When Harry Jones, Tom Leathes, and Alex Buttle set out to found Motorway, a startup that connects car owners with dealers looking to buy and resell their vehicles, in 2017, it wasn’t the founding teams’ first startup rodeo. Nor was it their second.
Motorway was actually the founding team’s fifth startup, Jones, Motorway’s CPO, said on a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Found podcast. He added that the co-founders all met back in 2002 when they were young, Leathes and Jones worked at the same startup, and have been able to grow up alongside each other.
Despite their prior experience and success — two of the startups they founded were acquired — Motorway had an early pivot to its current strategy. The company started out as a price comparison tool for consumers to see how dealers would value their car. Jones said that while consumers were actively using the tool, the team realized they couldn’t go far with that strategy, and pivoted to their current model.
“That pivot was really critical in how we kind of evolved the company,” Jones said. “the first thing is, as a founder or an entrepreneur, you’ve got to get comfortable with the idea of change.”
Jones also spoke about how the founding team has been able to land their company ideas which have ranged from travel accommodation curation to an office space search website to now Motorway.
“We look to try and deliver value to market as quickly as possible by just building really small, scrappy things, even if they were just one-page websites,” Jones said. “When you kind of pull on the string a bit, and you found one that was getting some traffic or some good conversion, we go a bit further and build it up further. And that was the same kind of approach that we’d taken with Motorway.”
While many startups expand into different geographies quickly — sometimes to their demise — Motorway has stayed committed to just building in the U.K.
“We’re still a fairly small market share in terms of overall car transactions in the U.K.,” Jones said. “There’s a lot of headroom there, is the first point. The second thing is, I don’t feel like we’ve fully built the whole end-to-end experience yet for Motorway. For us, it’s really important we stay laser focused on doing that before we go outside of the kind of U.K. borders.”
Jones also talked about how the Motorway team implemented lessons learned from past companies and what car he’s currently driving.