I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten used to having pretty much everything related to my life in an app on my phone. All my communication, my purchases, my banking, the whereabouts of all of my stuff, all my work and personal documents, my household appliances, my travel details, and so on and so forth. Since I switched to driving electric, even most of the car-related stuff is in apps; all my trips, charging sessions and expenses, seeing where the car is and whether it’s locked is also there. It is all the more poignantly strange and inexplicable, then, that the other stuff related to my car, like its roadworthiness, registration, highway fees, liability insurance, maintenance history, and my driving license expiration aren’t in an app. In the best case scenario, that info is scattered all around my phone in different places. And in the worst case, most of it is in the glove compartments of my different cars and completely offline.
That was exactly what entrepreneur Andrei Lazarov thought, when one fine day a few years ago, he was driving on the freeway outside of Sofia. It was a sunny weekend day, with almost no traffic, when suddenly he got stopped by a police patrol. Andrei was driving his oldtimer BMW, which is not his main car, and he had completely forgotten to renew the annual highway fee for that vehicle. Police pulled him over because he already had three outstanding fines for that.
Having previously worked at another Vitosha portfolio company, he shared the bitter experience to one of his former coworkers from there, Svetoslav, and on his behalf he admitted in the past he had driven without a valid driver's license for over a six-month period simply because he had forgotten to renew it. “Surely, there is a market for a solution which keeps track of all the time-critical car ownership-related items”, thought Svetoslav and Andrei, and the two Vitosha portfolio alums decided it was time to build a solution for keeping track of car ownership essentials.
“We approached the idea in a very lean way”, says Andrei as we sit to take a look at the just-released first version of the Carreta app, the company’s launch product. “We thought to ourselves: we really think there’s a huge need for this, but let’s see how the market reacts before we really go big with promoting it”. A few weeks ago, Carreta was finally launched, and without any sustained promotion activities outside the personal and professional networks of the two founders, the app has gotten to almost 3,000 daily active users, with 40-50 users onboarding every new day.
“It’s unusually strong retention and referral indicators that we’re hitting, before we even started marketing the app”, adds Andrei. “Currently, the app is fully free, but we are starting to test premium features, and are currently debating where to set the freemium threshold”.
Apart from moving towards monetization, the Carreta founders are launching partnership channel programs with leading automotive media, insurance aggregators, and payment gateways. According to Andrei, one of most popular features in Carreta, which attracts first-time users, is the ability to automatically track traffic fines, thanks to a recently launched API of the Bulgarian traffic police.
“The way it works is that once you’ve entered all your details, many of which we can automate based on just your license plate, you get a dashboard with a very clear and concise overview of the state of your car ownership. Stuff like road insurance, highway tax, vehicle registration validity, and roadworthiness certificate are just based on your car’s number plate. If you add your driving license, we can also check for fines and license validity. The most advanced thing you can add, which for now still takes some effort, is the maintenance history”, says Andrei. But if you do that, you’ll have a huge advantage when you sell your car. Instead of giving a folder of messy receipts, you can just tell the buyer to add the car on Carreta and see its full service history”.
As Andrei and Svetoslav point out, Carreta is not the only app out there that tracks and visualizes your car status and documentation. “But we definitely have the most user-friendly product, not designed around the idea of selling insurance or something else. It’s an ideal companion for car owners, especially if they have more than one vehicle. We already have a number of corporate fleet managers, who use the app for 20 or more cars, and we can see how decisive the value is for them. It’s one thing to put calendar reminders for one car, but when it’s 2, 5, or 20, it’s something that really calls for a dedicated solution”.
And Carreta is very much on its way to become that solution. Check it out for yourself, and show your friends; chances are, they’ll start using it right away as well: