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NabThat is a rising force to be reckoned with in the car-buying marketplace. Since the latest iteration of its website went live three and a half weeks ago, NabThat has sold 50 cars, pushing towards a goal of selling 10,000 vehicles in the LA area by the end of 2014. They now have relationships with over 100 dealerships in the LA area and are creating relationships with about 10 more every week.
Dealers love the fact that NabThat is helping them tap into the online market because, according to founder and CEO Jason Silberberg, 98 percent of car buyers leave dealers’ websites on their first visit and do not return. Car buyers have good things to say, too: "all of our customers are telling us that this is an incredible experience that they have never had before in the car buying process," Silberberg said.
What keeps buyers and dealers coming to NabThat is the smooth experience it provides. NabThat Concierge is one such 'smooth' feature. It lets consumers push their specific car requests online to NabThat through live employees, allowing them to talk one-on-one with employees about their desired vehicle and the filters they want to put on their car search.
Dealers also can find what Silberberg calls “stealth” car buyers who they would not be able to reach through outbound e-mails or phone calls. This specialized widget for dealers lets them see notifications and pinpoint certain buyers aka generating new, unique leads. The "stealth" part comes in when users bid on cars they want within a local radius, with a no-negotiation guarantee. After that, NabThat provides free credit checks before potentially putting drivers behind the wheel for test drives.
The concept that ignited NabThat came to Silberberg and his wife in 2012 when buying a car themselves: “We thought there has got to be a better way of doing this,” Silberberg said. “Everything else has been digitized and so there has to be a way to make the car buying experience a pleasant one.”
In short, he wanted to make the process of buying cars easier, more efficient and private. Silberberg’s idea of a new platform for buying cars emerged when he met several students in Loyola Marymount’s Business Incubator class - and it quickly coalesced into a company. The company was officially launched in August 2013.
Now, NabThat plans to move from its Malibu office to Santa Monica in the next few months as it hires about a person a week. The team growth is needed to expand and refine its relationships with both new and used car dealers before eventually expanding into new areas of the car market. Silberberg said that along with the company’s plans to sell used cars soon, they will also take over the national market. This market opportunity is huge: every year there are over 16 million cars sold nationally at 17,000 dealerships.
“We’re trying to stretch the market, not break it," Silberberg said. "We want to become a service provider so that the consumer and the dealership interact. So that relationship will change based off of our platform; we want to make the experience pleasant, efficient and fun.”
