His Simple Car Blog Became a $1 Billion Marketplace

WSJ has a fascinating write-up on Bring a Trailer.

Car fanatic Randy Nonnenberg started it with a friend back in 2007 “as an excuse to hang out more.” 

For the first few years, it was a simple car blog 🚗

Randy says in a video interview…

We basically from 2007 to 2014 built this community that was really excited about cars and selling and transacting them. But they would always fight over the cars and who got dibs. And the best way to solve that… was a bidding model. So we built our own and launched it in 2014.

Bring a Trailer came up with a clever way to make each auction more compelling…

One engine of BaT’s growth was its solution for the problem of “sniping,” the practice of winning digital auctions by waiting until the last moment to bid. If a BaT auction ends at 3 p.m., and there’s a new bid at 2:59 p.m., the deadline gets extended by two minutes and the clock resets with every offer, which means it could end at 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. This way, bidders are competing against each other, not time.

Apparently that’s how someone ended up spending $102,200 on this race car that was once owned by Tom Cruise, instead of the $40,000 he’d originally budgeted 🙈

WSJ again…

Sales on the BaT platform increased from $248 million in 2019 to $412 million in 2020. That year, the company was acquired for an undisclosed amount […] The numbers then accelerated to $859 million in 2021, according to BaT, and they zoomed past $1 billion in 2022.

$1 billion in sales… all from starting a silly little car blog 🤯