In the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits podcast, founder Tomi Mikula sat down to discuss the remarkable trajectory of Delivrd, a car-buying concierge service that has scaled from a modest experiment involving 100 free deals to handling more than 400 transactions per month. After spending six years entrenched in the traditional automotive industry, Mikula decided to build a business around a frustration he heard echoed by consumers on a daily basis: people genuinely hated buying cars. Today, the company boasts a 25-person full-time team and generates between $400,000 and $500,000 in monthly sales.
The journey to this level of scale, however, required a series of fundamental shifts in business model, pricing strategy, and operational structure. As Mikula learned what consumers truly valued during the car-buying process, Delivrd transitioned from a comprehensive, high-priced service centered entirely on saving money to a streamlined, $1,000 flat-fee model centered on saving time, energy, and stress. Those early operational lessons ultimately shaped the company’s pricing framework, its hiring trajectory, and its highly successful organic video strategy.
Turning Dealership Frustration Into a Business
Before launching Delivrd in January 2023, Mikula spent years building a background in sales and automotive leadership. His career in sales began early, spanning from age 18 to 23 in cell phone sales before he transitioned into management and eventually entered the retail dealership sector. Within the dealership environment, he moved quickly through the ranks, gaining a comprehensive understanding of how transactions operated from the inside out.
However, one fundamental realization stuck with him long after he left the showroom floor: the second-largest purchase most people will ever make in their lifetimes should not be such an exhausting and unpleasant experience. On January 3, 2023, Mikula officially gave notice at the dealership and walked away to establish Delivrd.
The original premise of the startup sounded straightforward enough. The goal was to allow everyday consumers to entirely skip the stressful dealership experience while still securing a competitive deal on a new vehicle. The core challenge, however, was figuring out precisely what modern car buyers were actually willing to pay a third party to remove from the equation.
Testing the Idea With 100 Free Deals
Rather than relying purely on assumptions formed during his years inside traditional dealerships, Mikula decided to analyze consumer behavior from the opposite side of the transaction. To gather genuine, unfiltered feedback, he offered to negotiate 100 car deals completely free of charge. In many instances, he even compensated participants $100 for their time afterward so that an independent third party could conduct in-depth interviews lasting two to three hours.
Those interviews quickly began to reshape his perspective on the business. Mikula had initially entered the venture believing that consumers primarily wanted a negotiator who could secure the absolute lowest possible price on a vehicle. The post-deal interviews, however, revealed that many buyers cared far more about avoiding the friction, time investment, and psychological stress surrounding the purchase than they did about squeezing every last dollar out of the dealership.
This discovery helped Delivrd filter out less-desirable customer profiles. Individuals whose sole priority was squeezing out every potential discount often turned out to be better suited as do-it-yourself car buyers. Meanwhile, Delivrd could focus its resources on a different demographic: consumers who were more than willing to pay a reasonable fee to reclaim their time and bypass the parts of the transaction they despised.
Shifting the Offer From Saving Money to Saving Time
Delivrd’s initial paid offering was an extensive, white-glove service priced at $2,500. It attempted to remove nearly the entire car-shopping journey by conducting a formal needs assessment, arranging test drives directly at the customer’s home, managing negotiations, and coordinating final vehicle delivery. It was an exceptionally heavy operational lift.
Over time, Mikula learned another crucial detail about consumer behavior: many people actually enjoy the initial stages of shopping for cars. They like researching different vehicle models, watching YouTube reviews, comparing specifications, and taking test drives. What they genuinely disliked happened later in the process—the protracted negotiations and the administrative headache of completing the purchase.
This realization led Delivrd to refine and narrow its service offering. By eliminating the early-stage tasks that customers actually enjoyed doing themselves, the company focused its efforts entirely on the specific pain points consumers were eager to pay to avoid. Consequently, Mikula lowered the price point from $2,500 down to a more accessible $1,000 flat fee. The previous comprehensive model had captured roughly 10 to 15 deals per month, but Mikula recognized that the audience for such an all-encompassing service would remain too narrow to support rapid, large-scale growth.
Simplifying Pricing Around a $1,000 Flat Fee
The decision to adopt a $1,000 flat fee also stemmed directly from lessons learned in the dealership world, where customers routinely expressed frustration over opaque pricing structures and hidden fees. By charging a predictable flat rate for its standard service, Delivrd ensured total transparency, even when certain deals required significantly more time and effort than others.
While some negotiations prove straightforward, others require extensive dealer contact and complex sourcing. Despite these variances, Mikula maintained that a clear, upfront price was vital for consumer trust. At its current operational scale, this simplified model supports a robust enterprise, generating between $400,000 and $500,000 in monthly sales while processing more than 400 vehicle transactions each month.
Operating at this volume, however, comes with substantial overhead. Mikula estimates monthly operating expenses between $200,000 and $250,000, making operational efficiency a top priority as the business scales. Maintaining a profitable baseline allows the company to handle difficult cases without resorting to complicated pricing formulas that might confuse prospective clients.
Finding the First Customers on Reddit
Securing those initial 100 free deals required a calculated hustle. After quickly exhausting the obvious network of friends and family members who happened to be in the market for a vehicle, Mikula needed to find strangers willing to trust an unproven startup with a major financial transaction.
Reddit emerged as one of his most productive early channels. He actively participated in online automotive communities, searched for individuals asking for purchasing advice, and reached out directly to offer his assistance. This grassroots outreach eventually helped establish Delivrd’s earliest word-of-mouth referral system, though progress was initially slow, with referrals generating only two to four paid deals per month during lean stretches.
By November of his company’s first year, personal savings had dwindled to the point where Mikula seriously considered scaling Delivrd back to a part-time venture. Then, a single piece of organic video content completely altered the company’s trajectory.
Growing the Company Through Negotiation Videos
Mikula had begun producing educational car-buying content on social media, initially sharing general advice rather than broadcasting full negotiations. One early video discussing a particularly frustrating dealership interaction unexpectedly garnered around 60,000 views, resulting in five new sign-ups that provided the young startup with much-needed momentum.
Encouraged by this response, Mikula recorded a much longer, unscripted negotiation with the general manager of a Mazda dealership. Running 27 minutes long and featuring no sophisticated thumbnail, polished visual production, or elaborate editing, he uploaded the raw footage to YouTube anyway.
To his surprise, the video generated between 300,000 and 400,000 views overnight. That viral breakout revealed a powerful content format that would soon become central to Delivrd’s growth strategy: allowing prospective customers to watch the very negotiations they were paying the company to handle for them. There was an inherent entertainment value in watching an experienced professional navigate tense calls, pricing disputes, and classic dealership tactics from the safety of the sidelines.
Turning Live Calls Into a Content System
Building on that momentum, Delivrd constructed an entire content engine around live negotiation calls. Mikula began livestreaming negotiations in real time, giving audiences an unfiltered look at the process as it unfolded. These livestreams subsequently served as raw source material for long-form YouTube videos, which were later edited down into engaging short-form clips for various social platforms.
The company made a deliberate effort to preserve the authentic nature of these interactions rather than framing every dealership encounter in an exclusively negative light. Mikula’s livestreams frequently ran for eight to 10 hours a day. This massive volume of content not only provided an endless stream of marketing material but also offered potential clients undeniable proof of the service’s efficacy—something traditional advertising could rarely replicate.
Remarkably, paid advertising has played almost no role in Delivrd’s expansion. Mikula estimates he has spent a total of roughly $300 on Google Ads throughout the company’s existence, a campaign that yielded zero website clicks and promptly convinced him to abandon paid acquisition in favor of organic content and audience building.
Building a 25-Person Operating Team
In its earliest days, Delivrd operated entirely around its founder, with Mikula handling every aspect of the business himself. Even after making initial hires, he remained deeply embedded in day-to-day production, noting that as recently as March 2026, he was still personally negotiating roughly 60% of the company’s deals alongside his other executive responsibilities.
That level of personal involvement eventually reached an unsustainable threshold. Today, Delivrd operates with a full-time team of approximately 25 employees, distributing the workload across multiple staff members for every customer transaction. While a typical deal involves roughly five team members behind the scenes, the client generally communicates directly with only two.
Mikula estimates that a single professional negotiator can effectively handle about 20 deals per month while maintaining the high service standards the company demands. Scaling to more than 400 deals monthly required rapid team expansion, encompassing dedicated roles for consultations, client management, marketing, video editing, and media production.
Stepping Away From the Founder Bottleneck
One of the most psychologically challenging hurdles for Mikula was accepting the reality that customers did not need him personally involved in every single transaction. For a long period, the company operated around what internal staff jokingly referred to as the "Tomi effect"—a practice where Mikula would insist on making at least one phone call for every deal so the client felt he had personally touched their file.
That mindset placed a severe operational ceiling on the business. If Delivrd wanted to scale toward 1,000 or even 5,000 monthly transactions, it was physically impossible for Mikula to personally call every buyer. Stepping back from day-to-day production, however, came with immediate growing pains. During the transition, the company experienced roughly $100,000 in customer refunds simply because internal systems could not keep pace with surging demand while leadership roles were shifting.
Nonetheless, removing himself from routine deal production ultimately opened up his schedule, allowing him to guide the company’s broader strategic vision rather than getting bogged down in individual negotiations. A pivotal part of that transition involved hiring key operational support, such as an executive assistant. Initially resistant to the idea of delegating basic administrative tasks, Mikula later realized that an effective assistant could evolve into a core company leader, eventually helping him build out management infrastructure and freeing up time to explore new expansion avenues.
Expanding Delivrd Beyond Its Current Service
With day-to-day operations requiring less of his direct oversight, Mikula has turned his attention toward long-term growth opportunities, including international markets. Approximately 20% of Delivrd’s existing audience is located in Canada, prompting the company to explore expansion north of the border, a move Mikula estimates could inject an additional $100,000 to $200,000 in monthly revenue.
The company is also evaluating new vehicle categories and specialized high-value purchases, such as exotic cars. Because sourcing rare or luxury vehicles involves complex allocations and months of specialized work, Mikula envisions these offerings operating under a distinct service tier with customized pricing structures that reflect the heavier workload involved.
Reflecting on more than three years of building the company, Mikula points to a few core takeaways. If he were to start over, he would hire an executive assistant significantly earlier and remove himself from routine deal production much faster. The very traits and hands-on habits that help a founder survive the turbulent startup phase can quickly transform into the primary constraints limiting future growth.
Three and a half years after leaving the dealership showroom, Delivrd processes hundreds of transactions monthly with a dedicated team of 25 employees, eyeing even higher volume milestones ahead. By listening closely to consumer feedback, simplifying its pricing model, and adapting the founder’s role as the business matured, the company turned a widespread consumer grievance into a thriving enterprise.
