Launch HN: Fiix (YC W17) – Same-Day Auto Repair at Your Home
We send licensed auto mechanics to your home to fix your car within 3 hours. All you need to do is send us a message over chat. We figure out what your car needs and send over a vetted mechanic with all the parts and tools to perform the repair at your home.
We started the company as “TireSwap” from Arif’s parent’s attic as a way to have your tires changed at home. Our customers asked for more and more repairs, until we offered over 300 services. We rebranded to “Fiix” and were accepted into the YC Fellowship (somewhat unorthodoxly!) via Snapchat (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11678286). Since then, we've quit our jobs, repaired thousands of cars, and are now processing almost $100k/month in sales.
Getting our unit economics right has been the most important takeaway from YC. We’re priced so we have enough money to acquire customers, offer a great price, and earn a profit to grow the business. We’d love to hear what you think about our company, and if you have any tips on local growth, those would be appreciated!
85 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] thread'But the flaw is this: "All you need to provide is a driveway or parking space where the mechanic can work"
I feel any decent mechanic will not work under these conditions. It is unreasonable to think good quality work can be done without a properly outfitted shop.'
I think if they got into professionally evaluating used cars alone it'd be a pretty useful service. Buying a used car, boom, send out a mechanic before you hand over the cash.
Does seem like it'd wind up being expensive relative to say, a Jiffy Lube, which seems like it's on a roughly equivalent level of service. Another one of those startups marking up service industry conveniences for the affluent. (That's not a value judgment, it's just a familiar business model.)
Second this. In Sri Lanka, quite a few of us depend on some mechanics we know to come home to do repairs for us. My car's been saved quite a bit this way (one particular time was when the coolant stopped flowing through the radiator due to a jammed thermo). Quite often the work involved taking out most of the pieces sitting under the hood.
The most difficult part was the reliability of bringing the mechanic down. So it's pretty cool to see this service here. I'd gladly pay for something like it in SL.
But you can do quite a lot of things with just some space and some tools. Oil changes, filter changes, brake jobs, battery changes, rotate tires, etc. And, if the vehicle called is capable of a tow, this might presumably supplant both AAA and Jiffy Lube type services.
Expanding on that, as someone who has been the proverbial "busy professional", I would have happily paid a premium to have someone come and do my oil changes while my car was parked at work to prevent having to take the half hour out of my day for routine maintenance.
A few reasons why leakage doesn't happen:
- Unlike cleaning, this isn't a weekly service, so the incentive is less.
- When our mechanics communicate with customers it gets routed through a Fiix phone number and/or 'business cards' with direct links to re-book them
- Mechanics have also expressed that they don't want customers having their personal phone numbers because it actually takes long to quote out a customer (we've built software to do this instantly).
- Because we do a high volume of repairs, we can get better parts costs than mechanics could on their own
- By going through Fiix, the mechanic gets 'de-risked' as even if the customer complains, or things go wrong, they still get paid
That's a massive plus point for all parties involved. Congrats on nailing that aspect
Dress clean? Really? Are they "articulate" too?
How do you handle catastrophic failures during a repair? For example, what happens when a rusty bolt head snaps off and now a component needs to be drilled and tapped? I've worked on my fair share of older cars that have lived their lives on salty New England roads, and this happens more often than you'd think. Does the car get towed to a repair garage in these cases?
I see wheel/tire mounting and balancing listed as a service. How does that work? Are you able to get the balancing machine into the service vehicle, or do you pick them up, leave the car on jack stands, and then bring them back balanced (probably disconcerting for the customer)?
We have a few partner shops across the city that we'll get the car towed to in the case that we can't complete the work at their home. That being said, we've completed thousands of repairs and less than 1% have needed the tow service.
Off rim tire changes and wheel balancing are the only services we offer that are non-mobile. These are 'experiments' for now, but we have them on the site because we have other mobile partners that will bring a large truck with the balancing machine and complete the repair.
Seems like a good idea if the price is right. I'd love this for regular car maintenance.
We try to maximize the number of bookings inside a garage, and they're all equipped with both heated jackets and portable heaters.
When it gets way too cold, we prioritize mechanic happiness and reschedule all the jobs for the day.
Metal gets brittle when it is cold. This will lead to tool breakage (health risk) and bolts snapping rather than turning. You really should not work on a car at temperatures < 5C and preferably you should work in a heated garage. Below -10C it qualifies as torture, not work.
Being a car mechanic is hard enough on the body when working in the best possible setting.
Nearly all the mechanics I see working now in the UK have gloves, tight fitting "latex" ones. I suspect it's in part to do with evidence suggesting used engine oil is strong carcinogen, and also because most garages have open fronts here. There are plenty of other fluids knocking around you don't really want to be in contact with a lot; also even light latex gloves will stop some scuffs and nicks. I've used them myself occasionally, when it's very cold (just above 0degC/freezing) they help a lot.
Gloves seem more common the more expensive the service is too, so it might be a company mandated 'health and safety' protection.
When we were running TireSwap we did on rim tire changes and rotations only (summer to winters and vice versa), so no mounting / balancing was needed.
I just sent an email to your About.me account. If that's no longer active, is there another address I can reach you at?
Thanks,
Daniel
http://www.eater.com/2015/12/7/9852106/kitchensurfing-privat...
Pretty much explains it.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/pg/The-Pit-Stop-DIY-Garage-45343608...
1. Tool theft. Anyone that's ever done anything Blue Collar will know that tools evaporate as soon as you turn your head.
2. Failure to fix. Cars end up taking up space due to their owners inability to fix and/or put them back together. Then it's up to the 'coaches' to become lowly paid mechanics and put the thing back together for them for next to nothing just to get the car out of the garage.
People have been trying this idea since the 80s. Never worked before and it probably never will.
Because there's very little human touch to the mobile mechanic business model in addition to how infrequent one would use Fiix, people are in no way swayed on picking between YourMechanic or this - it all comes down to price competition.
I would definitely not invest in this product, especially because it's based in the Greater Toronto Area (for similar reasons why Instacart started in tech-savvy cities like New York and San Francisco instead of most of the GTA which is suburbia - for one to grow the seed for such modern apps, they should plant them in the most forward-thinking communities).
What exactly would you say is the differentiating factor, other than the fact that they don't service Canada?
Because there's very little human touch to the mobile mechanic business model in addition to how infrequent one would use Fiix, people are in no way swayed on picking between YourMechanic or this - it all comes down to price competition.
I would definitely not invest in this product, especially because it's based in the Greater Toronto Area (for similar reasons why Instacart started in tech-savvy cities like New York and San Francisco instead of most of the GTA which is suburbia - for one to grow the seed for such modern apps, they should plant them in the most forward-thinking communities).
Congrats on the launch!
Also doing car repair in the driveway or on the street -- in many neighborhoods this would be a violation of the HOA agreement. We aren't allowed to do vehicle repair anywhere visible from the street (so like my garage door would have to be closed in order to avoid an HOA fine).
Just seems sketch... My AC goes out and I'm going to call some guy in a van to come put a new one in? Can he change my oil? Recharge my AC? What about spills and leaks, who cleans that up if it gets on my driveway or lawn? For a variety of reasons, mechanic shops better suited for this sort of work. Is this even kosher with the EPA?
Edit: Looked at the site... wiper replacement and battery replacement were some services offered. Yup... got it, I'm not the target audience for this.
I feel like even the least car-savvy person on Earth can figure out how to change their own windshield wipers.