First off, I have to clarify I am in Australia...but this is a general type question.

I'm involved in a startup that has spent about 18 months refining a sustainable business model before we actually started development. We'll be at the dev stage shortly...so we need to allocate sufficient resources to get this thing off the ground.

So it's basically a site that lists cars for sale. Fairly straightforward...but we also need to work in with the APIs of a number of dealer management software packages...so data is fed from these systems into our platform. It also needs to handle and direct leads from customers etc etc...pretty much what most auto sites do these days.

So w're looking at keeping the dev in-house probably using contractors. Perhaps using external people for graphic design...but the rest within a team.

So just looking for a bit of a heads up as to the resources required to build an MVP...not necessarily the complete bells and whistles as I know most of the big players employee hundreds of people. We're very much looking to do the initial work on the smell of an oily rag...but it still needs to be good.

Also, any advice with respect to what platforms, languages etc we should look at would be very much appreciated. 

And just on the idea itself, we're not just a carbon copy of all the other new players looking to undercut the entrenched businesses. We have a unique business model (yeah, yeah I hear you say!) and have researched this with Dealers across the country...so it has been validated.

Thanks in advance.

Welcome to the forums

I'd guess you'd need at least two people, one for backend stuff, API integration etc, and another for front end.

What platform/language to use hasn't got a distinct answer, I'd probably look at things like cost of maintenance, availability of coding people for that platform, and environmental impacts (some platforms are "greener" than others).

Edited November 10, 20214 yr by BlueDreamer
Silly typo

Thanks for that. Yes that would be a good start.

I've received a couple of bits of advice that we should start by hiring a senior developer first who ould be able to help map out the project. I wasn't sure whether we should hire a PM type first...but a senior Dev makes sense.

 

I did some work on a similar project earlier this year. The key to everything are the APIs.

Most have very good documentation but experience over the years shows it takes an average of 7 hours to research and then incorporate the API. You then need the tools to extract and display the data. Everything after this is just standard application forms.

The project I worked on used multiple APIs and the estimate was 80 hours to research and write the integrations. Depending on your developer costs this could result in a large bill before you display a single element of data on the site.

Thanks again. Yes we don't underestimate the fact this will require sizeable investment. We're looking in the hundreds of thousands as our initial requirement...which will obviously increase over time.

As someone who is a lead developer at one of the largest and one of the most popular independent Dealer Management Software providers in the UK, I can only echo what was said above, APIs will be key, over the past few years I've been working here I've worked with some very good APIs with excellent docs, and some very bad ones, unfortunately a lot of advertising companies we feed to, and even some dealerships who want feeds of their still prefer to have a CSV sent to their server via FTP in a standard DMS format, and some dealers prefer to feed us in the same format, CSV... fortunately a lot are moving to JSON APIs now though which makes the integrations easier.

11 hours ago, jpeters8889 said:

As someone who is a lead developer at one of the largest and one of the most popular independent Dealer Management Software providers in the UK, I can only echo what was said above, APIs will be key, over the past few years I've been working here I've worked with some very good APIs with excellent docs, and some very bad ones, unfortunately a lot of advertising companies we feed to, and even some dealerships who want feeds of their still prefer to have a CSV sent to their server via FTP in a standard DMS format, and some dealers prefer to feed us in the same format, CSV... fortunately a lot are moving to JSON APIs now though which makes the integrations easier.

Thanks a lot for this. I guess the fact we're starting with a completely clean slate rather than a legacy system helps as long as we make the right decisions to start with.

Yes I've spoken to a few of the DMS providers here and many have their feeds in CSV via FTP. It did seem somewhat archaic to me...but not being super tech, I just took it as standard.

Do any of the systems over there share data between aggregators and advertisers in real time? I would have thought in this day and age that could be possible??

Thanks again...all very helpful.

 

https://ukvehicledata.co.uk/

https://www.rapidcarcheck.co.uk/developer-api/

There are many more. What you get is all the vehicle data. What you don't get is the dealer info. For that you need something like this:

https://trade.autotrader.co.uk/lead-management/