Carnovo

Overview

Antai Venture Builder is an investment group of companies such as Wallapop, CornerJob, Glovo, Deliberry, which has launched Carnovo. Antai defines Carnovo as the first online comparator of offers on new cars from official dealers in Spain. It is a Barcelona based start-up that is transforming the automotive purchase process by making it fast, transparent and convenient for both, car dealers and buyers. Their mission is simple, to change the car buying process by placing customers in the center making them save time and money while offering them the best buying experience.

After doing a marketing research, which was done by Antai, they saw a gap in the market; there is a place and demand for an app which would simplify the purchase process of a new car. However, Antai saw that new players started to penetrate the market in Europe and in the US, therefore they needed to launch a web platform in a short period of time, to be precise in 3 months. And Antai needed the product to be robust & ready for scaling. In order to build that type of platform, different profiles were required: going from software architect, DevOps to Frontend & backend experts.

Goals

Their main goals were to build a super easy to use platform, where you could rapidly configure your car and start receiving proposals within the next 48 hours. We also needed to create a reliable back office for dealers in order to manage all the ongoing incoming users’ requests. The application was supposed to grow very fast, so all the automation processes should have been done to support this fast growth.

technologies used

Symfony PHP, React JS & Docker.

Results

We made it! We delivered the MVP before the high season so all the marketing campaigns could start on time. The product raised 2 million euros in less than 6 months and now it is one of the most promising startups in Spain.

Challenges

Timing - From market research we knew when the highest season for car selling was, so we needed to launch the platform before this period to have the time to test the platform properly and be able to launch the marketing campaigns on time.
Integrations - Following lean startup methodology, we tried to take advantage of third party services instead of developing them by ourselves, for example: cars configuration data base, analytics, help desk, communication platforms, email marketing platform, etc. This is why in a 3 months period of time we needed to integrate more than 5 different software service providers. That gave us time and possibility to focus on the core features of the platform, which we developed by ourselves.
Broadcast algorithm - One of the main and important needs that the application had to meet is to deliver the right user car request to the right dealers, taking into account the distance, the car configuration, the reviews and the price.

What we did

We developed the platform that gives access as for potential buyers as for car dealers.
We developed a back office for the administration of Carnovo’s team
We did an integration with a database that provided us with information regarding cars: multiple characteristics & configurations and their retail prices
We built a continuous integration system that enabled them to have staging, pre-production & production environments and deploying automatically their platform using docker.