Interview series: Eric Peters of FrugalMechanic
1) Tell us about Eric Peters. How did you come to start FrugalMechanic?
I’m a Seattle native, born and bred here for 28 years. I graduated from the UW with a degree in Business – but I also paid for school programming database driven websites. Programming+Business = Win. After school, I split my time between corporate jobs at Amazon and Microsoft (MSN Search). At Amazon, I was the only business user in Retail Hardlines to have a Linux Developer box (which I had to get an SVP approval for) and also my own SQL login account to the data warehouse. At Microsoft, I was one of a handful of search data experts & got to run & analyze monetization and usability AB Tests for MSN Search.
I left Microsoft a few years ago to go to an Ignition Partners startup SecondSpace (now called DataSphere) where in June of ‘08 my best friend Tim Underwood (who I had recruited to SS) and I were laid off – that’s how Frugal Mechanic really got started. At the PI, John Cook wrote a blurb about us in August 2008 @ http://www.seattlepi.com/venture/374001_vc08.html. At the time our initial goal was to spend the summer and “build that startup idea” we never could scrape the time together for. That summer turned into much, much longer.
2) In a nutshell, how do you describe FrugalMechanic?
We’re a shopping website for auto parts.
OK, that’s a little short but that’s what the website does for consumers. On the backend we scrape & normalize content from across dozens of websites, handle price refreshes, and power a front-end that has over 50M pieces of fitment information for auto parts. Oh did I also mention we power over 40 different websites all from the same code base? A couple of our more high profile partnerships include http://autoparts.cardomain.com, http://auto-parts.myride.com, and http://autoparts.thecarconnection.com
3) Who are your big competitors and what value proposition sets you apart?
It would be easy for me to say Price Grabber/Nexttag/Shopzilla/MSN Shopping/eBay/etc. The reality, though, is they rank terribly for auto-part related searches, so our biggest competitors are other individual auto part retailers.
Over the shopping comparison engines, our biggest advantage is our normalized dataset. We know which parts fit which cars – that model just doesn’t work on Price Grabber/EBay/etc. We also can de-dupe the different auto part numbers to provide a more comprehensive retailer options (the same exact Bosch fuel filter can have over a dozen different part numbers)
Over individual retailers, it’s the breadth of our selection. No one has the ability to have as large of a SKU offering, since we don’t have to optimize for profitability by picking any handful of distributors. If one retailer gets cheaper pricing on Fram parts, we pass that information onto the consumer, if another has better pricing on Bosch then we pass that information a long. We’re an independent and comprehensive database.
The whitelabel solution I mentioned is one of our competitive advantages for driving distribution – there are a lot of automotive enthusiast websites that would like to have an turn-key auto part store without the headache of customer service. We can do that for them, and at no cost (in-fact we pay them a revshare of our affiliate revenue)
4) What do you like most about your job? What do you dislike most?
I love wearing multiple hats. By far, that’s one of the biggest joys a business-techie guy like myself can have. I can be having a biz dev call in the morning, writing code during lunch, and de-duping auto part categories in a spreadsheet all in the same day.
On the flipside, starting my own startup has been one of the most stressful situations – especially when we were consulting to bootstrap in the earlier months – it was very distracting and sucks a lot of energy out of you. My boss can also be a bit of an a$$h0le sometimes, but I find it hard to talk behind his back.
5) What bit of trivia would someone not know about FrugalMechanic?
My Co-Founder & Best Friend Tim Underwood is also a Seattleite (I have visual proof – http://twitpic.com/9xaxj – Socks w/Sandles!)
Reach Eric via Twitter: @ericpeters
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