Cars and Bids

Doug DeMuro didn't set out to build a marketplace. He was already wildly successful as a YouTube creator—4 million subscribers, millions of views per video, making enough to live comfortably. But in late 2019, around the time he was considering expanding beyond YouTube, he noticed a gap in the market. Bring a Trailer, the dominant exotic car auction platform, had gotten so massive that things were taking forever to get listed. Sellers and buyers were frustrated. The site was still essentially a WordPress blog at heart. Doug thought: "We can do this better. We can make it modern."

The insight wasn't revolutionary—it was practical. "What insight did we have? None," he admits. "What were we thinking we could compete with them? I honestly wonder." But he and Blake, a tech entrepreneur he'd met randomly through a viewer email, recognized that if they launched a modern platform focused on younger audiences and 1980s-onward cars, they could carve out their own space while Bring a Trailer owned the collector car world.

They launched in June 2020 from Blake's back patio—literally. No office, hiring people over Zoom while sitting poolside during a pandemic. Doug and Blake funded it with seed money from Blake's company, and they made a brilliant early decision: spend money to get momentum. They offered $1,000 to the first 50 cars listed, then $500 for the next 50. That $75,000 investment was, Doug says, "the greatest $75,000 we ever spent."

What they didn't plan for: the deluge. They got a thousand submissions in a single day. Doug, having no operations team, personally approved or rejected every single one—a three-sentence description each. "That was another thing: what the hell was I thinking?" He was working 24/7, in chaos, but the chaos was good.

The first car on the platform was Doug's own. But what made Cars and Bids work immediately was something none of the other 20+ auction startups that launched after them had: Doug's audience. His YouTube subscribers showed up. Sellers and buyers materialized because they already trusted Doug. This was the moat. "You would be shocked at how many other auction sites have shown up and failed. Most of them never even make it on anybody's radar," Doug recalls. "The lesson we learned: you can make a great product, and that's important, we did that, but having an audience is so crucial."

The business model was simple: sellers pay nothing, buyers pay 4.5%. They later added shipping and inspection services as revenue drivers.

The first two months were chaotic and nearly broke the business—and the founder. But they hired fast and built infrastructure. By late 2021, Cars and Bids had facilitated $75 million in gross sales. Growth was explosive, and it caught the attention of PE firms. Bring a Trailer had recently sold to Hearst for a reported $300 million, and suddenly every investor wanted in on the car auction boom.

Dug got persistent outreach but ignored most of it. Then Churn Group came through a friend's introduction. They told him something that changed everything: they specialize in creator-led businesses. They understood YouTube. They wouldn't come in and "fix" his channel or rebrand things. They got it. "That was a huge light bulb moment," Doug recalls. "My big fear was they'd say we gotta change this and this on your YouTube channel, and it's gonna look like this now. But these guys knew how it worked already."

The negotiations took six to eight months. Doug ended up with majority ownership (Blake had put down the seed money, but Doug was bringing the audience and most of the value). The deal closed in 2022 at approximately $40 million for Churn Group's stake.

Dough took money off the table—he bought a Ferrari Daytona (the Prancing Horse kind, not the ugly yellow one). But he stayed in the business. He realized something that surprised him: making more money made him work *better*, not worse. "When you get enough money that you can chill a little bit, you're in a better mental state to make better decisions." He's more relaxed, and that relaxation compounds.

He's now focused on what he does best: making videos. He hired an editor in March 2020 and has since built a small team to scale content. The Doug Score—his proprietary database of over 1,000 cars rated across multiple dimensions—remains a hidden gem, sitting on a shared Google Sheet. He knows it could be its own business. Other viewers have reached out with data projects built on top of it. But Doug chose specialization: videos and the auction platform, letting others build on top.

He advises every creator he knows: "Start a business. Start a business. Start a business. You never know when your audience is gonna go away." His audience didn't go away. Instead, he turned it into $40 million.