Want to run a “simple” startup? Become a coder, and realize that some aspect of your workflow is unnecessarily complicated. Create a tool to fix that and run it as a dev-tools company. Get the first 100 customers from all your friends, then raise $5 million to sell to everyone, and eventually GitHub or Salesforce get tired of paying you to use the tools and buy the whole company instead. Not to show how difficult it is to build Any company, but that is certainly one of the easiest ways to earn two million dollars.
Reviver is exactly the opposite of that. If you’ve been driving around California, Colorado, or Arizona, you’ve probably seen the product e-color license plates. When I saw one for the first time, I was like, “Wow, that’s a hacker’s thing to put on their cars,” but then I realized that it was the first wave of electronic number plates. Seeing as how I’m a novice and a hardware nerd, I got curious, and the next time I saw one of the signs on a parked car, I wrote down the company’s name.
The product itself is not complicated; It’s an e-color display that needs to be updated once a year (when your taxes are due), and that’s about it. But building a company in that space is a unique madness that I respect the most. The founder of the company, Neville Boston, is basically trying to build a company under very difficult circumstances. It’s an easy-to-copy hardware product (basically, a solid Kindle) in a highly regulated (any automotive) industry that touches DMV databases. The product must perform as intended for use in freezing cold, freezing temperatures, and cities where people “stop by touch.” And for these things to end up on people’s cars in the first place, the company had to jump through an unimaginable chain of events with bureaucracies that had no incentive to make the change happen. It’s a perfect storm. If someone comes to me with this as a business idea, I advise them to run the other way. So, naturally, I called the company’s founder to find out why he’s so bent on punishment.
The company has raised more than $70 million and has about 65 employees. Headquartered in Granite Bay, California, the company has offices around the world and has nearly 30,000 cars rolling around with its e-color numbers today. The company hopes to increase that number to 50,000 by the end of the year and grow exponentially from there.
“When You think about the valley… Andreessen Horowitz says software will eat the world. Everyone is seeing things, Boston said in an interview with TechCrunch last week. “YYou’ve got all this money, and it’s great. I think what we’re doing is very different because it’s highly regulated. Number plates were a market ripe for disruption.
That’s right, the humble number plate. In the US, you’ll find more or less (often more) frustrating visits to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The challenge is that most of these systems actually run on older computer systems, and interacting with them is different than you might expect if you use modern APIs and the aforementioned dev tools.
“They’re still on mainframes that run COBOL,” says Boston. “They’re really behind the times, and everything the DMV does involves paperwork. whether you are getting your registration or driver’s license or anything; There is a lot of paperwork, and it is not modernized. Their system is outdated. They are putting pensioners back into the system because they are the only ones who know how the system works.
It’s a perfect storm, that way: old systems ripe for modernization, run by a universally hated institution. And then, the global pandemic wreaked havoc, meaning that for a while there, people couldn’t safely get into the DMV to do their errands. Surely there must be a better way? That’s the solution he thinks Reviver has brought.
“When I started talking to people about the dish digitization, to my surprise, everyone was open to it, because they understood that I was looking at it from a partnership perspective. I didn’t want to be a customer; I wanted to be a partner. I wanted to talk to you about the things that are broken, and I wanted to talk to you about ways to fix them – not just for you, but for all institutions across the country. “We had a platform that really worked. It became a long discussion as there were people who were a bit nervous as it was a sea change from the previous change and especially since no one in government likes change.
But in a country with hundreds of millions of cars, and even more in the world, it’s definitely a big market that warrants a closer look. So here’s what Reviver plans to do: fix some of the major problems with license plate distribution and road tax handling, all via the humble number plate.
“When you start talking about EVs and autonomous vehicles and all the things you need to have on the highway of the future, you really start to realize that this is a big deal. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Bakersfield, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago or Florida. The license plate is a way for law enforcement to know your vehicle’s compliance.” ” explains Boston. “And it’s not just here in the States. It’s also in Africa and China and Australia; it’s all the same across the board. I saw that as a huge opportunity—anyone with a car should have a plate.”
And while starting the company may seem daunting at first, things get more interesting when you realize that there are first-mover advantages in changing how things are done at the government layer of things. Amazing head start.
I have made connections with DMV directors across the country. I worked with the Department of Transportation. I’m working with law enforcement,” Boston reported, explaining the size and depth of the company’s well.
But having a deep well is not enough; There are many challenges in battling with over 50 different regulations and guidelines to bring this product to market. The company’s products are available in California, Arizona, Michigan and Texas. For government vehicles, the plates are legal in Colorado, Illinois, Georgia and Florida. The difference is a little fuzzy; But in states where it is legal but not sold, it has a relationship with the DMV and is working to plan a route to market.
“There is legislation at work in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Washington and Nevada,” Boston rose. “TThere’s a lot going on here, and our focus is on the 10 vehicle markets in the United States that we’ve put our energy into because we’ve had initial conversations with players who want to participate once we’ve got 50% of the driving population.
The company is eager to express its gratitude to the various government organizations that have made it work. In a world where people aren’t the biggest fans of change, one has to stick their neck out a little bit to make digital plates.
“I think the partnership aspect is very important; to have a public-private partnership where everybody wins. They’re getting benefits from it. We’re getting freedom of movement. The problems you hear about when it comes to government. You don’t really hear about the successes; I have to give them credit for thinking ahead and saying, ‘This makes sense.’ I want it. And we just want the ability to work in the state,” explains Boston.
The company has two products; Battery operated number plate and wired plate. The latter is aimed at fleet use, and adds a number of additional functions, including GPS, accelerometers and other fleet management-focused features.
The main thing that opens the electronic plates is convenience for drivers, and flexibility for management bodies.
“If a state wants to change to comply with what they put on the license plate, they can, but the cost of doing it is they have to ship another 5 million plates … it stops innovation,” Boston argued. . An example is California where the month and year of the car’s registration is on the plate. In Arizona, they are not. It’s hard to change that, but digital boards open up that kind of thing. “That’s why the digital display is so key. It allows regions to move forward.”
The company also has an eye on the future. The company suggests that connecting the dish to the traffic system means that smart routing and traffic balancing can be done. Just like a company like Waze did and, frankly, considering how many people use maps on their phones, it might have a better place to work. Self-driving could be another option where smart plates can be useful.
““You can have the plate when the vehicle is driving autonomously, so any time you see this circle on the board with a dot in it, that means it’s in autonomous mode,” Boston says. Some features may develop, change or improve as a result of the technology. I think this is because everyone sees it as a way to identify information about the vehicle. That means you can use that real estate to do more creative work.
