more expert advice and or solutions to say everyday problems maybe to do with weather or maybe you're hearing something new or what do the lights mean when the little lights go on? Right, there's all kinds of information. We're gonna be putting it on the website as far as some do-it-yourself fixes and that type of stuff. You know, one of the things I have with my Mini Cooper is when the window sometimes won't go down, you pull the little switch and it won't go down. Well, I found online, I found a video, it says this is a certain place, if you pop it with your fist, like that, just so, it fixes the window and the window works, oh my God, it works, it's so crazy, it's the most crazy thing, yeah, it's just like I blew my mind. I paid a mechanic $100. The first time it went wrong, like that, and I'm saying, I'm not paying $100 or telling the window it doesn't work. That's crazy. And I went online, I found a video. That's great. Figure that, just where to smack it and it worked again, it was crazy, yeah, this is terrible. So I could see the value of these sort of do-it-yourself kind of fixes. Yeah, yeah. Now we wanna, there's other things we can do to drive, our business is driving traffic to the auto repair shops, bringing them new customers. That's our business and finding the right repair shop for the customer that's looking to get their car repaired. And one of the challenges, of course, with an online business is showing up on the first page of a search engine. Right. There are sort of those most powerful words which everybody's fighting for. But one of the things I know, having been a search engine optimizer kind of guy, is that there's also lots of words that aren't necessarily as popular, but it's much easier to show up under the search terms. Like showing up under mufflers is gonna be a lot easier to show up, muffler repairs are a lot easier to show up than auto repair. Auto repair is a sort of big word where a muffler repair would be more specific and muffler repair in Honolulu is a much easier search term to show up under than muffler repair in, say, San Francisco. True, true. Yeah. So one of the keys, of course, to successfully showing up on the first page of any search engine is not necessarily trying to fight for those bigger words. Yes, that's true. And we aren't on the first page of Google. We need to be on the first page of Google for every city, every category in the United States. So that takes time to build up there. But what we're doing is we're integrated with Facebook. And so we, the average Facebook user spends 40 minutes a day on Facebook, which is 242 hours a year. So we're doing a lot of marketing on Facebook because we know where your customers are. Your customers are on Facebook 242 hours a year. And so we're marketing our business on Facebook. So we're getting a lot of traffic from Facebook. Now what about YouTube? YouTube, we've done some videos. And we haven't really, since we're kind of a small company, we haven't had the resources to put into making a lot of videos. We've only made a couple. But we do have, get some traffic from YouTube. And that's another avenue to market the business as is Pinterest and Tumblr and all these, there's so many social media sites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's gotten a little crazy. It's confusing these days. So what do you see as, if you're gonna keep working on this, do you think, but do you see yourself staying in Hawaii? Oh yes, definitely gonna stay in Hawaii. Okay, so do you think you'll be able to employ more people to come and work for you doing the marketing and such? Yes, we probably once we have this thing up and running within the next year, I expect us to have at least four or five people, at least four people full time working on the project as self. And then we're gonna be needing telemarketers, email marketers, social media people. So if you people, everybody wants to work, if you can have some social media skills, some internet, if you're a programmer, call us. We need to, we need some people. Now what is your platform written in? What is the, what is it, .NET, it's PHP, right? It's PHP. It's PHP with HTML. Yeah, PHP and Codigniter and the JavaScript and. All that stuff. HTML. But it's a pretty site. It's very pretty. I mean, you look at it, it's done well. Yeah, yeah, that's a second. That's actually the third redesign we've had. Oh, okay. It's been built twice in three redesigns. Now it's also, you know, one of the things, of course, is sites also need to be able to work on mobile phones and things like that. They have to be able to conform to the screen. Yes. Now did you have some challenges with that? Yeah, we hired a guy that does nothing but front end work. So it took, when we coded the front end for the web, you'd have to check it in, it has to work on the web, it has to work on the iPad, the iPad Mini, it has to work in three different phone formats. So it works in every format. And so every time you make a change, you have to make sure it works in every format. So that's... It's a big job when it's all hand coded. It's not like we did a drag and drop type website. This is built from scratch and it's enterprise level. So everything, every page we create needs to be, every new page needs to be redesigned. So if you're an auto repair company out there and you wanted to get a hold of you, what's the best way to reach you? So there's a phone number right on our website. It is 888-884-8451. That's a lot of eight. That's a lot of eight. That's a lot, like a Chinese, good luck. That's very good luck. Very good luck. Good luck. Yeah. Well, I really, I think this sounds like an interesting venture. And I want to wish you all the luck in the world. Well, thank you. I know this, you must put in a lot of, you have a lot of sleepless nights and or nights where you get very little sleep. Yes. But this is the world of e-commerce, right? Yeah, it's, I've had this project for a long time and I just gonna see it through because I still believe in it. And we wanna be the best auto repair site on the internet. And I think we're gonna do it. All right, awesome. Well, thank you, Richard, for coming on the show. Thank you. Here at Think Tech Hawaii and the economy and you. I'm Chris Lethem and I, next week, well, in two weeks, I'm sorry, we'll be, we'll be looking forward to having one of our candidates from this last election and we'll look forward to seeing you then. So have a great weekend. Aloha.