Interview with James Hind, CEO of Carwow
What has been your greatest achievement so far?
Raising money from VCs was a big achievement, especially from the caliber of VCs who have backed us. It wasn’t easy, we met most of them over 12 months before they actually funded us, but we’re very proud.
Selling our first car was also a great moment!
How long has the your startup been in the making, and who is the team behind the business?
We’ve been live as carwow for about 12 months now, during which time we’ve shifted over £45m worth of cars, £10m of which was just last month.
The founding team is myself and my 2 co-founders Alexandra Margolis (Head of Design) and David Santoro (CTO). The team itself is up to 8 people now with a few new people joining us in the coming weeks.
What has been your biggest challenge so far as a startup owner?
Hiring is always a challenge. Persuading amazing people who already work for great startups to leave isn’t easy, or cheap!
In the coming year, what would you like to achieve with your business?
We’re billing a significant amount each month, and growing pretty quickly but we still have a relatively small marketshare in the UK. The primary goal is to scale that as fast as possible. Beyond that there’s other markets and geographical locations that are on the radar.
What has been your most valuable lesson so far since starting your business?
That there aren’t right answers. When we started we spent a lot of time looking for the ideal solution or trying to work out what the best approach to a problem is. In reality a lot of decisions are based on intuition, especially in the early days, and there never is a crystal clear path to what you should do.
Finally, If you could give one piece of advice to someone thinking about starting a business, what would it be?
Just start. We never would have got into creating a new car marketplace if we hadn’t started as just a content site. Your business will always evolve, but actually jumping into the deep end is the first step.
