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What started as an on-demand car care service is broadening its scope, product by product, under the leadership of serial entrepreneur Scot Wingo – and with the inspiration of Amazon.
Get Spiffy, the Research Triangle Park startup Wingo started with Karl Murphy after leaving ChannelAdvisor, is rolling out what it calls Easy Tread, a product that provides what it describes as “hyper-detailed, visual tire diagnostics.”
The device provides automotive technicians the ability to capture detailed images of each tire using a tablet connected to a camera. Instead of just measuring tread depth on a few points of the tire, the technology captures more than 500,000 data points, creating a “mesh” of actionable data, according to the company.
Wingo, an e-commerce entrepreneur at heart, said Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) provided inspiration.
“Studying Amazon for so long, one of the things that is interesting about them is they built something no one has ever built before and then ended up building things around it,” he said, pointing to its cloud computing business, built to support its retail arm.
Similarly, he sees Spiffy as building products to support its central business.
Spiffy touches 3,000 cars a day. That’s 12,000 tires to measure. Current products require getting down on the ground, and as technicians are on-site – at office buildings and apartment complexes washing cars – it’s not exactly feasible.
So Spiffy decided to create its own solution. Wingo explains that the technology takes a 2D picture of the tire and 3D measurements, putting them together to identify where the tread is and how deep it goes. Right now it’s information Spiffy uses to help customers determine whether their tires are safe. But down the road there could be applications in helping customers understand when their alignment is off, or even what tire they should buy to match how they drive their car.
The plan is to use the product internally, but also license it out.
It’s the second time Spiffy has veered outside of its services sweet spot.
The company has also pushed out a standalone product called the Smart Tumbler, a rechargeable device meant to combat odors in fleet vehicles.
More could be on the way.
“We have some ideas,” Wingo said, though he cautioned that nothing is imminent.
As for Easy Tread, it’s not completely a surprise, as the firm filed a utility patent for a “tire sensing and analysis system” last year.
Earlier this year, Spiffy announced it had raised $30 million from investors that included Edison Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, Bull City Venture Partners and others.
Wingo, when not helming Spiffy, leads startup investor Triangle Tweener Fund with another serial entrepreneur, Robbie Allen.
