Autegro

Inception Media sold a WordPress plugin that pulled a dealer's cars from mobile.de onto their own website. For the first half of the project it was mine. I fixed the color system, redesigned the vehicle pages and built a financing calculator.

But the plugin had its limits. Setting up one dealership took one to four hours, on some sites it took up to eight seconds to load the vehicles, and it only ran on WordPress, so every dealer on a different tech stack was a client we couldn't take. The settings were their own problem, hundreds of options that were never meant for a user to see.

Behind all of it is mobile.de, close to a monopoly on the German used car market. Nearly every dealership depends on it and the fees are high. Putting a dealer's fleet on their own site as a second sales channel was the right idea, the plugin just wasn't the right solution. So we rebuilt it as a product.

My job was to make that switch something a non technical dealer would actually complete.

Until then my decisions came from bug reports and from what my mentor heard on client calls. That's a valid source, but I'm not in touch with the users myself, so before rebuilding anything I wanted my own data.

I did three dealer interviews and a survey across our client base, 22 responses.

• They won't leave mobile.de, but they'd like to. 8.4 out of 10 on cutting their presence there if the inquiries came from somewhere else.
• They all want to look different. 8.8 out of 10 on the vehicle listings, 9.2 on the website.
• They don't want to edit their own site. 59% want to trigger a change and have someone else do it.
• Leads are the real pain. They come in from six channels at once, and 17 of 22 said the top reason a lead is useless is that there's no real purchase intent.

I summed it all up in one persona, Markus.

Two of these turned into surfaces directly. The wish to look different became the brand tab and the widget configurator, and the lead problem became the Anfragen tab.

I was asked for a logo, a color palette and a name, in about a day. Yet I pushed back for a brand sprint instead, because a product needs something to be built from, and every visual decision after that point would otherwise be arbitrary.

The session gave us the sentence I kept coming back to for every decision after it: we give dealers the independence to sell more online, through trust and their own brand, instead of renting their customers from a marketplace.

Everything visual followed from that. A bird for independence and momentum, with sharp geometric shapes so it reads as speed and precision, on an electric lime green.

My mentor vibe coded a basic prototype of what it should do centrally.

This was my basis for this app and it had many flaws. One was that it had a dashboard full of numbers that nobody could act on. The research pointed at leads rather than data, so I turned it into a HMW question:

How might we give a small dealership team a place where they know what needs attention today?

I produced 14 ideas with crazy 8s, then scored each one against research evidence, brand fit and feasibility.

Five of them survived and combined into one board.

A dashboard of metrics would have been the obvious thing to build, and it's what the marketplaces do. But we promise simplicity, and a dealer juggling three roles at once doesn't need more to read. They need one screen that tells them what needs attention today.

It shipped as its own tab next to the old dashboard instead of replacing it. Getting a divergent idea into a company sometimes looks like a compromise.

I tested the whole setup flow with 4 first time users.

The testing setup was five steps:

• Create account
• Get mobile.de API credentials
• Copy a code snippet
• Place it on the site
• Match the branding

Some core issues I observed:

1. Users didn't understand what a widget was
2. They found the widget configurator to be overwhelming
3. Didn't have the mental model for Import / Export

Iterations:

The second one was on me. The survey said dealers want to look different, so I gave them every option I could. For someone opening the tool for the first time that's overwhelming instead of freeing. The fix was defaults first: four templates, with all the controls still underneath for whoever wants them.

Then a second round with four real dealers, on their own sites, with their cars, fonts and colors imported.

I expected pride. The whole direction was that a dealer seeing his fleet on his own site, in his own brand, would feel professional. None of the four said anything close to it. What they did say is that it looks cleaner and loads faster, so I corrected the claim to that.

What they got excited about was something I never asked about: automatically pushing their stock to their social channels. That gives them the same independence from a different side, and it's where the product goes next.

Setting up a dealership went from one to two hours on average in the old plugin to about 10 minutes.

One system now spans a multi role SaaS app, an embeddable widget that adapts to each dealer's identity, and users are already generating more revenue.

Currently over 2000 Leads generated and 40+ live embeds.

The project started as my bachelor thesis. Inception Media hired me full time as their first employee to keep building it.

Live dealer embed example: auto-bodenheimer.de