John Habeck launched Motive, an e-commerce showroom for car dealerships, in late 2021, and the startup is currently compounding revenues by an average of 57 percent monthly and has been generating free cash flow since March.
Headquartered in Oklahoma, Motive also already has expanded to Washington.
“We believe that the auto industry is a fantastic place to innovate,” Habeck said. “Across the sector, core activities and structures are threatened with obsolescence. The auto industry is experiencing a seismic shift from top to bottom, and it will undergo more change in the next 10 years than in the previous 100 years.”
Habeck said more than 80 percent of current car buyers first find the car they are interested in buying on the dealer’s website.
“Our platform is truly one of the most mission-critical applications in use across dealerships’ tech stacks,” he said. “We want Motive to become the digital layer for dealerships of the future, providing a tightly integrated end-to-end vehicle discovery and purchase experience.”
Motive looks to upend how cars are purchased, based on how consumers habits are also rapidly changing.
“Dealers are selling new cars in a radically different manner than they have in the past,” Habeck said. “Today, most new vehicles are built to order, and few are purchased off the lot. As a result, dealers have little surplus inventory.
Habeck said Oklahoma is poised to capitalize on the need for innovative companies to transform many industries, like Motive wants to do in auto sales.
“Oklahoma entrepreneurs have a secret that the rest of the country has not yet discovered,” he said. “Businesses here have a unique combination of intrinsic advantages that other states cannot replicate: a low cost of living, a dense concentration of intelligent people and a general culture of challenging the status quo. So, if your goal is to build a business juggernaut, Oklahoma is the place to do it.”
Startup Innovator of the Year Finalists:
- Steve Adams, Bison Underground;
- AJ Rosenthal, General Genomics
