232. He Bought a Tesla in College and Accidentally Built a National Business

0:00Ray Vardy:Imagine getting a Tesla in college and realizing you can't actually afford it. That's exactly what happened to today's guests. So he tried to make money with it, driving Uber, renting it out himself, doing anything he could. But renting his car turned into a complete nightmare. Customer issues, damaged cars, late night support calls. Instead of quitting, he decided to solve the problem by building a platform that automated the entire process. us. Today, that idea has grown into Eon Rides, a nationwide platform with thousands of electric vehicles on the road. So today we're breaking out how he turned one college Tesla into a massive virtual fleet.

0:37Ray Vardy:I'm Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the Helpful Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. Excited to welcome Ray Vardy to the show today. Ray, thank you so much for being here. I wish people could see your background because you got a sick background. So I'm excited to talk with you today here. Thanks, man. It's our office. We have a cool spot. it. Nice. I like it. Well, let's talk about what do you guys do? Give us a high level overview just for the listeners tune in for the first time. 100%. What Eon does is it makes sharing cars a frictionless process.

1:05We take cars that people have that they're not using all the time, can be a personal car or commercial rental fleet car. And we automate every single piece of the rental for the guests so that they can just walk up to the car, have it unlock automatically just by being next to it, get in and go. And we do that all across the country.

1:24Ray Vardy:Gonna be good. Give us a metric and then we're gonna dive into starting the business. Is there a revenue metric, growth metric that you can kind of explain just to give the expansion and scale of this business for our audience? So Eon grew from a startup that was really just my idea from a dorm room and piece by piece, brick by brick, built it into a national platform with multiple thousands of vehicles. We've been growing at a organic rate of growth of about 70 % per year, year over year, without ever raising capital or taking outside investment. Oh man, this is gonna be good. And we're gonna talk about the organic growth for sure here, but let's go back to college, Ray, because this is really how it all started when you're getting this Tesla.

2:02Ray Vardy:Tell us the story and like not being able to afford and like what you did from that. Take us back to college right here. Yeah, basically at the time, I was actually in school for biomedical engineering. I thought I was gonna be a doctor. My dad had one of these early Teslas back when Tesla was like the coolest thing that you could have. And when he moved out of state, I convinced him to give it to me because I wanted to have a car in college. But what I didn't realize is that I have to pay for this thing. And$1 ,200 a month for a college kid with no income was just a non-starter. So initially, I tried to monetize it by running Ubers on it, renting it out.

2:37I wanted it to become an asset that paid for itself and could justify itself. But very quickly, I realized that sharing my car was just something that didn't exist. It's really, I get to become the world's tiniest, worst car rental company with one car. And so very, very quickly, I learned that trying to share an asset that's this expensive and this difficult to manage was just untenable. It's like giving someone a gun and then asking them, hey, please don't shoot somebody. Bring it back on time. Don't damage it. And oh, Pinky promised you know how to use this thing. And And that's when I realized this problem is much broader than just me renting out one car.

3:12Ray Vardy:Interesting. So when I hear this, like we've interviewed someone that's on Turo before. I mean, is this pretty similar? Like, could you have just gone on Turo for this? If so, like, why didn't you do Turo? I did do Turo. That's one of the first things I tried to monetize. And that's when I learned that I couldn't, I really couldn't manage it by myself. Talked about the decision to build this. Was this something like, oh, well, screw it. Like, I'll find another way to make money. Or is this like, I'm going to put on my problem solving hat and actually build a software, build a product for this?

3:39Ray Vardy:I mean, how did you do that with those two avenues you could have taken? Yeah, so the reality was I never actually envisioned building out a platform. I just wanted to solve this for the one car I had. I had a promise to my dad that I would pay him back every month and I was falling behind on my payments and I was starting to feel ashamed of taking on this burden and having to tell my family I failed. So I was starting to look at this problem a bit more broadly. How do I increase the revenue that this car can generate? How do I reduce the operational burden of me having to run around and take care of this thing.

4:08I don't think people realize just how much goes into renting out a car. It's pre-checking the car. It's handing off the keys to the guest. It's teaching them about how to use the car. It's being available 24 seven for support. And then of course, at the end, in addition to checking to make sure that the car is okay afterwards, you have to tally up all of the charging, the tolls, the mileage, everything has to go in. And then you have to chase after the guests to get that payment back. And that just became untenable. On top of that, the car was just getting destroyed. It just kept getting scratched, bumped, dented, smoked in, not brought back.

4:41One time the car was used to rob a bank. The whole thing was a total mess. And I just realized if this is ever going to work, I have to fix this. So for me, I started building out a system to try and automate away the work and the risk for myself, just so I could get this one car out of it. And then as I started to grow the fleet, I started to start to make sense and the car started to bring money. I brought in a few more cars, got to about 10 cars. And then the craziest thing happened, which was other people with Teslas, with other cars in the neighborhood, started asking me if I could rent out their cars too.

5:13And that's when the idea of building out a platform that fully integrates to the cars and takes care of these problems at its core became Eon.

5:22Ray Vardy:Was it like kind of a light bulb moment where people are asking you? Because I feel like from an entrepreneurship perspective, it's like one thing to build something for yourself, that's a great way to get started with like your first business. But when other people are asking like you to do it, I feel like that had been like such a light bulb moment for you where it's like, oh, I actually have something here. Talk to us about that moment. Of course. Well, one of the craziest things is, you know, somebody comes to you and they say, I like your product. I was trying to compete with you. Actually, instead of me competing and trying to rent my car versus your car, can we join forces?

5:51Can you do this for me instead? And that's when you realize, wait a second, my solution isn't just good for me. It's good for a lot of people. And it's something that we can actually scale and improve the overall market altogether. From the earliest version, when we were just, you know, trying to do like one little automation just to take off a tiny bit of work to what it is right now, where if you're renting out the car as an owner on the platform and you're a guest who's using that car and you never actually talk to each other or interact or know who the other person is, was a massive light bulb moment to say, OK, this is what it could be and this is how it could help other people.

6:23Ray Vardy:One thing that comes to mind for me on this is, is it essentially a marketplace for people to come together? Yes, it is. But with a caveat. So basically, most marketplaces are just the connection between, you know, the seller and the buyer, right? Supply and demand, and then you sit in the middle and you're the connector. But what we do is much more of a managed marketplace. It's something that's taken care of. What we realized is that a car is an asset that's, I mean, that's like I said before, it's basically a weapon, right? If you let somebody who doesn't know what they're doing, give it to somebody else who doesn't know what they're doing, and you kind of tell them, hey, you guys go figure it out, you're going to have disasters that happen.

6:58I mean, this is one of the riskiest industries for any assets, right? The difference between renting out your house on Airbnb and renting out your car is that no one can take your house to Mexico or use it to kill somebody, right? Whereas with your car, that thing's gone. You'll never see it again. And so when you're trying to figure out how to do that, we realized that the approach of instead of letting people who don't know what they're doing, try to figure it out, automate the way the process, make it happen fully seamlessly so that they're not even involved in the process, control it from start to finish so that you can give the guest a better experience and you can give the owner what they want, which is, you know, monetizing

7:35Ray Vardy:their assets, being as little involved as possible. So with the guest and owner portion, and thank you for the clarification. I'm curious, like, how do you go about getting people on for the supply, but also like the demand aspect as well? Can you talk about that? Because I feel like if you're building something like that, like that's a challenge, you have to kind of get it from both ends. So how did you guys go about that in the early days? Sure. So two things, right? One is that demand became a much easier prospect because we just offered a much better experience than was on the market. And I know every founder says that the difference from when you let's say you're in Austin, You come visit me in New York, you land, right?

8:10And now you have to go through the airport and stand in a rental car line for 45 minutes, you know, just to get out of there. As opposed to you get off the flight, you go to the parking lot, your phone is already connected, already set up. You just walk up to the car and you go and you're actually on your way, not in 45 minutes, but 45 seconds. That makes for an incredibly superior experience in every way to what people are used to. So the demand was always there. Once you've built up the system, it's always there. And then for the supply side, for the owners, the country is just filled with people that are monetizing their cars.

8:45First, with commercial car rental companies that are always looking for additional revenue streams and places to publish their listings. And then with people that want to monetize their cars. So you come in and you say, hey, we've solved all these problems for you. We're going to give you this additional revenue stream. Are you in? And the answer is a unanimous yes. So to us, it's always been go to the demand first, solve the problem first, and then the people who it solves the problem for will come along.

9:09Ray Vardy:That's a really good takeaway, listeners. I would encourage you to rewind that and that's a good right there. Are you working a nine to five but dream of entrepreneurial freedom? Look no further than the Uflip Academy, the number one entrepreneurial platform with 20 plus step-by-step courses taught by active business owners, live workshops, hands-on skill training, a business idea database and a thriving entrepreneur community to keep you accountable. Click the link in the description below to join the Uflip Academy today and make this the year you stopped dreaming and started building your business without guesswork.

9:45Ray Vardy:So how did you guys go about like educating or getting people onto the platform as well? You just kind of highlighted the demand and like the supply side, but like, was it word of mouth? Was it SEO? Like, how'd you guys actually get on the platform? And I love that you're on here right now because it's just with all the tools out there, like Cloud Code, for example, like people can build platforms really quickly here. But it's one thing to actually get people on the platform. So how did you in the early days get people actually onto this platform? Of course. So like I told you at the beginning, you know, even to this day, we've never raised a single dime of external funding.

10:16That means that everything we had to do was had to be super lean, had to be super intentional. And so concurrently, we never had money to run ads. And by the way, at the time of this recording, we still have not spent a single dime in the eight years that we've been operating on ads ever. The only way that we've been able to grow has been word of mouth and SEO, which if you ask me today, if you're starting a company right now in 2026, I think you have a better shot at outcompeting your competition than a company that's medium sized or big. Because you just have so much faster flexibility and the tools to get you out there than they do.

10:52Ray Vardy:And they don't know the tools that you can access right now to get ahead. That's another good takeaway there. The faster flexibility. What are some of those tools now if someone is going to get started? I don't want to get too deep into this, but like just give us a few quick tools that you use in your everyday that if someone's listening to this right now, they're like, okay, I can use that to get ahead. What are like a few that you use in your stack? Of course. So look, when we started the company, there were no AI tools. ChatGPT wasn't a thing. Cloud Code's not there. We had to kind of figure it out ourselves.

11:17We had to think, okay, how do we rank for what people are searching for and help them find us? So we had to learn the keywords, the SEO, writing quality articles, putting together landing pages. And I think that if you're a founder, you should still learn those things. The last thing you want is a monitored AI, just spitting out content and you thinking that it's going to work. Right now, the tool set that you need is some basic level of understanding of how SEO works, how your website's actually going to convert, and then using tools like Claude or ChatGPT to find the keywords that you want to views, push them into articles, but then edit those heavily so that your message stays uniform and that you're actually telling your customers what you want them to do.

11:56At the end of the day, conversion is what matters, not just ranking.

12:00Ray Vardy:You said it earlier, like you guys are going like crazy all through organic. So to this day, it's still, I mean, I just heard you said you haven't spent anything on ads. Is it truly like SEO that has gotten you to where you're at today? Has that been the best marketing channel for you then? Absolutely. And now today it's much more, we're starting to see like the search through AI starting to increase as well. So people are finding us by asking ChatGPT or asking Claude, what's the best car rental company? What's the best Tesla rental, EV rental that I can find? And we're just looking at those tools and saying, we think ads are dead.

12:31We think it's going to get to a place eventually where you're going to have AI find the best solution for you. And it's going to get really, really good at that. So the challenge is to be able to explain to the audience to, you know, these large language

12:46Ray Vardy:models exactly what you do so that it can be recommended correctly. How do you do that? I'm really curious on this because for my own company as well, I think the term is literally like AEO, like AI engine optimization. Can you give us a quick masterclass on how your teams are pairing for that? Because for my own company, like we started to run ads recently, Facebook ads, and like, I don't know, like they're all right. We've only spent like$300. We've gotten a few leads. They're not high quality. So it is what it is. But like, I do believe we're still at the early days of like AEO, like that AI engine optimization.

13:15Ray Vardy:So how is your team doing? Because I love that like talk track there. I think there's a lot to learn there. Look, I'm going to be completely honest with you. I'm not going to be able to tell you that I'm an expert in any of this. This is stuff we're all learning at the same time together. The only difference maybe is that we're just trying out a bunch of new stuff all the time. We're trying to see what source material is AI using to find us. And then can we get into that source material? What is it that people are searching for on AI? And then being able to say to the AI, hey, I'm actually relevant.

13:43There's a thousand and one different techniques. And again, I wouldn't be the guy to tell you this because we're trying to figure out just as well as everybody else. And I can't tell you what's effective yet. What matters is that you keep getting more shots on goal. Try this method. Try that method. One thing that we did that I thought was really clever is that we just started to look at how our websites are all ranking and then having our AI basically assess the meta tags on all of those landing pages and then just run a review audit every three months to see which ones are high ranking, which ones are underperforming and can we update those landing pages to try and perform better.

14:17Ray Vardy:So that's just one way you could do it. Let's go back into the business model and more of the operations of like how this works. So for someone who's never used this, can you walk us through a little bit more about the moment someone books, like what does that workflow look like? Tell us about that. I want to hear more about that in the business model of it. basically like we're finally bringing to the car and mobility space what you've come to expect in every other aspect of your life you know every other service and tool there's an app for that there's a capability to get it at your door when you expect what we do at eon is if you're downloading the app for the very first time and by the way we could drop a referral code for your listeners down below so they can get a discount on the first ride they download the app they choose exactly the car they want they can choose to either pick it up or have it delivered so they can even have it brought directly to their door.

15:03They book their car. If they're a first-time user, they're going to do a one-time verification. So they're going to upload their license, do a facial match. Once they're approved to drive, it's literally as simple as they walk up to the car. They go through a very brief tutorial if it's their first time driving. So we teach them everything they need to know about how do I charge this car? How do I turn on autopilot? What are the things I need to know? What can I do? What can't I do? And then after that one-minute orientation, your phone becomes a Bluetooth key that literally just walk away, the car will lock, walk up to the car, it will unlock.

15:36You don't even need to take it out of your pocket. You just walk up to your car, you get in, and you go. And that's literally it. At the end of your rental, every single thing that you have gone through, whether it's tolls or charging, is available for you to see in the app in real time. So you're not getting billed months after the fact for something and you don't even remember for a trip you don't even remember taking. You see exactly what it is in real time. So if there's a question, you can ask it right in that moment. You close your trip, and then you get a discount code for your next trip because we love our customers.

16:05That's it. That's the entire experience. And by the way, if anything happens during your trip, if you need assistance or support, you've got a 24-hour 7 line that you have the ability to call or text. And we're able to help you right then and there because we have the ability to connect to your car, see where you're at, and see what issue you're facing. so you don't have to worry about what if the owner of the car is asleep what if he's on a flight and he can't get to me you have a flat tire we can send a tow over to you even if you don't know

16:32Ray Vardy:what the address is right then and there one thing that like blows my mind uh like it obviously this is like an incredibly built out like platform one thing that blows my mind is like you were a biomed like engineer that has now pivoted to being like a sass founder not a sass founder like a sass founder you could call it sure yeah how did you build like the early product others was this you coding the platform or like what did the very like early days look like i'm very impressed no man that's a great question i actually don't get asked this enough the reality is to this day i can't write like a line of code like at all basically i was always on the operational side i was the guy suffering and answering phone calls at 4 a.m and and like getting my you know i remember i had a date that got just like totally disrupted because i had to go up to new hampshire and in the winter recover a car, just like crazy stuff.

17:19What I ended up doing is I was like, okay, I don't have the resources. I don't have money. I don't, who's going to build this with me? And I managed to find a friend of a friend in college who I sold him on the vision. And I told him, listen, here's what I want to build. I want to make this thing happen. Here's my proposal to you. You build me that very first version to just give me two hours of sleep a night back. That's all I need. And I will make sure that every car on the platform for the rest of time, you have free and full access to, I'll pay for it, right? And that was what did it. And so we built out that very first version.

17:53It got us to from zero to one. And then the next step, one to two to three to five to 10.

17:59Ray Vardy:That just became, what do we need? Who do we need? And we started building it out from there. I want to talk to the people that are like afraid of launching because how I'm interpreting this is like, you really like launched this thing. You're like, I'll give you this, just launch it. Give me from zero to one here. how has the platform evolved like from that very first stage to where you are at now i don't want to speak to people that are like afraid to launch like oh i need to perfect my product it needs to be perfect i don't want an mvp but it sounds like you just launched so talk to us about that oh my god uh listen so to anybody that i could speak to directly right if you're afraid of launching what it is that you have listen there are two things that are just not never going to change this is the youngest you will ever be tomorrow you're going to be older than you are today and you will never have as much time to figure it out as you do right now.

18:46Always, always, as life goes on, you will acquire more and more responsibilities, more and more things that need to be taken care of. You'll have less time and less resources to focus on the problem. Just get out there and do it. And by the way, to the question of what was it like to get from zero to one, to be perfectly frank, it was freaking horrible. When I first started and it became known around school that I was renting out my Tesla to people, I'm even surprised to admit this, but I was ridiculed by a lot of my friends. I started being known as like that Tesla guy. You know, like I had friends that would always like, ooh, did you come here in your Tesla?

19:21You know, it was like, it became like a thing and it was kind of embarrassing. And what I would say is if you're waiting until you're not embarrassed by your first move, you waited too long, right? The market's always shifting. Look at the way that AI, how fast AI is evolving right now. Things are just always, always, always on the up and they're always gonna be different. forget in a year, in a week from now. So unless you get started right now and figure out what you don't know, you're going to be left behind. So just get out there, be prepared to eat the crap, be prepared to move forward

19:51Ray Vardy:and just take it on. That was like a phenomenal soundbite. If you aren't embarrassed, you launch too late. That is a really good one right there. Talk to us about being ridiculed and stuff because you're a senior in college, you're launching a platform, you're biomed, where some people are like, you're biomed, you can go be a doctor. Why are you doing this? Like, take us to that moment as well. At the time, it wasn't even like this grand vision of I'm going to build out this amazing app. It was like, wow, you see Ray over there? He's got a car rental company. How goofy is that? Like, you know, there was a lot of like stigma associated with the fact that it's like this is, you know, perceived as like a blue collar space.