#343 - Yossi Levi - Founder @ CarDealershipGuy - Taking the Auto Industry By Storm

Chris Powers: Yossi, my man, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today.

Yossi Levi: Chris, it's good to be here again.

Chris Powers: For anybody listening, this is the second time I've recorded, but the first time I did it, you were still in Yossi. You were still just a car dealership guy. And it was funny preparing for that one because you were like if I can show my face, I don't know this. So, we arranged this whole conversation, and now we talk like brothers. I love it.

Yossi Levi: Yeah. And I remember we were telling Johnny, Hey, Johnny, can you mess with the voice a little bit? I don't want to do it myself.

So Johnny started playing with the voice afterwards, but it's funny how things change.

Chris Powers: It's so funny. And while you're saying doxing the voice, the comment you made in one of our notes, most people thought you were the CEO of Carvana at first, like that was the consensus.

Yossi Levi: Yeah, and I took that as a compliment because, hey, he has access to tons of information, and I came out swinging in this online social media world, sharing things that I was exposed to in very intimate forums. Of course, you know I did it, you politely. I didn't share any people's confidential information, but I just had access to fascinating stories about growth stories and whatnot in automotive.

So, people found it interesting, and we'll get into my background in the online car world, but that lent me a lot of insight into that market.

Chris Powers: So, for listeners, we are going to spend the meat of this talking about what you're doing today, but I said that to set the tone for what you're doing with the car dealership guy, we would not be doing the audience a service by giving them a little more history of how you came up.

 You could give us some insight into how you came up in the industry and then touch on the bus your business you started, CDG.

Yossi Levi: Yeah, yeah. And how I came up and how I came down—I think it's an integral part of the story. I'll take you back and keep it brief, going way back.

But my story started here in Northeast Philly. My father had a small, ten-car-use car lot; as a teen, going to the car lot was a thing, right? You wanted to see Dad like you went to work, and that was just what needed to be done.

The family was here to do what we needed. We needed to do what we did to make ends meet, and at the time, that was the right thing for the family. So, I spent a lot of time at the car lot growing up, just an independent-use car lot. Around 2014, I was doing my undergrad and started getting significantly involved in the business.

I realized that I couldn't leave too much at this point; the business started to rely on me in certain aspects. I was very involved with the website, the marketing, and the company's digital side. And I said to myself, I was a finance student, but I said to myself, you know what, like, I'm going to stick around a little bit more, help my father grow this business, supporting the family, then I'll move on.

Get a real job. That's the thing car people always say: I'm going to do this until I do that. And so I was on this whole track for going to the corporate world and whatnot. And the car world just kept kind of sucking me in. And so it was around that point, Chris, where I went for an interview at Subaru of America.

It is funny. Subaru of America is getting a real job again. I'm a used car guy. I need to get a real job. It was in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, right over the bridge of Philly. I remember interviewing there for a couple of hours as if it was a long process.

And at the end of the interview, two things happened, right? First of all, the guy asked me, what do you do? I like Carla. I'm young and naive. I'm the chief operating officer. Now, I didn't know. I didn't realize that a COO or any of these things.

 I run the operations at this point. I'm the COO. And so this guy looks at me, and he's like, who are you bullshitting? Well, we figured that out. I explained it. But then I remember at the end of the interview, He gives me, okay, well, here's the next step.

He's like, and this is what the role entails. You're going to be making PowerPoints. And when the second I saw that, I said, holy shit. I said I was not built for this. Like, this car business, there's something for me to do. I stuck around, and we kept making the traditional family business.

Chris Powers: All right. Two things. One is just funny. Girdley always posts that photo of a Subaru that says if your husband's driving one of these, he's not having an affair with you. Quick on the tin car used car lot, just really quick, like, can anybody start one of those? What are the barriers to buying a corner and putting ten cars on it?

Yossi Levi: No barriers to entry, my friend.

That is why the car business attracts entrepreneurs: people who don't have opportunities elsewhere, or maybe they're not educated formally or whatnot. You can make it in the car business. It would help if you were a grinder and a hustler. You have to be willing to put in very long hours.

You're working retail, which has its own set of challenges. And in the car business, there's one rule—excuse me—there's one cardinal rule, and that is, It's not, it's really, the way you make your money is where you save, right? You could, say, equate that to real estate, where it's how you buy, but it's really about where you can save, right?

Because working in a 5 per cent net margin business leaves little room for error, if you're highly scrappy, resourceful, a hard worker, and willing to put in the hours, you can make millions in the car business. However, you must be patient. It will take you a decade to do it consistently and continue evolving.

Chris Powers: Okay. And then one last quick question with the big dealerships, and I could be wrong, but I have a few friends that own the big ones, and we've talked, you hear like, you hardly make any money on the car. You make it all on the service. The aftermarket accessories, the warranties, like when you have a big dealership, you can offer all this when you only have ten cars and probably a tiny office, what, how do you make money in that business?

Is it a revenue or income model different from the big dealerships?

Yossi Levi: Yeah. Different dealers have different types of revenue models, right? We're all selling cars, but we're all selling added products to these cars, meaning warranties and whatnot.

But you make money on the car when you're a small dealer. You have no choice. You must find and cherry-pick these particular cars and make money on them. As you scale, you can get more creative and competitive. So, on my podcast, the Car Dealership Guy podcast, I just interviewed someone who sells 300 cars a month out of each store he has.

He has three stores. And he loses, or borderline loses, on every single car in the actual vehicle. But that is his business model because he wants to sell the backend, the warranty, the gap insurance, and the tyre and wheel protection. And so if he sells that to 70 per cent of his consumers, right, well, he just made a ton of money, even though he lost itself.

And because he's so competitive on the vehicle, he can attract many consumers and do such high volume.

Chris Powers: He sells cars as a front for his warranty business, something like to that degree. All right. You go to Subaru; you're disenchanted. You return to your job as COO at the family business but only stay there briefly.

You eventually had an idea to raise venture funding around an idea in the industry. Will you take it from there?

Yossi Levi: Of course. So, 2018. Four years later, the business has grown. We're doing close to 30 million a year in sales for 2000 units, netting close to 2 million yearly.

Again, it started from nothing, so it was like a great business. My father and some other family members were involved as well. And again, I always had this challenge where I didn't feel I could do more. I didn't feel like being just a used car lot and one store; I wanted to grow.

And I didn't know how that growth would come, right? Because my father, at the time, was in his mid-fifties, we were at different points in our lives and aiming for other goals. So, I asked myself what the best opportunities were for me to grow truly.

And take this business to the next level. If you remember 2018, well, and you might not know this because you're not close to the car business, but that was when online car buying started taking off because Carvana had just gone public. Online car buying has been around for decades, since the early 2000s, eBay Motors.

But it became very mainstream; technology was improving, and Carvana had gone public. I don't know, like a couple hundred million dollar valuation. It was nascent, but it was talking to town. So I sat there one day and said, why can't we build a better mousetrap?

Right? The insight that led to that was that I realized that most of my customers were coming onto my lot to purchase a vehicle. That wasn't even physically present on my lot, right? Let me give you more context here. We were a subprime dealer, meaning we primarily served customers with credit scores under 650.

The subprime customer when they're buying a vehicle, right? They're not shopping for a car. They're shopping for financing. They're asking who can get me approved and where I can get the lowest monthly payment, et cetera, et cetera. And it was wild that we had 50 cars in a lot at this point, but then we had 150 vehicles in some side lot a couple of miles away.

People would say, Hey, I need to buy a car. We would bring a car from this side lot. They would fall in love with it. Great. Boom. I'm buying it. And so all that led me to say, okay, why do we even need a car lot? If people aren't buying these cars that aren't here, right? It's like, why can't we do this online?

And then, coupled with what was happening in the market, Carvana, and technology, I said. I want to build a better way to buy a car. And so I did something very unconventional. It was wild then, so I said we would make an online auto retailer.

I quickly realized that that was a huge undertaking that brought me to the next level: venture capital. I'm happy to give you the background on that right now if you'd like. Alright, so it's 2018, and I started developing this idea. We're growing all the technology in-house about selling cars online right out of my little office in this used car lot; our managers and staff are like, look, what is this? What is he doing?

Why is he always in his office? But long story short, I realized this was a very audacious opportunity, and we would need more capital. And so, in six months. I took one; I built a plan, we made an MVP, created a very shitty budget that was very, not very thorough and went out to raise venture capital.

And I said, we're going to raise capital, and we're going to build this crazy way to buy a car at the end of 2018. we landed an investor. It's a rough process, especially since I knew nothing about this world. I had never raised a dime in my life. Going out and seeking investors was a weird phenomenon.

But having the pedigree from the dealership, and when investors saw a real business, something working here gave them a lot of confidence. Ultimately, at the end of 2018, we landed our first 5 million Series A funding to build this online auto retailer.

That was the entrance to the building called GetACar. We named it GetACar because it was meant to be a completely online car-buying service.

Chris Powers: How would it be different from Carvana, or was it not?

Yossi Levi: When we first launched, we focused on subprime consumers.

At that time, Carvana was still very much focused on targeting consumers. They were always focused on subprime but tried to go upstream and offer a better vehicle. They would not buy cars with Damage in the car facts and whatnot, and we view that as an opportunity.

We said, Wait, if they're not buying these cars, if they're trying to target these people, competing in certain angles on price and stuff like that, right, they're going after a different customer. Why can't we do this after another type of customer? Oh, and by the way, the used car market is highly fragmented.

At the time, no single player owned more than 2%, right? CarMax was at 2%. Everything else was dispersed between 40,000 plus dealers. And so we said, why not us? Right. If we can offer a superior service and do it better in the northeastern part of the United States, where we're launched, why can't we build a better online auto retailer?

That was the thesis behind it.

Chris Powers: I suggest spending a little bit of time on it. You grew it, but it didn't become the thing. Take us to the later days when you saw the writing on the wall: This couldn't be business.

Yossi Levi: Yeah. So, in 2019, we were pushing things.

At the time, I was 25 years old, had no kids, and had a girlfriend but not a wife yet. And it was just go time. I did something intelligent and stupid at the time, but it worked out. I guaranteed all our inventory because no lender wanted to offer us floor plan financing to buy inventory to scale.

So, I put it all in my name, and it worked out. So thank God for that. Or that part worked out. Nonetheless, I said, look, we're going to rush, and we're going to build this company. And so, Chris, for the next three and a half years, we grew to nearly our peak in 2021. We closed the year at 83 million dollars in sales. We raised 55 million in capital.

So I raised that. That was all just V.C. investors who believed in us and the vision. And that took us to 2021, which was our peak year. As you remember, money is sloshing everywhere, and interest rates are nothing.

And it was mayhem. People were buying cars left and right. But we started running into some challenges. I remember around mid-July 2021, the specific month we peaked. And after that, things got tough. I can break this down because some elements were pivotal in the company's history.

But first, growth started slowing significantly for us. In fact, in certain months, we were going backwards. We were scaling so quickly that the operational undertaking of building a vertically integrated online auto retailer was underestimated, right?

Let me explain that. When you're a car dealer, right? As we were, we had our reconditioning centres. We had our logistics. We had; we were turning wrenches. We were putting cars in the body shop and painting cars. I mean, we were doing everything. We set all this up, and it became highly complicated as we scaled quickly and our investors armed us with capital.

We put together a very aggressive plan, right? At the time, startups grew at all costs, and things got tough. Around mid to late 2021, we entered an M&A process. There was an online technology, a publicly traded technology company that was considering getting into online auto retail.

They took notice of us. We spent three, four, or five months with an intimate potential M&A process. Eventually, after all these months, I'm sure some people will resonate with this—anyone who's been through these processes, but they're tough.

And you can't count your chickens until the eggs hatch, or however you say it, but the point is that it looked pretty promising and didn't end up working out; the deal fell through, right? It was around November 21; that was the moment where we hit an oh shit moment.

We said, wow, it's real, we're not going to get bailed out, we have to figure this out, and we just had to start cutting costs. And Chris, that was the beginning of a road to nowhere positive. It was a rough year and a half after that, and we just spent cutting costs and laying off.

We tried to pivot. We tried to shift to private equity. We tried to downsize. We attempted to acquire profitable dealerships to infuse them with the technology we had built in-house and improve their economics. But in the end, we couldn't raise enough capital by this point.

The market had shifted, rates were rising, and we needed to be better equipped to continue executing this vision. And so that was the story that brought me into the Cardealship guy. But this was the entire journey because I was on this aggressive plan, and we were building, and we thought, I mean, we were already talking to bankers about it.

We were maybe doing an IPO in two years and an SPAC, and within six months, we were backpedalling. Six months after that, our investors wrote us down nearly to zero. So, it was a fierce couple of years with tons of lessons, but it was just a crazy roller coaster ride.

Chris Powers: I have so much respect for you telling that story.

I wrote two notes: personal guarantee, God, Lee, if you have not personally guaranteed something, are you even an entrepreneur? I've heard that. And then push anybody listening to this; you've been cut one of my excellent friends I've met online. We've spent time offline together, and you mentioned pushing.

And I was talking to David Centre the other day about you. And he was like, what's tell me about Yossi? I was like, David, you're very passionate. If there's one person I know who might be equally as intense, it's Yossi. So I can only imagine when you had venture capital, and it was going mode, how fast you were going, but it's your superpower.

All right. You decide to wind down, and we could spend the whole episode on just that lesson. But what's important is what came out of it. And when we met the first time, you told me this was happening. You were yet to be public when we first met again.

We weren't; we had just gotten to know each other, but you're like, I have this company. It may work out, but you had, basically, in your spare time or maybe too; it was therapy for you to start a Twitter account to release some energy. You could start there. What was the initial impetus to start doing it? We'll talk about what transpired.

Yossi Levi: Yeah, and I'll tell you one more important thing, but this was Get A Car; before Cardio Shrek, Get A Car was not just another company for me. Get A Car was something that I sucked my entire family into. Right. Like I would, in hindsight, I was crazy for doing this, and it brought a lot of pain because when we were pivoting it, trying to downsize, get the profitability.

Remember, like I was dragging along, I had a father who was involved in business, even post-venture capital. They all had roles in the company. They had sentimental value. I mean, it was tough. And I constantly wrestled with myself because I had to deliver value for shareholders, right?

Stay very objective. But it added, it added, and just another layer of weight on me, knowing that I was letting down my family, my father, or so it felt at the time. I had shareholders who believed in me. I believed in myself. I mean, I sold him a story. And I couldn't deliver on that.

And it was a challenging moment for me going through all that, especially when, I mean, I'm telling you, investors put a lot of money and faith in me, and so just that experience, I'm sure there's always people going through this. I think that experience is a very eye-opening experience because you realize who wants to support you throughout those times; I mean, it's when you go through that adamant time where the investors and the people around you, you can tell they're true character until today, Chris, I'll let you know that, I'll tell you something I've never shared this before, but I returned capital to investors.

Right. And what I mean by I haven't shared this before is that I didn't run the company to the ground after we knew it would not be a success. I could have kept going. And, like, we don't want to do that. We wanted to if we wanted to avoid throwing good money after bad.

When it reached that point, we arranged a structure to return millions of dollars to our remaining investors on the balance sheet. Instead of continuing to try to grow something we could have done better, that was the right thing to do.

But until today, you can see the character of confident investors who, maybe after that, have even responded. Some people have yet to respond again. Everyone reacted in different ways. Some people have been super supportive. And that, Chris, life is long.

And we're all in this business world, right? We're all trying to make things happen. It's a test of people's character when you go through these types of moments, which I'm just sharing because I think it's essential to know who you partner with, as much as possible, who you're working with, and how will those people how would they behave in the day when things are not going well, and everything is not roses and butterflies?

I wanted to kind of cap off the Get Across Saga because it was just a brutal year and a half, two years of winding down and discovering who supports you, who even gives an ounce of shit of that, you're going to do things the right way. And versus who doesn't.

Chris Powers: I have a ton of respect for sharing that. On that note, is the idea still valid? Is there room in the market for your vision? Or is it? Are we still? It's just not an economically viable model.

Yossi Levi: It's viable, but you must have billions of dollars.

Tens of millions are not enough. It's a capital war—who can throw more money at the problem? To do well in the 5 per cent margin business, you must have a vertically integrated infrastructure, build reconditioning centres, and develop technology to own a bank that can lend to your consumers.

All these things take hundreds of millions of dollars. So, the most significant miscalculation for us was not realizing that we would need a lot more money than we would ever have access to and doing it briskly. You're incredibly disadvantaged if you're not starting with a massive spring or springboard like Carvana did with Drive Time, a billion-dollar auto retailer, if you want to increase and dominate the market. If you leverage processes and systems from other businesses, you will have a significant advantage in the market.

So, the opportunity exists. It would help if you had a ton of money and domain expertise, although some players are already super entrenched in the space, and I would not want to compete against them again in just-auto retail.

Chris Powers: Some things you can only learn by going through it. Sometimes, you must get punched in the mouth to learn the lesson.

Yossi Levi: I call it the four-and-a-half-year, 50 million lesson. It was very, very brutal. Near the end, but overall, it was an invaluable experience. So, you asked me about the car dealership guy. So, I'm happy to transition to what happened there. Cause that was an accident as well.

Chris Powers: Well, it beautifully sets up for anybody going through something terrible. Often, what's on the other side of a bad situation is the next, which is excellent. You're coming out of something with many learning lessons that reshaped you.

I've seen that happen in my own life. You'll hear it here, but you listen to it often. Somebody's most giant swing is right after they get a little bit of a nosebleed. When did you start the business? I'll just let you tell the story.

Yossi Levi: Yeah, look, car dealership guy was a Twitter account that I initially launched on December 21.

Remember, the layoff started at Get A Car on October 21. Sixty days in, I'm already with my tongue on the floor. I flew over the Atlantic. We had an office overseas. I had to go lay off a bunch of engineers and stuff. I was there for 48 hours, sitting in my hotel room, looking at the ceiling.

I'm like, Fuck, this sucks. The next day, I start laying off people. I have people crying on my shoulder. It's just never fun. Right? We all, anyone who's been through it, know that it's never fun. Anyway, I got back, and it is just very, very. I call this a non-creative two months.

I'm very creative as I've learned more about myself and discovered what drives me. I get to go from creativity to doing things differently every day. And, it was, we entered, it's like, for me, it was like a dark moment where I just felt like, I told you we're talking about like P. E., pivoting, this, downsizing, very like financial engineering, cutting expenses. I mean, incredibly mundane, dull, and non-creative tasks, or at least it felt like to me. And so I'm sitting in bed one night and have always been a big consumer of Twitter and the X app, right? I've just always loved reading and stuff.

I saw a real estate account. It wasn't yours, but it was very well. By the way, I followed you then, so I'll tell you that one. But I saw a good friend, a strip mall guy, 's account, and I'd seen it a couple of times, but it hit me. And I said, what if I just launched one of these accounts, started sharing some stuff, and just had fun?

It was never meant to be anything. It was an anonymous account. And so I said, you know what, let me do this. And so I remember super, super vividly. I was out because we had just moved to a new house. And so I was sitting on the other side of the bed, and I am today.

But I was sitting on the left side of the bed. I made this account, and I just started tweeting. Chris, this was unbelievable because I had amassed thousands of followers within a few days and was blown away. I was here. I am just like a lifelong car guy. I have been 13 years in the car business, and I went from a traditionally used car dealership to an 80, 100, or 200 million dollar online auto retailer, venture-backed, right?

It's like a completely different world. And what if I share my insight and experiences? And so I just really went all in. And that was what I said, and what I mean by all in is I just started tweeting my butt off. I had, I had no vision, I had no intent yet, there was nothing meant to be behind it, it was just, hey, this is fun, it's giving me energy, suitable, in light of these days that are very dark and grim for me, and so let me keep doing this, and I just kept tweeting.

Chris Powers: In hindsight, just by thinking about what you said, you were doing it with no strategy. Most people listening know that some accounts you can tell have a plan, but more people are surprised than not that they're outstanding accounts.

They're just letting it flow from the heart. As you look back at that, what were you doing right then? You may need to know you were doing right. Were you sharing things that nobody else in the industry was discussing, or what?

Yossi Levi: Yeah. There are a couple of things to note, and I'll discuss each separately.

First of all, we have a ton of strategy, car dealership guy today, car dealership guy media. I launched a former media company for this about seven or eight months ago. We're a small team. We were four individuals and worked with a couple of great freelancers.

We're a team today, but today, there's a ton of strategy, and we're much more structured, but I'll get into that later. First, when I started, I realized that the market rewards asymmetrical insight, right? What's scarce in our social world and our market is insight from actual practitioners, people who have done it, have a real, have done the thing.

They're not just posers trying to create some content, but people who have grown a business or built something with their hands get their hands dirty. And so, what struck people was that I was offering that real insight. Now, it was very raw. It was very crude.

I needed to learn how to write the best. I used some emojis, which I later realized cheapen your brand. I used a bunch of capital letters. I needed to learn how to do the whole copy work, the best way to write content, what aligned with my brand, and how I wanted to be perceived.

We'll get into that. But early on, what struck Chris was sharing scarce insight and authentic stuff that I had experienced on the ground floor. And just as importantly, interacting with the people that started interacting with me. And so I wasn't just putting insight, locking off.

I engaged with people early on. That was the initial foray into enabling me to build a community because it wasn't for me. I enjoyed an actual hobby early on, was passionate about it, and was well-invested in it.

Chris Powers: There's that passion again, showing back up. All right, I want to talk about how we can call these critical inflexion points along the way. So maybe the first would be, started tweeting, okay, this is landing, this is resonating, didn't have a strategy, you're using emojis, what was like the next inflexion point along the way where you were kind of like, I have something here, don't know what to do with it, was it Elon Musk retweeting you, was there some new moment that was like, okay, okay, okay, We're going to double down on this hobby of mine.

Yossi Levi: There have been content and tactical growth inflexion points. I'll explain the difference, and again, this is all stuff that. It's funny you're asking me because it's all been in my head. I've never talked about it, so it's a good question.

Chris Powers: We're like brothers from another mother, so it's natural that I will ask the right question.

Yossi Levi: It will be fun talking about this because it is interesting. Let's talk about the content inflexion points.

I have about 500,000 followers on all my platforms, including Twitter. I started very consumer-focused, sharing insights that primarily benefited or interested consumers. You must consider growing a social account like a business.

In your early days, how are you wedging into the market? Right? Who is your audience that can consume this content and find value in it? People on social media and human beings in general, correct? They only want a couple of things. They want to make money, save money, or get more intelligent. That's it.

There is no other thing on social media that works.

Making money, saving money, and making myself brighter are where people come from. You can sprinkle some entertainment, but that's what will drive your growth. And so what I had realized early on, and I didn't know how to put words behind this yet, but I realized that that's what people wanted and that my audience was consumers, right?

Because the dealers had not yet found me, they didn't know who I was, right? And we'll get into that because that's my biggest audience today. But for me, I said, okay, there's consumers here. People who will one day buy a car, have purchased a vehicle, maybe need to sell a car, who knows what. Let me grow a following.

I don't know what will come from it, but it's fun. I'm enjoying it. And who knows what happens once I have a thousand, two thousand, maybe 10,000 followers? The first 20 30,000 followers I gained were strictly through consumer insight. Once I hit that inflexion point, I realized another big pocket audience on Twitter.

And that was the financial world. I realized that investors, analysts, and hedge funds are all on this app and are looking for that scarce insight. And so as I consciously started learning this, and the only way I realized this was by seeing who's engaging my content, I said, Hmm, I said, Let me share a bit more insight about the general markets.

How, where are prices heading? What's happening? What am I seeing on the ground floor? That might resonate with a bigger audience. And I so started doing that. I would tell you around 30 to 40 000 followers. I went deep into it. I wouldn't say I shifted from consumer, but I started supplementing like market insight, right?

From around 100,000 to 120,000, when I became mainstream, it was clear that the broader market was taking notice: the right people. Like the everyday person who may not be in the market but is curious about the car business, I have started noticing.

That brought me to my next inflexion point: in early 2022, when Elon Musk retweeted me. Again, we have to set some context here. The car business was starting to shift in early 2022 or late 2021.

I'm mixing up my dates, but you'll bear with me with the story here. The car business is starting to shift. I spoke with my G.M. at one of our stores, and he told me the story about banks misbehaving or whatever you want to call it—approving some customers who should not be approved for lending.

Long story short, I wrote a thread about it. I tweeted it. At the time, Elon had yet to purchase Twitter, and he rarely tweeted; a tweet from Elon at the time was very impactful, right? It was, it was a time when a retweet from a tweet or something, you were reaching lots of people, and you were able to talk to the town.

So I put out this thread, and Elon commented on it. And it went ballistic. I went from 110,000 followers to 160,000 or so within two days. It was unbelievable. Cathie Wood, the prominent investor, retweeted it. But those, what I just explained to you there, were the critical inflexion points in my story, where after that, it just turned and earned, right?

Just keep putting out the content and keeping in the reps, and the platform keeps growing. But those were the critical points I thought about in the content. They served as inflexion points and allowed me to scale the brand.

Chris Powers: Were there a lot of you being boots on the ground in the industry, sharing your insights, or were you at that point where people were also going to you and sharing things that maybe you have the distribution for, like, Hey, this is something you should put out?

Yossi Levi: Yeah. Early on, all the content came from me. The crazy part was that the table turned within a year, and most of my content was user-generated. And so the beauty of this platform with the car dealership guy is that we'll soon get into the business side of things today, but it's that.

My goal is to build this. I call it a premier destination of insights. And the craziest part is that I am not the originator of these insights, right? I am no longer the first-party source where I used to be. Today, I serve more as the nucleus. I am the centre of it all.

I have hundreds of people feeding me, and Chris, we're not talking about salespeople. We're talking about dealer principles. We're talking about executive CEOs. People are providing me with information. And I am serving as this filtering mechanism where I can make sense of it using my experience and share it with the world.

So, the game had already shifted about a year after the car dealership guy was already operating. And I was primarily—not wholly—but significantly leveraging user-generated content insights data now. To be very clear, I'm still writing the content. I was still crafting it all.

But the data ultimately was no longer just me. Hey, what did I sell this week? What did I see at the auction last week? It was, let me grab this insight from this auction executive that has 50 auctions under their belt, or let me go to this dealer that has 70 stores or 50 stores in this, like, I'm saying it allowed me to leverage, more extensive samples of data and anecdotes and then combine them with my insight and expertise to share with the world.

Chris Powers: Yeah, when I've been with you, there's been multiple times when you've been like, I don't know if you were the one breaking the story, but you were so excited because you had just gotten some titbit of information that you might be the first to share. And where are you getting this?

And you'd be like, you would have no, the top of the auto world wants this out. So, I've never had an anonymous account, but when I think about it. If people didn't know it was me, I would tweet that there's a benefit to having a personal account. But there's so much more you could share anonymously. God, that has to be so valuable.

Yossi Levi: And I'll tell you that, like, I, car dealership guy, would not have worked if it wasn't anonymous. It just wouldn't. I would not have been as I wouldn't have had the liberty, or I wouldn't have felt as comfortable sharing certain things. People judge me by my content, insight, intellect and experience, right?

I was not judged by who I am, my background, or for what it's worth, right? Like I've done some things. It's not like I'm a 19-year-old intern sitting in a college classroom, but still, being an anonymous figure is genuinely an incredible tool that the internet has just enabled us to share this insight where you can be candid and open.

And today, it's a different game. The brand today is scaled. It's the credibility is there. I've liked the way I tweet and the way I talk. Things have, right? I've grown, learned, and improved, but it would have worked with a fully anonymous account.

Chris Powers: Okay, when did you decide this is what I will do full-time? I'm going to make this my next job.

Yossi Levi: So it was in April 2023. I launched a podcast, right? That's the classic line. But again, it goes back to me, right? Like I needed to keep my brain working.

I was still CEO of Get A Car and needed to do something mentally stimulating, interesting, fun, and creative. So, I launched this podcast. Let me share some insight. One day, I sat down and recorded myself doing a monologue, editing it with GarageBand.

It's a hobbyist at home. I was having some fun over the preceding three to four months. The podcast exploded in a good way, right? It grew. It's like it was going viral. I brought some real. I had changed it to a style podcast because I sat there one day, and I said, yeah, I was like, I can't think of more content.

What do I do? And so, how do you solve that problem? Right? You bring great guests, and they solve your content problem for you. And so I started; I moved to interview style, but the podcast went viral within the auto community. And so It was around September 2023, where, for a couple of months, I was already having conversations with the board about, we were trying to sell the business, wind down and whatnot, Get A Car.

But at that point, I had officially stepped down. And so we had put a plan in place; someone was taking over my position to do the wind-down operations. And in September of 2023, I said, it's gone time. Like, I now have this platform. I've built this reputation. I have yet to monetize it, which is a very immaterially monetized scale.

But now it's time for me to build a business around it. The specific business I chose to build was media. I said I could make CDG insurance, CDG dealerships, a car dealership guy, anything. But to me, just being in the media space felt like a missing opportunity for the car market.

I said there is no refreshing, authentic, transparent source of insights for people who want to know what the hell is happening in the car market. Yet, we're coming off the craziest years in this business. People have no idea where prices are at. Where is inventory heading? What's interest rate affordability? It was wild to me. We're coming in, we're in the most, and we're in a time where people are craving insights into automotive more than ever, yet there was the broader market or mainstream media channels that weren't solving that. And I said we will build a media business that will disrupt us.

Chris Powers: To be fair, I'm assuming you probably still think, when you talk to these creators who are turning into media businesses, especially in an industry as large as yours, that CDG insurance and CDG dealerships might be on the backside of this, too, where once your distribution is so extensive and you are the authoritative brand, you can start launching lines.

It's like the Mr. Beast model or whomever you want. It's the future. Have you thought about it that way?

Yossi Levi: Content is your oxygen. And so, for me, what are you doing every day as a creator? You're compounding, gaining more followers, and gaining more attention.

You're gaining more email subscribers, podcast listeners, and credibility. But it's not perfect because you're also losing some—a hundred per cent why it's essential that you know what type of content you're offering when you're building content.

Are you offering content that is easy for people to drop off? Or are you offering something that's sticky and people keep coming back to? As I grew my podcast, I asked myself a couple of questions. What am I interested in? Right? What is most interesting to me, and what type of content can I build a business around?

Right? Because at the end of the day, you can't; I don't believe in advice like, oh, go. And, you know. Right. Did you talk as if you were talking to yourself or no one was listening? No, that's B.S., in my opinion, because you have to; you have to create stuff that the audience will actually listen to and could potentially be a business if you want to be able to do this full-time and sustain and sustain it as a profitable casual, positive entity.

I needed to double down on automotive insights geared toward the automotive industry. Most of my listeners today are in the auto or auto-adjacent industries, such as lenders or vendors. I have plenty of consumers who listen as well and are tuned into my podcast and whatnot, but still, most of my audience is B2B at this point.

However, I realized that B2B always needs insights. And in such a dynamic, fast-moving industry like automotive, There's always something new happening. And so I was very confident, and I said, I'm going to double down on this, and I'm not going to rush to monetize in all these creative ways, because I think that, I believe that, I want to build still the foundation for what this is.

I didn't feel mature yet, meaning the company still had a lot of room to grow, and I said, let me continue. Content is king. Before anything, I've done some things since then and launched several things. I found an industry job board and a bunch of other stuff since then, and I'm still working on things, but at the end of the day, when I wake up and go to sleep every single day, content is my baby, and I have to make sure that, several pieces of content go out.

Whether I have something scheduled for that day, which I don't do too often, whether my team is clipping some stuff for me, getting some insights for me, whether I'm tweeting off the whim, which I do every single day, I have to do that rain, snow, sleet, or shine. I have the flu.

I'm in the hospital. It doesn't matter. If you want to build a great business, you have to put in the repetitions and be very obsessive about that content flywheel.

Chris Powers: To elaborate more, when you first started, you tweeted into the ether, sharing whatever was coming.

And then you said that now that you're at 450,000 followers, there's a little more method to the madness. You have a team, but if you had to describe how content goes out now, is it a certain number of daily pieces? Is it getting across more channels, such as TikTok and Instagram? How are you thinking about building that foundation?

And then what kind of strategy is behind it?

Yossi Levi: Yeah, so as I scaled CardioShopGuy and realized I wanted this to be a real business, I started asking myself, what are all the different types of content I'm posting? And so, I sat with the team, and we just drilled this down.

So, as I look at my screen, I'll tell you exactly how it works. Today at CardioShopGuy, I have 13. I have 16 different forms of content. It is how we've mapped everything I've done to 16 other forms. We label each one of those contents with a letter.

So, there's an A post, a B post, a C post, a D post, an E post, da da da da, you get the point. Now, every type of content requires different effort and insight. And so, as a creator at my scale, remember, I'm also building a business. I need help finding every single data point and whatnot.

Sometimes, I still need to inform it, put the insight behind it, and press send. However, different types of content require different levels of effort, knowledge, and experience. When we did this, we mapped out my entire ecosystem using all these letters.

And then we asked ourselves, what do I need to do versus what can other people help me with? For example, an APOST is a short form of STAT. It is a short-form statistic without context and could be the year's top-selling car. If it shows you a list of 10 vehicles, that is something that I can do without doing.

That is a stat that, like anyone, could do with no context, no insight. And so, as an example, that is something that my team today. We'll aggregate and post, or I might post it, but my team do that work. I'm just going down the list. You have short-form stats, long-form stats, community engagement posts, user-generated content, a CDG self-promotion post, a meme, breaking news press releases, best car deals, a podcast post, and a podcast teaser.

These are all different types of content on my calendar. And so now, what we've built at CarDealershipGuy is four-week sprints. Every four weeks, there's a certain amount of A posts, B posts, C posts, D posts, E posts, da, da, da. We map them out on a calendar, and then we can know what content we need on what days.

I set this myself. I decide what I want out of the world. The day before a podcast, I always wish for a teaser. Right. I want to post about the best deals once or twice a month. Right. Three times a month, I want to post memes. Right. And this is how we can start better managing and systematizing content creation.

Right. Because if you don't build a system—and this is just, we're testing this—it's still super nascent, flawed, and imperfect. But this is how we're starting to build that muscle because we realized that for the company to scale and for CDG to be a car dealership guy, it has to be much bigger than just me, right?

We have to start. We are building, building that muscle.

Chris Powers: What's the most complex form of content to create of all your types? Is there one that's super difficult?

Yossi Levi: It's simple but challenging to delegate. Right? So there's some stuff that, like, listen, I love creating content.

I love interacting with my audience. I'll never delegate everything, and I don't want to. I enjoy this stuff. So, putting out a long-form statistic with insight and context requires many competencies.

You need to copyright very well, have insight into the market, and have context, right? You've got to have experience to know what this even means. You have to put it at a time when it makes sense in the market. There are all these different kinds of experiences, and you have to have a certain level of context that is harder to delegate.

And so, that's the type of content that I'm just tweeting about. I just had a conversation with a dealer. Here's what they told me. Here's what this means. Here are the implications this could have on the car business. Like that is me mapping 13, 15 years of car business experience.

It's just a lot more work to delegate. So, I'm not trying to trust that. What we're doing here is saying we want to build the. It is the premier and most significant platform for automotive insights. Let's delegate the 60%, the 70%, and the 50%. That is stuff that I don't need to be doing.

It's easy to delegate because it requires only a little insight other than getting the correct data into the market.

Chris Powers: Okay. And real quick, you said that was a huge inflexion point on podcasts. I know my answer to the question, but if you had to describe it, it would take six or seven months, based on your experience running your podcast.

What's the value of having a podcast? Why do you think podcasts are so powerful?

Yossi Levi: So I've still stolen your line. You said this, but were you the one who said trust at scale? Yeah. Is that you? But I stole it from somebody. Fair enough. But like. But it's so beautifully stated because when you simplify it, think about it: When has there ever been a time in the world where you could listen, tell a story or what we're doing now, and tens of thousands of people listen to that?

In such an intimate manner. I mean, it's genuinely fucking incredible, right? Now, for me, it's been two things. Number one is I've scratched my itch, right? When I was a dealer, I needed a source of insight. How are dealers making money? Doing this, that model, this method.

Yeah, and you can join 20 peer groups in the automotive business. But the point is that I felt like there was nothing that democratized this to everyone. And so, for starters, the podcast enabled me to do that. Because now, It's such a privilege.

I get to bring on the most prominent, best dealers in the world, the most significant stores, the most prominent executives, some of the smaller stores, mom-and-pop shops trying to make ends meet—everyone in between —and ask them questions for an hour. It's unbelievable because you gain so much knowledge in such an intimate forum.

They're thrilled because they get distribution, exposure, and their name. The best part for them is that they're not just speaking to one person but to thousands. And how you worded that trust at scale is so beautifully stated, and I couldn't agree more.

Chris Powers: Why would it be better to get on CDG, which may have a smaller audience, than, say, go on CNBC and do your typical 10-minute spiel?

Yossi Levi: Look, at the end of the day, you want to go out and deliver a message to the world. It would help if you told your story. We all want distribution. CNBC follows me closely. They're great people. After seeing the podcast, they invited my guests onto their segment and told me this.

So, I like CNBC. But at the end of the day, Chris, as you go on CNBC or some channel, it may be out there once. It could get uploaded to YouTube. But at the end of the day, there isn't a face behind that brand, right? There isn't a human. And the podcast, what's so powerful about it is that when I bring someone on the podcast, it's a natural, human connection.

It's a human-to-human story. And I didn't invent the rules of human nature. I don't know why humans gravitate more to humans than brands and things that don't have a face to them. But that's just how life works, right? Like people want to listen to people. People want to listen to authentic conversations.

People want to listen to things that are unfiltered, right? And podcasts give you that. The podcasts are not gate-kept by anyone. They're permissionless. You're not going through some screening system or filtering system. It's genuinely one of the last. Completely unbiased platforms allow you to have a natural, candid conversation without any agenda or someone pushing some narrative.

Chris Powers: It's a trusted scale. , It's, and we built better filters even in this world of more content. It used to be when it was only this mainstream media; you just, maybe you trusted it, perhaps you didn't, but it's all you had to rely on. There was no other form, and we're in this world now where I think we're building better radars for what's authentic, what's trustworthy, and not that CNBC isn't responsible, but it's what you said, there's no face to it, it's scripted, they ask questions in a way that.

Aren't you wondering how two people would ask at a dinner table what we're doing? So anyway, okay. You have a massive Twitter account. You have leading podcasts in the industry. Let's keep thinking about channels. So, I hate to say this, but do you have a newsletter? How are you thinking about it?

 More verticals or more channels to get this content out. What matters to you?

Yossi Levi: Yeah, so we're looking at, I'm constantly asking myself, let's say there is my, our ideal customer profile, a car dealership guy is the car dealer, the senior manager, the automotive executive, right?

That is who we're targeting with our insights. That is who we're providing, asymmetrical value to where they say, wow, this is incredible. I can't get this anywhere else. And so what we're doing is today we're reaching about, I'll take you to last month because we just did something massive and special. I'll fast forward to that shortly, but last month, we were making about 60 million impressions a month across all social channels, the newsletter, and the podcast. That was our primary source of insights, and just the mediums we were using were newsletters for written format, podcasts for people that like audio, YouTube as well, bundled in with the podcast, and then social channels.

Now, we had an issue, and it goes back to the vision again, right? We want to deliver many insights and be the most prominent platform. The challenge we ran into was that I'm very comfortable with text, and LinkedIn and Twitter are the platforms on which I thrive.

So we started asking ourselves, how can we deliver more insights? How can we do this through Instagram, TikTok, and other visual platforms with tons of audiences? It could be a better use of my skill set and our current company's competence. So, we launched a talent network and worked on it for months.

But what this talent network is: Many automotive influencers contacted us for help, and I needed more time to help them. Some of these people are talented. And so one day, I sat there with my team, and I said, Hmm, I said, What if we Team up with these influencers, these creators who have hundreds of thousands of followers, and they compliment us from a platform perspective, right?

Because they're on other platforms, and we exclusively manage their entire business, right? Because creators want to create, or at least most do. And so we went full swing, full steam ahead on that. We started by speaking with several creators, spending a few months, and signing our first creator.

And that means now, Chris, that we've doubled our reach today and over the last few weeks. And so, while we're still primarily a social newsletter podcast in terms of media distribution, now that we've signed on, our first creator. And I'm happy to share who it is.

There'll be. I haven't had time to share it yet, but I'm happy to share it here. Now that we have signed our first creator, who's very big on Instagram and TikTok, we can dominate the platforms entirely. He does over 120 million impressions a month. Again, we continue chipping away at the different forms of distribution that exist in the media ecosystem.

Chris Powers: Quickly, how is that individual using your platform for their CDG? Do consumers who consume the content see a link related to you, or do you not care?

Yossi Levi: Yeah, so there are a lot of plans we have for cross-pollination and co-branding and whatnot, but at the end of the day, if you think about it,

So this, the creator we signed, his name is Russ, Russell Richardson. He's just a phenomenal creator and very talented. His Instagram and TikTok handles are under RussFlipsWhips. I'm just so creative. I love this kid, and he is, I say, kid; I mean, he's an adult, but he's just so good. But anyway, he's, so it's a lot of co-branding and cross-pollination between the two.

We have a lot in plan. We're just kicking off now, but at the end of the day, the value of Car Dealership Guy continues to increase as we're in more places and as more people rely on us for insights, right? That's what we want to be. We want to be your sidekick. We want to inform you.

And for us not to have the presence on, or a prominent presence because we have a presence, but on Instagram, TikTok, and all these platforms is just not okay. And so having someone like Russ now on our platform, expanding the reach of Car Dealership Guy, and being able to serve as his agent, and get his deals done, which is a muscle that we have in the company, which is very strong nowadays, is a massive benefit to us because now it allows us to be in more places, serve more people. By the way, the advertisers that come to work with us Have doubled the exposure they have access to on double the platforms.

It's like M&AM&A in a traditional business. If you know how to do M&A well, you can accelerate your growth. In this case, it's not M&A but partnering with someone you believe in who's super talented, intelligent, creative, and aligned with values.

Once you get a deal overnight, you can double your reach on the internet.

Chris Powers: Okay, you answered it with brand and advertising deals. But if somebody signs up to this talent network, you're saying you'll get to do this, and we'll do all this.

What will you all do? Brand deals, ad deals, or anything else?

Yossi Levi: Yeah, so we've had a lot of conversations, and we're having a lot of discussions with additional creators, as you can imagine. All these deals are very bespoke like they're all different. It depends on the creator and their needs, right?

Because you don't want to go to someone and say, Hey, let me do this for you. I don't want that. And so for us, like the foundation, the first starting point is just like, who is talented? Who compliments us, right? Maybe it compliments us by being on platforms we're not. It may complement us by appealing to an audience segment we appeal to less.

But we first ask ourselves who compliments us. And then we say, okay, now that we know who compliments us, let's understand the best ways to monetize this creator and work with them to do deals. And so, who are the best brands from which we can get these deals?

And then, after all that is said and done, we say, okay, Mr. Creator, Mrs. Creator, what do you need our help with? You may need me to do your accounting and sell your deals, or you may need me to help you with production, or you don't need anything. You may want me to sell your deals and leave you alone.

And so our spot is not to go to a creator and tell them, Hey, this is what you should be. It is how you should be. It is who you should partner with. Our job is to work with talented creators with whom we have aligned on values in the auto space and potentially beyond and then ask them what they need help with.

How can we help you be a better creator? What can we take off your plate? And again, Chris, it goes back to the same issues I dealt with, right? I was an up-and-coming creator. I didn't want to deal with all this logistical headache. It was a pain. I had yet to have a sales team. I had no production. And I built it.

It was hard, and I wouldn't say I liked it. But I did it. And I'm still doing it. And now I love it. It's much more of a system than it was early on. And it's still super early. But the point is, I know the pain. I've been there. And I want to help other creators ease that pain and grow.

Chris Powers: I love it. All right. The next inflexion point might be what you were talking about last month. A series of prevalent anonymous accounts decided. Maybe you all did it individually for different reasons, but you had been unknown for roughly three years.

You decided to make yourself known and made this incredible video about who the F is: a car dealership guy. Why did you choose to show who the man behind the account was?

Yossi Levi: Yeah. So, I spent time again; it goes back to thinking about first principles. So I sat there for months and said, okay, I started an anonymous account for a reason at the time: I wasn't going to put my stakeholders or risk them in any way.

 I'm way beyond that now. I'm a legit brand, and I'm building a real business. Plus, a thousand people probably know who I am—every guest on my podcast, every advertiser. But I don't control my narrative, right? I realized I was getting on calls with people meeting me for the first time.

And they're like, you were a dealer, then you were a venture-backed tech founder. Then that didn't work out, and you launched this media company, like what? And it bothered me because I felt I was doing a disservice to myself and my story. I was going into these conversations like, oh, let me explain.

It was awkward. And so, I asked myself very simply, I said, what is the best way that I can tell the world my story at scale and explain who the fuck I am and why I'm doing this and do it vulnerably by truly opening up and telling people the truth. And I'm super proud of my story. I've been through some crazy experiences and wanted that out there.

I wanted people to know my failure, like, I wanted to, to be that sicko that puts it up front and shows people like, Hey, this is what didn't work out. And all roads- all roads are producing a slightly different video. Now, I'd never personally made a video. I'd done some stuff through Get Core, my product company.

But I got linked to a talented producer and a video guy, and we just went to bat. And so I spent, like I said, three and a half to four months creating this video, which was incredible. I interviewed my father, some of my former co-workers, and some of the biggest dealers in the country, and it was just a home run.

We publicized it on Twitter on February 2. I did a live unveiling, as they call it, at a conference in Las Vegas. Hundreds of people attended. It's on YouTube and my YouTube channel. And it was just unbelievable. It allowed me, Chris, to tell my story again at scale.

And I added visuals, making it even more intimate and decadent. And explain to people, like, this is who I am. The good, the bad. It is how I got here. Here's what I'm doing. Here's my vision. And I can't tell you how much I recommend this. I mean, I get it. Not everyone's anonymous. But you'd be shocked at how many people are curious; people want to know who this person is.

Why are they doing things? And when you put time and effort into producing something intimate and authentic, I mean, today, I get on the calls with people, and they're like, man, I feel like I know you. I watched your video; I know your story and am incredible. Let's get right into it.

It's a cheat code because podcasts are trusted, scaled, or permission-less. It's very similar. Now, I mean, I'm so glad I did it. I came, I unveiled. Again, I don't have to, at this point, as anonymity no longer serves me. Or I didn't need it anymore.

I built my credibility. The industry knew who I was. I mean, it was just time. And I mean, thank God it worked out very well.

Chris Powers: Dude, it was such a great video. Check out his YouTube channel or Twitter account if you're listening to it. It's his pin link. We'll also put it in the show notes.

It was such a great video. It was about 15 minutes long, with Netflix quality and one question. Did you have to build credibility and reach where you were to launch then? Would you not have had the audience to see it, but would it have been a disservice had you started it a year ago or done that video a year into the account?

Yossi Levi: A hundred per cent. I needed to wait to be mature. For the brand to have solid credibility, I had some of the most prominent industry CEOs on my podcast when I unveiled Chris. Some of the most influential people gave me confidence and allowed me to say how it is.

Chris Powers: Were there points in time when people dismissed your credibility? Was that impacting you at all along the way? Or was it all 99 per cent positive and 1 per cent negative?

Yossi Levi: It was overwhelmingly positive, which, truthfully, shocked me. I didn't expect that as I was growing up.

Like there were very few naysayers, and I, and the reason that the reason I was able to, to get that done, and when I say naysayers, I mean people like, oh, like you're bullshitting, it's because you're bullshitting. Everything I wrote about got to a point where I started informing it with data, and I sourced my data.

And so, early on, I had a lot of people like, Oh, you're full of shit, you're this, and I still share anecdotes all the time, but I do my best to inform those anecdotes and back them up with data with reputable sources. And the beautiful thing about data is that it's a lot tougher to argue with.

Because if vehicle supply went up from 2 to 3 million or whatever, that is a fact. Vehicle supply means there are more vehicles on the road. And what happens when there are more vehicles on the road? Prices come down. And so the fact that I was very data-driven minimized it.

The haters, but listen, I will caveat that with one thing. Anytime you do something or put stuff out into the world, you will have people who hate you and try to discredit you. And you're just like, it doesn't matter. It would help if you listened because sometimes, one in ten, there's something constructive, but like nine in ten, it doesn't matter.

And let me reframe that even more. You should look for those people because that tells you that you're doing something different, right? If you don't have those people, just it chirping in your ear or whatever, jealous, whatever it may be, then you're probably not doing something that impactful.

So I see today that those stages were just an unlock for me, knowing that this is something unique and different. It's truly changing the game because otherwise, people wouldn't be this passionate about it, maybe telling me I'm wrong.

Chris Powers: Yeah, it's interesting. Sometimes, I'll tweet like I'll have lunch with a giant in the industry, leave, and post something like I had lunch with a friend. He told me this, and again, it's mostly all positive. Still, there are always the few people that are like, you're full of shit, or who's your friend or, and you can't share who the person is that like, they don't want anybody to know that they said it, but, that's been my one anecdote on sharing like on the fly stats.

And I always caveat it with, like, I heard it from my friend rather than taking credit for the insight. It's just always interesting how people respond to it.

Yossi Levi: But that's the strategy that works.

Chris Powers: Yeah, it does. Okay, you've been going full-time since September. We could keep talking on and on about this, but if I were to give you the big vision here, what would it be?

What would you have accomplished in this business if we sat back in five years?

Yossi Levi: Look, I stumbled onto an opportunity that, as Brett Morgan, one of the dealers on my documentary, said, is like you're seizing an opportunity that we didn't know we needed, right?

Like where a car dealership guy is headed, I want to build the largest destination of automotive insights. Think of this as a hub that levels the playing field for dealers and consumers on information access and insight and boosts ground experiences.

I'm serving Chris in this industry right now. I'm growing what I call the collective intelligence of the automotive industry, where people are feeding me information. And the more I get, the more it's self-perpetrating. It makes the brand stronger. It allows me to deliver more insights and arm the market with more knowledge.

And so, where's this brand going? Well, the way I see it, we are going to continue. Number one, first and foremost, we are going to expand our content. I mean, content—I mentioned this before—content is king, content is king, content is king. And the first, the most important thing for me—every day I wake up, I talk to my team, and the first thing we talk about is always content, right?

What are we working on? How are we making our content 1 percent better every day? It could be adding a B roll on our sponsors' ads on YouTube, improving the SEO on our descriptions, or upgrading our thumbnail. I am still determining what it is. Every day, we have to get 1 percent better at content because the content will drive us to continue scaling this business.

Other than that, expanding the content, growing the content, and improving the content, I want to get into more business and service businesses as well. And so, we're slowly starting to sniff around and see the best opportunities. Recently, we launched an industry job board. Sounds simple—industry job board. You don't understand. I mean, this thing has gone viral. Over a hundred top automotive brands have already signed up for it. There are over 150 roles posted. And it's free. And again, it's stuff like that and sounds so simple.

But when you think about it, you can only do that if you have a community, right? It would help if you had people who need jobs and people who have jobs. And it's stuff like that that I think there's, that's where the opportunity lies with car dealership guy because as we grow our scale, as we extend our reach, we're able to be in front of tens of thousands of automotive, just people in the automotive industry, it just creates an opportunity where we can match make, we can design, launch businesses, services, products that are just limitless.

And so the truth is Chris, I don't know what we're going to launch yet in a year or two years, I mean, six months, even from today, but I can tell you that it's all going to, it's all going to be rooted in a couple of things. It will be number one and drive our mission of making car buying or the car market more transparent.

Number two will offer more insight and transparent knowledge of the car market. Number three will uplift this industry for dealers and consumers. There's no reason dealers and consumers should be adversaries.

The dealership has such a bad stigma because expectations are misaligned, and there is a lack of transparency. Fixing that alignment will ultimately help uplift the entire auto industry for buyers, sellers, and dealers alike.

Chris Powers: Did any dealer along the way ever be like, man, quit sharing this? It has been our secret for 30 years and is now exposed.

Yossi Levi: I've had some dealers do that very much, like, tiny numbers. I've had some consumers. To do that, it's always the extremes, like only the extreme dealers and the extreme consumers are, will hate on me if I do something that's a little pro-consumer or pro-dealer, but I don't care.

I know my values and my ethos. I want to be objective. I want to be down the middle as much as I can. And so, again, it's okay. Some people will do that. They'll live with it.

Chris Powers: We are very aligned. I am still determining where the Fort podcast or some media we've created here will lead.

But if I stick to it and remain consistent, opportunities will continue to open up. It's like distribution is king. Once you've created that around something great, that's why you have it. But once you have it, if you don't screw it up, it can be; it's probably the most powerful tool right now in the world. It's still undervalued.

Yossi Levi: This is my biggest problem. I get a car. I couldn't acquire customers at a profitable rate at a certain point, and it's distribution, right? How do I get my word out there? How do I tell the world about this phenomenal product service? And it is, distribution is so, so important.

Chris Powers: All right. I wanted to pivot for a little bit, which was incredible. I want to talk about the market. The first thing I would throw out is why Apple is dropping its electric vehicle project, which they have been working on for a long time.

What does that mean for the market, or what does that tell you, that Tesla's king?

Yossi Levi: Well, it's definitely. Kudos to Tesla for sticking through and making it happen. Apple could have acquired them years ago, and they didn't pull the trigger. Who knows if that worked out, but it worked out for Tesla.

It's also a testament to the state of E.V.s in our market today. E.V.s and electric vehicles are selling roughly twice as slowly as internal combustion vehicles. We've hit this obstacle on the road, and the day supply is explicitly roughly twice as high on E.V.s.

You're seeing increasing rebates and deals, which are becoming more attractive for consumers. I'll put that out there, but there's no doubt that the E.V. market is cooling. I mean, the last couple of years were crazy. Every car was selling like hotcakes off the lots.

In the last year, you've seen electric vehicle prices drop between 15 and 50 per cent, right? Tesla has dropped some cars down by as much as 50%. And so, it's not a secular decline from here. It's just an obstacle in the road.

E.V.s still have a lot of room for growth. They're not for everyone, for sure. Growth will slow over the foreseeable future, but E.V.s will continue growing. Adoption is still increasing, and market share is still growing for E.V.s.

And speaking concise terms, the deals are getting a lot better. And so again, I'm like a deal hunter, right? Like I look like, okay, I don't care if it's a car that runs on air, on gas, on freaking jelly beans. Like, I want to know the best deals in the market. And if you look right today at the state of E.V.s and the best lease deals and purchase deals, I mean E.V.s have taken over.

About 80 percent of the best deals are E.V.s. If I were a consumer in the market today, I would absolutely, and again, if I didn't care what car, I just wanted the best deal, look at an E.V. because the prices are seriously declining. They're just offering the manufacturers some of the best rebates.

Chris Powers: Why are they declining?

Yossi Levi: Demand, my friend. That's the only word. It is just demand. There needs to be more demand. Supply is rising, and cars have to get off the lots. So it is that simple.

Chris Powers: But if they're cheaper and they're better deals, is it something about the, how they work or how far they can go?

Or does it take too long to charge them? If the price is right, why are they dropping so much?

Yossi Levi: Oh, no. Let me caveat: The prices have only started adjusting now. So, they've been behind. So, you're right. Sales will probably rebound now, given that certain brands are on the way to equilibrium.

They're not there yet, but they are underway. Prices declined a few days ago and have fallen since last week. Tesla is the only one ahead of the curve. They started dropping prices months ago. Tesla is already on the other side of it.

They dropped their prices significantly over the last 12 months. And they took the medicine there, but all the other brands have been slowly declining over the last couple of months. And so just now, sales for E.V.s are starting to pick up, and I'm seeing it also anecdotally; I'm seeing Lots of people that would have never considered an E.V. suddenly pulling out of lots with BMWs, electric BMWs and Audis and stuff like that, or Hyundai's because the deals are getting a lot better.

I posted an Audi the other day; someone who bought an Audi in Maryland got about 36,000 off MSRP on a lease for an E.V. It was an Audi e-Tron. They put down, they did put down like eight grand, but still got a crazy discount, and they drove out for like 600 a month on 110,000 cars.

It's pretty wild. There are opportunities today to take advantage of the cooling E.V. demand.

Chris Powers: We'll bring it home on this one. What is captivating your attention right now in the auto business? Is it something different?

What is the most exciting thing dealers may care about, the B2B or the consumer, right now?

Yossi Levi: The auto industry is going through the craziest transition it's probably ever gone through. Over the last three years, we have not leased enough cars, so a leasing cliff is coming. A lack of lease returns in the next few months means fewer used cars, which could mess up prices again.

Who knows what's going to happen? I don't know if used car prices will go up, but they may not go down, so there's so much uncertainty. And so, I love staying close to the data, macro and even micro, just seeing what's happening. The biggest thing I see is that people are returning to the fundamentals.

In the last couple of years, people disrespected the fundamentals. I mean, all rules went out the window; it was mayhem. Salespeople were making three times their earnings, and dealers were. Things are returning to normal because the fundamentals matter again; you need to manage your inventory well again and customer experience issues.

You have to run a tight ship if you want to survive in this environment. The rainy climate could be more pretty, and dealers don't own their inventory cash. They typically finance that. Some dealers pay hundreds of thousands per month for inventory or over 100,000 months on inventory alone.

It can get boiling and heavy. So, I'm looking at how dealers are navigating these environments. How is it going to impact the market? Where will deals pop up for consumers so that I can keep customers informed?

Guess what? What will you do if you're a dealer with cars on your line of credit, and you need to get them off your line of credit? You're going to offer deals that you maybe otherwise would not just to get them sold. And so I'm paying attention to all this. And then, other than that, on the macro level, to zoom you out, will China start bringing their cars to the U. S.? That's going to cause a lot of disruption. And they will, right? I am still determining how they will do it, whether they're coming through Mexico or whatnot—but I am just talking to smart people with access to much more insight than me and travelling to China to meet with officials. I think it's happening.

It's coming soon. I don't know how it's going to impact the U.S. market, but it's going to be—it's not going to be pretty. So, we must brace ourselves for a dynamic environment because the market and the game are changing.

There are new players in the field. Technologies are changing. And the next five to 10 years will be monumental in how they shaped the car industry as we know it.

Chris Powers: All right, folks. Follow my man, Yossi Car Dealership Guy, to stay up to date in the next five to ten years.

 Yeah, what you've done is incredible. I'm so excited to keep watching you do it, man. Thanks for joining me today.

Yossi Levi: I appreciate you and have admired you from early on. You know this because we spoke super early on before this was anything. And so I think it's just wild. It's funny how life works and how things change.

And I remember speaking with you and telling you, Chris, I don't know if I can do this or what I should do. And I have my dad and investors and this, and you really just gave such sound advice early on, and super, super appreciate it, man. So thank you for that, and yes, if anyone is interested in the auto business, check out Insider Insights, the Car Dealership Guy podcast, and all platforms.

We have many consumers who listen: auto people, lenders, and people from all walks of life. So, yeah, we'd love for you to tune in, and I enjoyed being on this podcast.

Chris Powers: I'm rooting for you, my man. Thank you.

Yossi Levi: Thanks, brother.