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Comment by ArifBhanji | Hacker News Reader

Thank you! We're trying to change the way consumers see this service. Our mechanics dress clean, bring you your favourite coffee, and teach you a bit about the repair as well to educate you about the trade. Our customers range from low to high income individuals who just want to save time and effort and spend that time with their family or on their hobbies. We've seen a ton of our customers build strong relationships with our mechanics and request them over and over again. I do agree that working remotely is tougher to do then at a shop and that is why we compensate mechanics 3x more than a shop and provide them the independence of a business owner. We've seen happiness on both sides of the equation so we will keep pushing!

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It sounds like you guys are on the right track, but small input -- the coffee bit is somewhat campy. I think it's kind of unnecessary burden on your mechanics that will be tough to uphold as you scale. Additionally, speaking from personal needs, I couldn't care less if I got coffee -- I just want a professional mechanic who won't fleece me. Stick to making that your value prop, and I think both sides of the marketplace (techs, and consumers) will be better off for it.

There's a reason why people have pointed out the flaws of this model for a while now: https://www.quora.com/How-is-YourMechanic-doing-lately/answe...

'But the flaw is this: "All you need to provide is a driveway or parking space where the mechanic can work"

I feel any decent mechanic will not work under these conditions. It is unreasonable to think good quality work can be done without a properly outfitted shop.'

They do limit the jobs they're willing to take on, and you'd be amazed at the work you can do with a good set of socket wrenches, a nice hydraulic jack, and maybe one of those ODB2 readers to talk to the computer.

I think if they got into professionally evaluating used cars alone it'd be a pretty useful service. Buying a used car, boom, send out a mechanic before you hand over the cash.

Does seem like it'd wind up being expensive relative to say, a Jiffy Lube, which seems like it's on a roughly equivalent level of service. Another one of those startups marking up service industry conveniences for the affluent. (That's not a value judgment, it's just a familiar business model.)

> They do limit the jobs they're willing to take on, and you'd be amazed at the work you can do with a good set of socket wrenches, a nice hydraulic jack, and maybe one of those ODB2 readers to talk to the computer.

Second this. In Sri Lanka, quite a few of us depend on some mechanics we know to come home to do repairs for us. My car's been saved quite a bit this way (one particular time was when the coolant stopped flowing through the radiator due to a jammed thermo). Quite often the work involved taking out most of the pieces sitting under the hood.

The most difficult part was the reliability of bringing the mechanic down. So it's pretty cool to see this service here. I'd gladly pay for something like it in SL.

Indeed. I've had a gearhead friend work on my cars for the past ten years. He briefly ran a shop he rented, but reverted back to shadetree mechanic work in his spare time when he pursued other career pursuits. I'll usually give him a hand if needed. All you need is a jack a decently stocked toolkit, and some knowhow.

'But the flaw is this: "All you need to provide is a driveway or parking space where the mechanic can work"'

But you can do quite a lot of things with just some space and some tools. Oil changes, filter changes, brake jobs, battery changes, rotate tires, etc. And, if the vehicle called is capable of a tow, this might presumably supplant both AAA and Jiffy Lube type services.

Expanding on that, as someone who has been the proverbial "busy professional", I would have happily paid a premium to have someone come and do my oil changes while my car was parked at work to prevent having to take the half hour out of my day for routine maintenance.

Once your customers build a relationship with one of your mechanics, what's to stop them from contacting them directly? I know Homejoy had this problem where customers would just contact cleaners directly to avoid the service fee. Or are your mechanics employees instead of contract workers?

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

> Because we do a high volume of repairs, we can get better parts costs than mechanics could on their own

That's a massive plus point for all parties involved. Congrats on nailing that aspect

>Our mechanics dress clean, bring you your favourite coffee, and teach you a bit about the repair as well to educate you about the trade.

Dress clean? Really? Are they "articulate" too?

j/k :) sounds like a great service! I'm excited to see more services that value educating their client base as a core value.

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