Hi Deepak! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?

Hey Failory! My name is Deepak Murthy and I am a mechanical engineering who has worked in various roles in the automotive industry for 12 years, ranging from design engineer to software developer, and currently residing in Bangalore, India.

I am currently working at a media company in India, managing the engineering group as Program Manager. But before this, I failed to build Autto.in.

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What was Autto.in about?

Autto.in was an on-demand doorstep car service provider, which operated in the city of Hyderabad, India. Our service consisted of sending mechanics to the doorstep of car owners who required general maintenance services, such as oil change, spark plug change, battery change, among others.

As a car owner, I used to find going to the automotive dealer garages very expensive, as my car was out of warranty. And, apart from the big costs, I had some bad experiences with an authorized garage.

This motivated me to solve this problem by myself, by asking mechanics to visit me and fix the car in front of me.

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What went into building the initial product?

I began the business, by first figuring out how to procure genuine auto parts. In India, retail availability of genuine car parts is a big challenge, given that many spurious parts are sold, making it hard to differentiate them from the original ones.

Luckily, a few phone calls to Bosch, got me into meeting their local sales head who helped me to get in touch with genuine distributors.

In parallel to this, I started searching reliable mechanics. My idea was to start with just one mechanic, full-time hired and based on traction & demand expand. I was lucky again, as, after screening 8 candidates, I got a really good one.

I initially called the company GeniusMechanic and bought the domain on GoDaddy. The idea was to make it SEO friendly and get customers by ranking for different keywords. I built the website really simple, using Tilda. However, after receiving some feedback from friends and customers, I decided to rename GeniusMechanic to Autto.in.

After getting some customer traction, I decided it was time to build a website with a booking feature. Again, without coding, I was able to do it really quickly, using Bubble, which is a UI based app builder, and Chatra, which allowed me to embed on the site a chat application to receive customer bookings.