This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube video titled "The NuBrakes New Market Launch & Expansion Playbook" (posted January 29, 2023). The excerpt is a presenter-led discussion about NuBrakes' approach to evaluating and prioritizing new markets. The speaker describes an initially over-engineered scoring model that used about ten criteria (search volume, population size, days of rain, vehicles per household, technicians per capita, average technician earnings, etc.), normalized and weighted into Z-scores to rank markets. They then explain lessons learned—many assumptions must be validated in-market—so the team is simplifying the approach, focusing primarily on search as an acquisition channel, competitive landscape, and whether technicians can earn more by partnering with NuBrakes (with mention of reactivating certain Florida markets).
Chapters
But what does like the kind of new market launch or kind of expansion playbook look like for you guys? Yeah, so while I'm chatting with you guys, I'll pull something up for you so that you can just, so that you can see what our like new market kind of criteria has been, because we're actively thinking through it right now. But what I will tell you is whenever we were first launching into new markets, I would tell you that we significantly over-engineered this thing. And because what we started out with doing, and what I'm going to show you here is we honed in on like 10 different criteria that we think are indicative of a healthy market. And those criteria for us would be things like, what's the search volume in that market? What's the population size? How many days of rain do they get? Because that affects our ability to operate. What is the average number of vehicles per household? New York's got a lot of people, but low vehicles per household, right? And then we're also looking at like average technician earnings per, average number of technicians per capita. So number of technicians per 1,000 people, as well as the technician, average technician earnings. So that's going to give us some like supply side health metrics. And then we, what we ultimately did was like assigned all of those a, normalized them and assigned them all a Z-score, and it gave us this really pretty, you know, kind of like ranking of our market. So again, these are the different criteria that we were looking at, and then we assigned them weighted averages. And so every single market got a score and then ultimately an overall model score, and we ranked them. Here's what I would tell you about this is, you know, when you're like raising capital and an investor or somebody asks the exact question that Mike just asked, like it's a great answer actually. It's very, you know, in-depth and thoughtful and there's clearly like, you know, you have a way of a method to your madness. But in reality, like how do we know that, you know, these things are as we think they are? How do we know that a, this number, this population change, for example, has a positive effect or a negative effect. The reality is you don't until you actually get into the market and start gathering your own data points. And so as we are thinking about actually reactivating those Florida markets that we pulled out of earlier that I mentioned, we're really simplifying things down. And largely what we're looking at is, so search is a really big acquisition channel for us. And so we're definitely using search as a very significant influence on where we are going to go next. And then we're looking at competition. And, and then we're looking at like, how much are technicians making? And can they make more by working with us? And like, and we're just leaving it at that. So that's an over— what I just showed you was very overengineered. It sounds good, it can work. But until you actually know what works, you're totally guessing.
