Motcheck, an MOT information platform, has become one of the most prominent startups in the industry despite being launched just a year ago. We asked Connor Evans, CEO of Motcheck, about what makes a great idea for a startup in this niche and how difficult it is to achieve success in a highly competitive environment.
Connor, what inspired you to start Motcheck, and how do you evaluate its performance so far?
You know that feeling when you work on something for ages, and you deal with the same annoying thing every single day? You ask yourself, “Why hasn’t this been fixed yet? Why hasn’t anyone come up with a solution?” Then you talk to your colleagues, and they mention how difficult it would be to accomplish it, so that’s why no one bothers.
Well, in Britain, there is a huge problem with vehicle sale scams, and an online service that provides comprehensive MOT reports to buyers (or any drivers in general) always seemed to me like a perfect solution to it. If everyone can easily check car history, previous owners, accident reports, technical issues, and so on, then there is no way you can misinform people effectively. You just need to make a highly reliable and easily accessible tool like that first.
So, at one point, my wife and I decided to save up some money so that eventually I could quit my job at DVSA and start this project—that’s how much I believed in it.
Performance-wise, I’d say we’re in a really good spot, especially considering that we’ve only been online for a year. Motcheck is already one of the leading services of that kind in the UK, and we offer some unique functionalities that no one else currently provides. That puts us a bit ahead of the competition, and we also have a lot of ideas to implement in the future.
You’ve mentioned that your colleagues said that launching something like Motcheck would be very difficult. Was that true for you?
As much as I’d like to say something different just to spite them, it was just as difficult as they predicted. I’m joking, of course; they are all great people and close friends of mine to this day, who are also highly supportive of my passion project. But yes, dreaming about something and making it happen are entirely different.
Launching an online platform is just incredibly taxing in itself, and launching something as complex as Motcheck is doubly so. You have to start your own company, deal with hiring people, plan out the entire perspective, come up with the technical infrastructure, develop it, test it, iterate when necessary, fix it when it breaks…
Managing this requires your full attention, a lot of times even outside of work. I’ve often found myself lying on a couch on Sunday, staring blankly at the screen for an hour without realizing it—I was just completely fixated on thinking about the ways to make it happen.
Some parts went smoother than others. Our general algorithms worked great from the beginning, and we didn’t have to fine-tune them all that much. However, working with AI proved to be much more problematic, which is funny considering that it is supposed to understand natural language. Working with a black box technology that no one can properly understand and ensuring that it consistently does something you require without occasionally hallucinating is very stressful. I’m glad we’re past that point right now.
Do you think Motcheck has accomplished your initial goal? If not, what would it take to achieve it?
My goal is far beyond the current scope of the project, but we are getting there at a great pace. It only took us a year to get to the leading positions in our niche—now we just need to improve our tool to expand its reach further and also popularize the niche itself.
Lots of drivers don’t really use MOT tools like ours, despite the fact that most of them would find them helpful. We need to make ourselves more noticeable to become predominant in the automotive industry.
At Motcheck, our next goal is to increase mobile accessibility. Desktop is a good start, and a mobile-friendly website is a decent next step, but we need to go beyond that and become native for mobile users. We need to achieve such a level of convenience that not using Motcheck to assess a certain vehicle would feel stupid.
There are lots of mobile-first features that we are planning to implement in future updates, but I don’t want to spoil them too soon.
What would you recommend to other startup founders in the UK’s automotive industry?
People generally say that you need to learn what your potential customers’ pain points are and what they all complain about. This is a good practice, and you should implement it into your planning process, but I would add that you always need to try to take things one step further.
For example, lots of people who deal with vehicle sale scams naturally start thinking of legal solutions to the issue: how do we punish offenders, how do we ensure there is a consistent way to hold people accountable, and so on. But what if you just make the scam impossible or at least highly unlikely? What if you create a tool that makes these scams ineffective in the first place? This is an example of thinking one step ahead, and I’m glad that I could prove that it can work wonders.
What I’m trying to say is that you should be creative when you build a startup. Offering a basic solution, even with great execution, isn’t likely to work: your competitors have been doing the same thing for years, so they have an established brand, trust, and lots of resources to work with—why would anyone choose you over them? However, if your idea is superior and your execution is at least decent enough, then you can achieve a lot more.
