Builders of an app for managing a myriad of possessions have gone all-in on a new venture arising from what they saw from users: Demand for a better car-shopping experience.

Visor, which rolled out its first paid features last week, represents a hard pivot that resulted from taking a related startup, Currents, through Techstars Columbus Powered by the Ohio State University. Without a single ad, Visor has attracted some 8,000 users since its August debut, many leaving effusive reviews.

CEO Craig Smith and CTO Cole Smith, co-founders and brothers, know they are going up against established players like Carvana, CarMax, Autotrader or CarGurus. In a way, that helps, they said.

“These sites help dealers sell you a car. They do not help consumers buy a car,” Craig said.

"We are not alone in thinking like this," Craig said. "(Consumers are) really tired of using the established sites. They’re really tired of being worked by the dealer, spending hours and hours inside of a dealer showroom."

Visor provides transparent, searchable data – including displaying for-sale cars on a map, which the brothers say is a first. Instead of limiting to a 50-mile radius, it will show a listing for the desired make, model and characteristics 500 miles away that would still be a bargain with a delivery charge, the brothers said.

The startup pays for access to auto listings then better organizes and augments the data, such as providing reliability reports by model year. It's building AI features to further narrow searches to best value.

Tech from the first startup, Currents Systems Inc., helps with the automation, search and other functions in Visor.

Other online marketplaces consider auto dealers their customers, and are paid for providing customer leads. Expressing interest in a single listing leads to a flood of calls, emails and texts to the shopper.

Visor, in contrast, plans to charge user fees for certain features. Shortly after the first free version rolled out, a user emailed that they saved $2,000 on a car and happily would have paid $50 for that.

The first paid features include the ability to search private listing such as those on Craigslist, and advanced filters for vehicle options and trim packages.

"There is a set of features that are missing from all these other sites that we can charge for either on a recurring basis or one time," Craig said. "We've seen the effect the site has had on our users to date."

How Techstars helped push the pivot to Visor from Currents

The Smiths said they accomplished about two years' worth of work on Currents in the 13-week Techstars program that concluded in May.

A Columbus Business First Startup to Watch for 2024, Currents was among the first group to go through the OSU accelerator. The second cohort is past the halfway point.

"It was such a gift to go through that program," Craig said.

The main lesson, they said, was that it would take more time and resources than they had to monetize the Currents app.

"What makes sense as a sustainable business?" Cole said. "How can we create a full-service experience over the life cycle of a thing? We’re choosing vehicles."

Currents replaces spreadsheets and a few heavily manual apps for keeping track of and managing ownership of possessions – cars, appliances, phones. After working on it as a side project for years, the Smiths went full-time and moved it to Columbus one year ago.

The app continues, with most of its functions automated. But user data clearly showed vehicles were of top interest, the Smiths said.

They also absorbed lessons from visits to the accelerator by Ratmir Timashev, the serial entrepreneur whose record donation to Ohio State created the Center for Software Innovation, including Techstars.

"You don’t necessarily have to go out and create a whole new market to win," Cole said Timashev told the startups. "If it’s an existing huge market, you might very likely have a better chance at winning.

"We were trying to create a whole new market (with Currents). With Visor it’s an established market, but it’s a huge one with a lot of velocity."

Cole graduated last year from OSU as a data scientist. Craig, who lives in San Francisco, previously worked for EY, Aon and Workday. They have several family ties in Central Ohio.

The brothers agreed with the assessment of several observers who told Columbus Business First for a recent cover story that Columbus is poised to break out as a major tech hub in about a decade.

"There is so much strength to that city that is undervalued and overlooked," Craig said.