Overview
I was the design lead on a remote team of five that worked nights and weekends to create Priceflow in 2018.
We built a machine-learning algorithm to calculate the price of a car given several market conditions: current competition, historical sales both internal and externally, and more.
Problem
Existing tools are clunky, dated and too expensive for most used auto dealers.
Solution
An intelligent and intuitive auto pricing web app for dealers to best price their used inventory and beat the competition.
Goals
Onboard regional multi-location dealerships to prove the value of Priceflow with dealers with diverse vehicle inventories.
Home
Main dashboard and entry point for dealers to see an overview of their inventory and take action on under and overpriced vehicles.
Inventory
Dealer’s full inventory bucketed and broken out in tabs by multiple criteria: under market, over market, at market and all vehicles.
Vehicle
Granular look at a specific vehicle, its price history and the direct competition.
Price Changes
History of all confirmed price changes and ways to push them to external tools.
Post-MVP: VIN Search
Search was a heavily requested feature. Many dealers preferred to search by VIN rather than browse by vehicle make/model.
Post-MVP: Snackbars
Dealers often felt confirmation doubt when taking action in the app. In order to improve clarity and add emphasis, we implemented a post-action notification snackbar at the bottom of the screen.
Post-MVP: Placeholders
Vehicle data often lacked photos, which was something we didn’t consider in the MVP, so we introduced a simple placeholder image to fill the blanks.
Post-MVP: All Inventory Tab
Dealers requested a way to see their entire inventory, so we added a fourth “All Inventory” tab to the vehicle inventory page.
TrueCar Acquisition
We built the MVP, tested it on several dealerships, and the product evolved based on feedback from these dealers.
After the initial round of dealers, we had trouble expanding. Many dealers had extended contracts with vAuto and, internally, we were quickly losing cash on nationwide VIN data and access to the Homenet API.
However, in January 2019, things changed. We met a few TrueCar representatives at the annual NADA dealer show. They were impressed with our data model and interface and wanted to chat more. Five months later, TrueCar bought our company.