Why WeBuyCars Refused the ERP and Built Its Own

Chapters

1. 0:00Introduction: the R26 billion juggernaut
2. 2:47The 2018 call: leaving BCX for a car dealership
3. 6:40One Google Sheet and 2,000 cars a month
4. 8:38Build or buy: the ERP decision they refused
5. 11:30Full cloud in 2018, and owning every customer touchpoint
6. 14:12The hard part was the people, not the technology
7. 16:39Eat your own dog food: developers who buy and sell cars
8. 18:30Your website is your digital billboard
9. 21:19The first hire was a data scientist
10. 22:56The 2018 dream: buy and sell a car with no humans
11. 24:53The pricing models South Africa cannot compute
12. 25:31Explainability: replacing a founder's gut feel
13. 26:38High volume, low margin: a quarter of stock sold on day one
14. 28:11Controlling both sides of the value chain
15. 28:58Not a dream anymore: 6,000 vehicles traded autonomously
16. 30:26Kavak and an LLM for every customer
17. 32:08A small language model for every lead manager
18. 34:22Recommender engines for dealers
19. 35:15How much power do you give an agent?
20. 36:59Why pricing has to be 98 percent right before agents negotiate
21. 39:05We are a data company
22. 40:47Inspectify, replacing DEKRA, and the drive-through scanner
23. 42:36Chinese cars: cyclical, not structural
24. 43:09Six new branches in nine months in a deflationary market
25. 45:31Headless websites and the ChatGPT plug-in
26. 47:42Stickiness: what happens after the car drives away
27. 51:08Robotaxis in South Africa
28. 51:41Culture: 4,000 people, attitude over skills
29. 55:12Clarity is kindness: building trust
30. 57:16Founder led to listed, without losing the startup
31. 59:17Closing thanks