In the last few posts in my Life at a Start-up series I have talked about how we want to work as a company, our hiring process and the office environment, but in this post I want to talk about the 2 products that we are building here at Buying Butler and RightIndem. On initial inspection they may look like two completely disparate products, but there is a link between the two that makes them a very attractive proposition. First I will explain what the Buying Butler platform is and then I will talk about what RightIndem is about. I will finish up by covering why these 2 products compliment each other.
Buying Butler
Buying Butler is a platform that allows a customer to make a complex purchase with the help of an expert. We are focusing on car purchases at the moment, but we can expand the platform to include any type of purchase that requires a lot of research to buy like laptops, bikes, white goods etc. The way the system works is like the following. You specify your requirements using plain language search parameters. For example you may specify that safety is more important than speed. You need plenty of boot space, or you might want a smaller faster car. The Buying Butler engine will take your requirements and using our algorithms select a series of cars that you can then refine your search with.

Once you have a good idea of what you want you can then proceed to a tendering phase where your requirements are sent out to dealers who are signed up to the platform. These could be within a certain distance boundary that you can specify. These dealers can then make offers against each other anonymously. So, for example, one dealer might say, that they can’t come down on their price but they could throw in some extra fittings. Another dealer might not have the car in the colour you originally specified but they can drop the price by £500 etc. Once you have picked an offer that you like you can then arrange a test drive and follow through with your purchase.