I grew up DIY, and the scene ran on two rules. Rule one: only buy what you can't build yourself. Rule two: you can build a lot more for yourself than you think. More Than Cars is a small team, so building with AI brings back plenty of punk house shows. The guitars are quieter now, and the audience smells better.
So I'll admit the first full episode of AI for Dealers, our new podcast hosted by Daniel Kim, poked at rule one. His first guest, More Than Cars and Auto Genius CEO Kyle Mountsier, told dealers to buy more than they build.
"[T]oday, I am still in favor of, as a percentage, much more buying than building."
Kyle gave two reasons for buying.
Security. Plenty of people are vibe coding their way into vendors' APIs without understanding access controls or how to store secrets safely. The models won't handle that for you yet. Enterprise vendors carry certifications like SOC 2 and ISO and run regular penetration tests.
Key man risk. Today's builders are mostly IT, marketing and BDC directors. That's a small group, and they can find greener grass fast. When one leaves, the know-how goes too, and a tool the whole store depends on has nobody left to fix it.
Where should dealers build, then?
Kyle named two places:
Build here | What it looks like |
|---|---|
In the gaps | Fixes and add-ons to your workflow that no vendor will ever put on its roadmap |
Prototypes | A working mock-up of what you need, handed to a vendor so they can see exactly what you mean |
Mid-size and large groups with enough people to use these tools should go further and hire an engineer or two to keep things running. Daniel drew the outer line clearly: nobody should be building their own CRM or DMS.
What does building in a gap look like?
Daniel's group runs five Hyundai stores, and their service CRM wouldn't reliably surface manufacturer-recommended maintenance or past declined work. So he pulled repair-order history from the DMS, declined services from the CRM and 15 years of Hyundai owner's manuals into one Chrome extension. It flags what's due on any VIN an advisor opens. The episode covers how he built it, and the access rules he set before about 300 people started using his platform.
The DIY rules still hold up.
Listening back, Kyle and my rule one agree more than I expected. "Can't build" covers more than skill. It includes anything you can't secure, and anything that dies the day its builder walks out the door. For most stores, the DMS and CRM fall squarely in that category. The gaps between them are where rule two pays off.
The full conversation is on the first episode of AI for Dealers, including Kyle's trick for keeping AI from building you into a corner.
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Consider this: Which software gap does your team work around every day, and who would still be around to fix the tool you built to close it?
