The main flow of the website is to let us pick the mechanic for you, but for customers that really want to choose their mechanic, they can book directly at fiix.io/mechanics
You're onto something here with maintenance. The worst part about owning a car is maintaining it. Fiix is going to remove all of the hassles of owning a car, and we want to get to the point that you can 'set it and forget it' for general maintenance.
So far we have seen no signs of leakage, and we've been monitoring it closely.
A few reasons why leakage doesn't happen:
- Unlike cleaning, this isn't a weekly service, so the incentive is less.
- When our mechanics communicate with customers it gets routed through a Fiix phone number and/or 'business cards' with direct links to re-book them
- Mechanics have also expressed that they don't want customers having their personal phone numbers because it actually takes long to quote out a customer (we've built software to do this instantly).
- Because we do a high volume of repairs, we can get better parts costs than mechanics could on their own
- By going through Fiix, the mechanic gets 'de-risked' as even if the customer complains, or things go wrong, they still get paid
If the car needs a tow, we'll get it taken to one of our partner shops. So far, we've repaired a few thousand cars and less than 1% have needed a tow. We only contract licensed mechanics with many years of experience, so they can do pretty complex work by jacking up your car on your driveway.
When we were running TireSwap we did on rim tire changes and rotations only (summer to winters and vice versa), so no mounting / balancing was needed.
We have a few partner shops across the city that we'll get the car towed to in the case that we can't complete the work at their home. That being said, we've completed thousands of repairs and less than 1% have needed the tow service.
Off rim tire changes and wheel balancing are the only services we offer that are non-mobile. These are 'experiments' for now, but we have them on the site because we have other mobile partners that will bring a large truck with the balancing machine and complete the repair.
Seems like they're learning a hard lesson on unit economics. We're somehow at a point where companies are burning cash to provide low service fees, and now they need to become profitable.
When there's nothing left to optimize, the way to become profitable is to either pay drivers less or charge customers more, and customers are not down to pay more.