How LetYouKnow uses reverse auctions to lower car prices
Boris Zhukov is Co-Founder and CEO of LetYouKnow, a Seattle-based reverse-auction marketplace that lets buyers anonymously bid on new vehicles with locked-in dealer and platform fees. This interview explains how the patent-protected matching system and growing AI-driven marketing are changing how buyers and dealers connect.
LetYouKnow combines patented matching technology with AI-driven marketing to let buyers set their price while helping dealers use price discrimination to lower acquisition costs. The company is expanding the marketplace model into other local services to scale that same dynamic beyond cars.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
We reserved the LetYouKnow.com URL back in 2003. From there, I was able to collect a significant amount of transactional data and began developing matching methods. The deeper I went into these developments, the more I realized the potential of creating a marketplace centered around instant bidding. I began assembling a team of talented and hardworking people around the premise of consumer and business empowerment, with the goal of delivering win-win outcomes for both consumers and businesses. Consumers benefit because they love saving money and enjoy conducting transactions on their own terms without wasting time. Notably, savings come first, while the time saved is a natural byproduct of this elegant design. Businesses benefit because they can pursue profit maximization strategies of price discrimination, which beats a single price strategy any day of the week, while simultaneously lowering customer acquisition, transaction and search costs. This allows them to focus their time and resources on what they do best, whether that is producing new goods and services, taking care of customers, or both. We officially founded LetYouKnow in February 2019 and are based in Seattle. Our matching technology is protected by U.S. patents and today we work with approximately 150 franchise dealerships nationwide. We are now in the process of opening the marketplace to other industries. Soon, customers will be able to bid on restaurant gift cards, oil changes, alignments, brake pad changes, haircuts, paintball and airsoft sessions, dental cleanings, grocery store gift cards and much more. The goal is simple. Give consumers the ability to save both time and money as if they had negotiated hard for weeks, except they didn’t have to. At the same time, as mentioned above, we enable businesses to maximize their profits by bringing them customers for free, without revealing their pricing thresholds or interfering with their existing sticker transactions. It is a win for everyone involved rather than a win for one party at the expense of another. A true win win win across consumers, sellers and the marketplace itself. By building a highly sophisticated marketplace ecosystem, we have positioned ourselves to help virtually any business or startup acquire customers without requiring them to do anything or pay us anything. In doing so, we address one of the most fundamental questions founders face from investors and venture capitalists. How will you generate revenue? That is one of the powerful outcomes of creating a system where consumers save money, businesses grow efficiently and entrepreneurs have a scalable path to acquiring and growing their customer base without disrupting their existing initiatives.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
It comes from our marketing strategies, which used to be inadequate, to say the least. But thanks to our talented shareholders, some of whom specialize in GEO and AI driven marketing strategies from top to bottom, we’re rapidly getting better. Ideally, we’d like to reach a critical mass where most of our new business comes directly from our customers. We’re already seeing incredible loyalty, where empowering people to save both time and money is turning nearly all of them into fans for life. We take care of them and they take care of us. The idea now is to take that relationship to a massive scale while making sure no one is left behind. As we grow, our goal remains simple. Take care of everyone.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
First of all, let’s define AI. We used to have calculators where you could enter numbers like 4,357,980, raise them to the power of 1,256, then add exp(9,865) to it and tada, it gives you a result! How amazing is that? Technically speaking, that’s not AI as we know it today, but it illustrates an important point. The fundamental idea is the same. We give a machine instructions, data, and a problem to solve, and it produces a result. What has changed is that today’s AI has taken that basic capability to a whole new ball game. Instead of simply calculating what we tell it to calculate, modern AI can work with enormous amounts of information, recognize patterns, connect ideas, generate content, write and analyze code and help piece together answers at remarkable speed. So, to use AI and fail is a little like saying, "I used a calculator and failed." If that’s the case, I’d think long and hard before blaming the calculator. As I mentioned in my previous answer, we use AI for everything from programming and database architecture to mapping processes, customer targeting and many other aspects of our business. For us, it has been nothing but a blessing, taking our productivity to the moon!
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Absolutely. We’ve already seen customers, dealers and business owners from all walks of life reach out to us after using AI to discover us. That’s especially interesting because we’re still in the early stages of this shift in how people find businesses and information. Wait until we launch our GEO and AI marketing campaign. We expect to take these early results to a whole new level and dramatically expand how many people discover LetYouKnow through AI.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Work hard and ignore the noise. If you find yourself failing, look in the mirror, regroup and get back to the fundamentals. And when you do, remember the first step is always the same, work uber hard!
Thank you to Boris Zhukov and the team at LetYouKnow for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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