205. From Facebook Marketplace to $480K a Year in Car Sharing

0:00In 2017, Aubrey Janik was stuck with a car she didn't even like, her first big adult purchase, a Jeep Wrangler. One day, a friend casually mentioned that he was renting out his Mercedes on Turo to help pay it off. That night, Aubrey didn't just look it up, she listed the Jeep right then and there. The next day, it was booked. Since then, that one impulse decision has grown into a full-blown car-sharing business with 34 vehicles, over$30 ,000 a month in revenue, and an entirely self-funded fleet sourced from Facebook Marketplace. And the best part, Aubrey never even read the terms of service until after the first rental.

0:35So today we're going to be diving into her journey, unpacking how you can start your own profitable car sharing business from the ground up. From buying your first car to scaling smart, this episode is packed with everything you need to know. Aubrey, I am so, so excited to have you on today. Thank you so, so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Let's set the stage because you're sitting there with a Jeep you don't really like. A friend casually mentions, hey, I'm using this car rental service. Most people would brush that off. You listed your Jeep that night, which is just amazing. I love the entrepreneurship there.

1:01Take us to that moment. I mean, what did your gut tell you that made you take action so fast on renting your car out to complete strangers? Yeah, you know, I think at the time I had heard of Turo, like I had seen Facebook ads for it. I definitely was kind of target market for a host. And so I was being targeted their ads. And truthfully, I thought it was a scam. And so whenever my friend had mentioned that he was renting out this car, to me, it was like that ounce of validity that I felt like I needed. And it was just like things were aligning. It was like, you know, this actually makes so much sense.

1:31Like I had, obviously I was familiar with Airbnb, but I wasn't like a host or anything on Airbnb. And so I had this car. I didn't like it. I was in a perfect situation to be like, you know, I'm going to put this car on. And I've always been that type of person to just kind of like dive into something. I'm not like one to have analysis paralysis. And so I decided to take pictures, have it listed. And then really it happened so quickly. I didn't really have a ton of time to like overanalyze what was happening that, you know, Before I knew it, it was out on its first rental. And then I was like, this works.

2:03This makes sense. Oh my gosh, that is so crazy. I love the entrepreneurship spirit there. I was talking about on this podcast, the biggest thing that makes a wannabe preneur and entrepreneur is entrepreneur took action. I want to talk about getting that car booked. Obviously, you're just kind of, you know, you're shotgunning it. You're like, oh, hopefully this works. But the next day it gets booked. And so talk to us. What was that process like? Did they come pick it up? Are you nervous? Are you anxious? You're like, holy crap, a stranger has my car right now. Or what was that feeling like for you?

2:25Oh yeah. I mean, so now, I mean, it was, I think I was like 24 at the time. So it was quite a while ago. And even back then, especially, but even today, I don't love meeting guests in person. So I'm sure we'll dive in later, but most of my key exchanges are like not in person. They're a process called remote key exchanges, but not this first one. We met them in person at the time I owned a different business. And so we kind of used that business as like the hub for this, what was to become our Turo fleet, which obviously at the time we didn't know. And I say we, it's my husband and myself, but back then he was just my boyfriend.

2:58But anyways, so yeah, so they came to the business and we did a quick walk around and, you know, I was kind of naively inexperienced about this, but I thought it would all be fine. And, you know, fortunately the car was returned in one piece. There was no damage. And then to your point of earlier, I was then able to kind of do some online Facebook groups of Turo, did some more research. And I was like, I really need to read the Turo terms of service here, because this is going to be a disaster. We're going to talk more about like the details of Turo. So listeners stay tuned for that. But I want to ask me, how much did you make on that first booking?

3:28And was it like life changing money by any means? Or was it like, oh, this is going to cover my groceries. I just want to talk to listeners about like, you know, this is easy to get started with. And like, you can make money into it. I'm curious to your first booking what it was. For sure. So I think it was, I don't remember exactly, but I know it was a couple of days. And so it was maybe like a two or three day booking. And maybe it was like $100 to$150. And so, you know, for me at the time, the Jeep had a$380 car payment. It was before the days of extremely expensive cars that were in now. But, you know, that's 50 % of the car payment.

3:59And so for me, it was definitely a substantial amount of money. And I wasn't swimming in cash at the time either. And so it certainly wasn't like life changing funds, but it was enough for me to be like, this is something to continue to look into. I mean, what's your boyfriend? I mean, you're telling your boyfriend like, hey, honey, like I'm going to go rent out my car to complete stranger. Is there any friction there as well? Oh, yeah. I mean, so we at that point, we had been dating for I think four or five years. And so we were certainly like much further than the new dating stage, but we weren't married.

4:27And he hated the idea. Like he did not like it. He's also and I'm sure as we'll we'll probably explore later. He's a very talented mechanic. And so he's done a lot of work on our cars. He now works in the business full time. But at the time, he was just, you know, a boyfriend who is 23 years old doing work for his girlfriend on her car whenever she needs it. So he's like, if something happens to this car, it's going to be me that has to fix it. Like, this is a terrible idea. He like loved his cars. He liked the Jeep. But pretty quickly, I mean, he's very supportive of anything I want to do. So he did not like it, but he was cautiously supportive of the entire thing.

5:01I mean, I'm putting myself in issues as well. I mean, if my girlfriend came to me saying that, I'd probably be like, yeah, that's probably not the best idea. But for you, I mean, it worked. I mean, so this Jeep, you're like, OK, I don't really love this Jeep. But you're like, OK, I want to continue doing this. What was that next step for you? Are you buying another car? How long are you renting out the Jeep? Bridge that for us. Yeah. So fortunately we were in a position to where we did have like a spare car that was sort of like plopping around from like family member to family member over the last like six years.

5:27And it's still actually my daily driver today, but it was my first car. It's a 1997 Toyota 4Runner. And so we kind of had this spare car that was just like sitting at my dad's house. And so whenever we had, whenever I decided like I want to go and I want to start renting this out, I was able to pick up the 4Runner for my dad and I started driving that car. And so I took over the 4Runner and then I started renting out my newer Jeep and it started getting rented out full time. And so no longer was it my personal vehicle. We almost immediately transitioned it to just being rented out on Turo. So we started in September of 2017.

6:01And then by, I believe it was February or March, we had got our second car. And so we had saved up enough cash to go out and buy a second vehicle, which was a, I think it was a 2007 Toyota Yaris that we bought for like 2 ,700 bucks or$3 ,000. Very, very cheap. I'm laughing. I want to make just a quick side note here. I'm laughing because you said you had like the Toyota runner. I was going to guess I was a Toyota if it was like a 1997 old car. Those cars are literally like incredible. Okay. So we go to February now you're buying your second car. How are you buying this? Are you taking a loan out?

6:31Are you buying it all with cash? I know you saved up for that. I've talked about this because I want to be actionable for our listeners that are like, can I have a sidecar? Like I could afford another car if I want to do this. So talk to us about that. Yeah. So obviously with the Jeep, we didn't have any like upfront costs with that because we already had had it and it already had like a loan and we were just paying that monthly payment. Whenever it came to the second vehicle, we just saved up as much cash as we could. And so I had the business that I was running. At this point, my then boyfriend was not involved financially in the business.

6:58So it was kind of like on me to save up the cash for it. And so we were able to put, fortunately, the Jeep was at the time fairly new. It was four years old. So it wasn't like plagued with a ton of issues. And so I used all of the cash that the Jeep had made and then also just saved up my own cash, tried to, you know, put together everything I could to then go into getting that second car. And because of the fact, you know, back then, especially cars were so cheap, it didn't take too long for us to get to the point where we could save. And we actually ended up buying, I believe we bought the third car with only like a month or two of the second.

7:30So like we tried to grow kind of quickly from there of trying to save as much cash as we could and buy those like cheap, cheap cars. So what you know now, because obviously this is, you know, February 28th, I'm mathing and monthing this correctly here. What you know now, someone was going to go get a new car. What tips would you have for like an early stage beginner that is interested in doing this that wants to keep their car, but they're like, OK, I'll explore this. I'm going to get another car. What tips do you would you give them right now? Yeah, so I think the best, and this was something that we always had done, but we did it very unintentionally.

8:01And it wasn't until later that we kind of like connected the dots on what this was. But it's buying cars under below market value that have already depreciated. And so there's a ton of different business models in the world with car sharing from buying newer cars, buying like mid-tier cars like a 2018, 19, whatever. And what we really hone in on is buying those cars that are older. They've already hit the bulk of their depreciation. And that way, if you buy a car and it gets totaled or you have to sell it, or let's say, for example, somebody saying, hey, I want to go try Turo, but then they do it and they don't like it.

8:30They're not in a position to where they have this car that they don't know what to do with. And so I think buying a car that is below market value, so you buy it at a discount, that already has hit its depreciation bottom. It just puts you in a position to where you kind of have a lot of different avenues to go down if things just don't work out the way that you thought they would. Or alternatively, if, you know, there's an accident or you need just want to sell the car, you can in some cases make a profit off of it. And so that's, in my opinion, really, I think the best thing to do with getting started with Turo, at least to kind of stick your toes into the world of like, is this worth doing for me personally?

9:03I love that advice. So below market value listeners take notes of that. Of course, I should have prefaced this. Would you, of course, recommend people to just rent out their own personal cars first to dip their toes in the water? Or would you advise people to potentially go buy below market value car? You know, I think it kind of depends on the car, to be honest. And so for me, I didn't like my Jeep. So it was like, if this gets totaled, I don't really care. And so it was very much like I did not like this car. I didn't want to drive it. But if you like your car, I really do not think it's a good idea to put it on Turo because I think, you know, even if you're just maybe testing it out for like a weekend, but I certainly wouldn't recommend doing it for an extended period of time if you really like it.

9:41Because my philosophy is always don't put things you care about on Turo. They're going to get damaged. They're going to get wear and tear. Like even, you know, if it's not a full-fledged accident or dent or scratch, like little things just begin to break. And so my husband and I both have always had the belief of like, whatever car you put on Turo, you need to be able to kind of emotionally distance yourself from. And I think a lot in a lot of cases, people just can't do that with their personal cars. And rightfully so, you know, and so I think that that context matters. But if you feel good about renting out your car, 100 percent, do it for a period of time and see if it's a good fit for you.

10:14Most people spend months, sometimes years, just thinking about starting a business. But what if you could do it in just 10 days? that's exactly what the 10-day business launch plan is designed for. It's a step-by-step roadmap that takes you from idea to real operational business in just 10 days. Click the link in the description below and get ready with your business. So let's go into that checklist for Facebook Marketplace. Obviously, I'm here in below market value. Typically, this can be cars. I know you said the mid-tier. This is cars before 2013, 2010. Give us that exact checklist that you look for for getting your first car to put on Turo then.

10:48Yeah, absolutely. So with you're going to just generally be looking for cars that meet the Turo requirements. So I guess those are like the must have things. So it's 12 years old or newer. That's like a rolling requirement. So as we see here today, it's 2013. But like in January 1st, 2026, it'll be a 2014 and so on and so forth. 130 ,000 miles or less. Now, Turo does have a policy to where if you list a car and it's as long as it's under that mileage at the point of listing, it can get grandfathered in. So it just needs to have under 130 and then clean title. So it needs to have clean title, clean car facts.

11:20And those are the biggest kind of like must have. But then obviously, whenever it comes to like buying a car, you have a lot of other things that you're going to want to look out for as well. Like what is like the condition of the car? Is there a lot of things wrong with it? Is it a northern car? So does it have like rust underneath the vehicle? One thing that we see very, very frequently is like there might not be anything really large wrong with the car, but like a lot of small things are wrong. And oftentimes small things compound to become a really big problem. you know, oil sludge, seeing if there's metallic flakes in the engine.

11:49So those types of like really kind of foundational pre-purchase inspection items are always where we look for first. And it will be a deal breaker for a car every single time if it has them. That's a great checklist. Let's walk through one of your best performing cars, like revenue wise. Can you talk to us one, like what the car is, how much did you buy it for? What is that monthly revenue or the repair costs? Talk to us about that. Cause I want to take the picture for listeners about like, this is the potential. If you just have a single car and we're going to talk about how you've scaled to 2730 cars.

12:17So I guess the caveat is that we do have a couple of financed cars today. And so we have started to finance a couple of cars here and there for tax reasons. So in our fleet currently, we have two financed vehicles. Both of them are Honda Odysseys. So those do very, very well. But our number one car in our fleet is a 2018 Lincoln Navigator, which we did finance. It has since been paid off. So it's no longer a financed vehicle. But that car just rocks it. I mean, it does sometimes$2 ,100 in a month, especially like in the summer months where people are taking it frequently. And then in the kind of lower seasons where it's not as hot, it might do 15, 1600.

12:51That vehicle actually has had some pretty severe maintenance problems in the past, but now it's been pretty good. And so, you know, we had in that car a transmission problem, which costs about 2 ,800. But since we got that fixed, it's been very, very low maintenance because it is still relatively new. So it's, you know, tires, oil change, things like that. But if we're talking in the world of like our older cash cars, which is, you know, all of our vehicles except for a couple. Our best vehicle was for a long time. It was actually a Mercedes C300. It was a 2009 Mercedes C300 is actually recently totaled, but that car would consistently do 1300 a month.

13:25And it had very, very little issues, you know, very just routine maintenance. Occasionally it would have some more severe things here and there, but the kind of maintenance and upkeep for it would be anywhere between about maybe a hundred to$250 per month averaged out. So like if we take into account, like, you know, tires come in one month, but you kind of average that out over the course of multiple. And that car was just bulletproof. Another car that I talk about all the time is like Toyota Yaris's, I think are amazing. Hyundai Elantra GTs are really, really great cars to start. Those are low maintenance as well.

13:55So the Slinking Navigator, you're saying it's doing about$2 ,100 a month. You know, some cars are doing$13 or whatnot. On average, I mean, what is a car typically doing? Obviously, there's gonna be ones that perform better, don't perform as well. What on average are you doing per car? and like what kind of determines like if it does well like is it the make the model the season or that talk to us more about that to break it down for us yeah i mean really good question so the way that i see it is we have our kind of like higher end cars and for me like a higher end car if it does above fifteen sixteen hundred dollars per month that's like a good a good car and obviously it does also depend on like the car payment and the cost of the car for us if we finance a car it's going to be something and that like 30 to 35 000 range and we only like to have two financed at a time.

14:38So we don't like to spread ourselves in that realm. Whenever it comes to cash cars, if it does over 1200 a month, that's extremely good. Like that to me is a very, very good car. Typically what we'll see is somewhere like the 900 to maybe like 1000, 1050 range. And, you know, to be honest, as stupid as it sounds, there isn't like a huge trend with which cars do really well and which ones don't. So our cash cars are, I guess we have two schools of thought. Like we have kind of a model within our model, which is like the high perceived value cars. And these are cars that kind of look expensive, but they're not mostly due to depreciation.

15:13And so we have a couple of fully loaded Ford Escapes that do very, very well. They're leather heated seats, things like that. We have a Mercedes. That one does very, very well. It was cheap. A Volvo. Those all do well because people see them and they're like, this car is expensive, even though in reality, the car costs under five grand. But whenever it comes to our kind of normal economical cars, we find that like the cars that do well are very random. It's just, you know, we have, for example, we have five Hyundai Elantra GTs. They're all very, very similar, very similar year. Two of them are the exact same car, but one of them just for whatever reason doesn't do as well as the other four.

15:49And so it has to do so much with the vehicle itself, but also like Turo ranking and the algorithm and availability and how long the car has been on Turo. And so, you know, there is some discrepancy with that. But other factors are the color of the car can impact it. Loud colors tend to not do as well as like more muted tones, door count, seat count. All of that can be dependent. Like all of that can have an impact, especially depending on your market. Interesting. Yeah. This is such a large question. So I apologize for asking this. If you could recommend like one car for someone to start with Ontario, like what car would you then recommend based off of like what, you know, it's such a large question.

16:21So I apologize, but. Yeah, for sure. So I think there's two answers to that question. One is I think Toyota. I think Toyota anything is going to do well. I'm such a huge Toyota fan, but kind of a more nitty gritty answer. So Hyundai, very long story short, I'll make this quick. Hyundai has a rod bearing warranty extension. Basically Hyundai has a reputation of having terrible engines. And there are specific Hyundais that have due to a class action lawsuit had unlimited warranties implemented on their engines. And as a result, you could have a car that has 200 ,000 miles or 150 ,000 miles. And if you have a blown engine, you could get that engine replaced for free.

16:57So Hyundai Launcher GTs are a car that qualify within that. They're a four-door hatchback. They're very cheap. You can buy them for around four grand and they qualify for this. And so this is the car that we have five of in our fleet. We buy every single one we see. And so I would recommend for everybody to like consult your Hyundai dealership, make sure the Hyundai you're looking for qualifies for this. But I think Hyundais that qualify under that warranty extension are the perfect, perfect turbo car to buy. I love that. That is a good little tidbit right there. I'm writing that one down for our takeaway.

17:28So good stuff. But let's talk about scaling to 27 cars. I mean, you just said you had five of the Hondas or whatnot. What did that growth look like for actually like purchasing these cars? And then, yeah, talk to us about your revenue that you're doing per month as well with this, especially the number of cars that you have. Yeah. So and I think whenever I had we had like talked about doing this podcast, I was at 27. We're now at 34. And so we've grown quite a lot over the last few months. Yeah. So yeah, so we've grown and revenue is right now anywhere between 35 and 40 ,000 a month with the fleet.

17:56And that range sort of comes into claims, which is like a part of love it or hate it. It's a part of the business, but the way that we've sort of built our business is we do try to turn claims into a bit of a profit center. And so that's why it's sort of counted as like a revenue instead of, you know, purely an expense because there is a revenue generating aspect of that. But yeah, that includes, you know, the daily rates, different like fees or incidentals that could be charged, for example, smoking fees and then damage if there is damage that occurs. Interesting. So how did you scale up to 27 cars?

18:28I mean, give us the big picture about purchasing these cars, these all through the Facebook marketplace. Are you taking out loans? Are you buying cash at them? Pretty much all of them except for three were just purchased through Facebook marketplace. And so right now our team is myself, my husband, HP, and our employee Todd, And we're all three like full time within this business, but then a couple of other businesses that we own. And we are constantly looking for cars on Facebook marketplace. I mean, we will like toddle Texas at 11 PM and send us a car that he likes, or like, I'll send one to my husband while I'm like cooking dinner.

18:59It's constant. You're looking for them. And so that sort of like constant grind of like trying to find a good car has allowed for us to find them at a pretty good cadence. And now, you know, we're getting to the point where because we do lose cars, either because of accidents or because it's just time to retire them. We're averaging out this year, especially we've bought more than one car per month, every month for the entire year of 2025. And it just comes down to like looking extremely consistently. Now we do have the three cars that we did finance. And so those were purchased through traditional dealerships.

19:28And our method of like kind of using those vehicles has been for tax reasons. So they all are cars that qualify for section 179. They're 6 ,000 pounds. We use them a hundred percent for business. So that's been kind of a combination tax play plus revenue generator for the business as well. That's really interesting. And then like three full-time employees all work on this. I mean, Aubrey, did you ever think you were going to be even 24-year-old self when you're throwing this on Turo for the first time? Did you ever think it'd grow to what it is today? Was that like vision set in place? Or yeah, I mean, it just has to be crazy to reflect on.

19:57Yeah. I mean, what's even crazier is just like our Turo business has become such like a large thing because it's not only we have Turo and car sharing, but like we have a production company that makes content around this niche. And so it's like a whole like car sharing kind of ecosystem that we've kind of unintentionally created. And, you know, I think definitely did not picture it this way. I think, you know, if you would have asked both me and my husband back in 2017, where it would be, he ended up quitting his job in 2021 to join me full time. And then we hired an employee last year in 2024.

20:26And it's just, you know, it really is a dream come true. It's been an awesome growth process. It is such a cool process. I'm a, this is one that I've never heard of before on the Upflip podcast. So this is all new for our listeners, I know, then as well then. So someone's like, OK, I'm going to get started with this today. However, you're firing me up. I'm going to go get a car. I mean, what does that 30 day roadmap look like for them? That's someone that's trying to go from like zero to one on this. What's that 30 day roadmap that you'd advise? Yeah, you know, I think the hardest part of that equation is buying a car.