We started with three founders in 2020. Today we’re a business with around fifty full-time staff across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Our website launched with no traffic and a domain authority of zero. Our YouTube channel had zero views and no subscribers. Today our website gets over 3.8 million visits per month, has a domain authority of 71 and our content is syndicated to millions of Australians through the Seven West Media network and the Australian Community Media network. Our YouTube channel is Australia’s most-watched new car review channel on YouTube and gets over three million views per month with over 320,000 subscribers.

Don’t go into business with the mindset that your end game is endless riches. You need to have the mindset that the thing you’re launching will help other people, will change somebody’s life or will make someone’s life a bit easier. For me, it was a passion for cars. I had started ten other businesses in my teens and early twenties but all of them were started with the end goal of financial success. So, it’s not hard to see now why they failed. My passion for cars meant I was able to think like a car buyer, think like a marketer and think like a car company. Combining all of these things led to the success of CarExpert.com.au.

Ironically, I thought we learned from our mistakes with our last businesses and this time around everything would be perfect…simply because we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Unfortunately, that was wishful thinking. While we didn’t make the same mistakes, we did make new ones. But, you know what, there’s nothing wrong with mistakes or failures. They are the reality check you need in business. They are the sanity check you need to know you’re not perfect and that things are fragile. It’s also important to allow your staff to make mistakes. Some of our biggest traffic stories have come from ideas that have stemmed from new angles and concepts, while others have been failures.

While Covid-19 presented challenges for most businesses, it was almost terminal for us. We started our business just before the pandemic kicked in. Our seed investors were unsure of what was going to happen to the world and the key staff we needed became nervous. Most challenging of all, extensive lockdowns meant we couldn’t test cars and create the content we needed to make. But, with the benefit of hindsight, our business wouldn’t have succeeded anywhere near as much as it has if it wasn’t for the pandemic. While all our competitors slashed costs, we massively ramped up spending and invested in quality people. This led to us catching our competitors in record time. Our motivation actually comes from ‘the haters’. In our industry, we deal with the opinion of the public and our competitors. We thrive off their criticism since we know the harder we work against our slow, legacy media competitors, the more we will achieve. That mindset has made all the difference for us.

By: Alyssa Herr, Editor