Quinn Osha grew up around cars and has been waiting for the right moment to bring his engineering and entrepreneurial skills together with his passion. After working at a medium-size tech company in leadership roles spanning engineering, program management, and enterprise sales he decided it was time to take the leap. Topmarq is the result of that convergence of Quinn’s professional and personal lives as it takes on private car buying and selling, by using technology to make it easy and stress-free for the everyday person.
What is Topmarq all about?
Topmarq is using technology to make it easy and stress free for everyday people to buy and sell their vehicles privately online. Even though transacting privately is much more financially favorable to both parties, few people do it because it’s wrought with confusion and opaqueness. Topmarq makes the process crystal clear by guiding users through the process and helping them transact safely online with an escrow service. This provides peace of mind for both parties to ensure neither side gets ripped off.
Further, rather than allow anybody and everybody to post listings, Topmarq only accepts fully fleshed vehicles and requires them all to be inspected by a mechanic first. This makes sure that buyers are fully aware of what they are buying from the very beginning. By adding trust and transparency back into the private car market, Topmarq hopes to make car buying fun and worry-free.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I grew up in Houston and spent many of my weekends at car shows and auctions with my dad and brother. I moved to Los Angeles to get my undergrad and master’s from Caltech in electrical engineering. I started working at a tech company called Axon, where I led the design of two generations of connected police dash cameras. I then spent about 18 months in Sydney Australia doing enterprise sales covering parts of Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. In March of 2020, I decided it was time to take the leap I had been waiting for so I left my role, moved back to the US, and dove head first into entrepreneurship. The idea for Topmarq really resonated with me because it solves a problem I had experienced for years in the car industry where buying private – while definitely the better financial option – was hopelessly opaque to the average person.
How do you plan to grow this company?
My plan for Topmarq is to become the leader in private (individual to individual) car sales. If you look at other options like Craigslist, they’ve been around forever and are really great for quick deals, but haven’t progressed much. Modern car buying is shifting to an online focus and as such technologies should change with that. When you consider that 87% of consumers generally dislike something about the dealer experience and that the private car buying options aren’t fully fleshed, I think you’ll see that there is a great opportunity for some innovation here.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
So far I have fully bootstrapped Topmarq and kept it on a shoestring budget. I wanted to prove things out before going out and raising money (even though I’ve had offers) to keep the direction totally under my control. To do that, though, meant keeping development costs down and doing a lot of coding myself. Having never been a software developer this has been the hardest part of the early stages. I took a crash course in coding in the first month of work and then have been slowly expanding my skill set as new features were required. While tough, it’s been incredibly rewarding to have a close pulse on the development of the product.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
I made what many would call a rookie mistake early on and thankfully only lost about $4k in the process after realizing it. I had learned to code in Django/Python and built the early platform in that. I wanted help on the front end though and the devs I talked to all pushed towards doing a react front end. Great, I thought. This was very popular and I knew it had lots of benefits. The problem was it made the front end essentially in-acessible to me until I learned yet another coding language, and it required a total revamp of the backend to be API-based. So essentially it would be tons of man hours just to get back to feature parity, plus I wouldn’t understand how it worked. It took me a couple weeks to fully recognize this and pull the plug. Had I not acknowledged the mistake quickly and just called it a loss, who knows how much more it would have cost me.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I love to read and try to do so as regularly as possible. You never know what snippets of insight might send you off in a totally new direction and reading gives you constant access to insights in a way few other options do. While I read lots of tech-based books (Lean Startup, Principles, Measure what Matters, etc), I also like to mix in autobiographies and just nonsense books to keep things interesting.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
Measure what matters is great for keeping you honest about your goals and maintaining focus.
- The infinite game helped guide my long term approach to business
- Lean Startup gives you insight into how to keep you early company lean and mean.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
Honestly, I have no idea. There are so many things I ‘wish’ I knew before starting and those would all correlate to some misstep or issue I had along the way. But the problem is you’ll never avoid them all and the only thing that matters is taking the first step. You’ll figure the rest out.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
I use a lot of forums and social media to promote the website. The cool thing about Topmarq is it’s based on my passion for cars, which a lot of other people share. So I can relate to my user base really well and it’s easier to open up conversations with them. I run a “car talk” blog on the website as well that has helped provide valuable knowledge to users as well as drive traffic to the site.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
Just registering your business in the US will cost you about that, so definitely don’t go open a C-corp. Start small online and your first instinct anytime you come across a service offering help (marketing, hosting, advertisements, etc) should be no. There are cheap/free ways to do almost everything if you look around. With only $1000, your equity is time, not capital.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
It’s easier to get started than you think. Just jump in on a side project you’ve been wanting to do and see how it goes. I promise you will learn so much so quickly, and likely find out whether entrepreneurship is really for you. Many try it out and realize their current job and work-life balance is actually pretty nice…
What is your favorite quote?
I have 2 – but they’re closely related. The first is “Progress not perfection”. As a bit of a perfectionist, I can sometimes get so tied up in how to make things perfect that I ultimately end up not doing anything at all. This helps me keep moving when I get stuck.
The second is by Walt Disney at the inauguration of Disneyland. He said, “Disneyland will never be completed”. No project is ever fully done or perfect. You must always keep improving and evolving with the time and that’s a great way to view any product you work on.
How can we get in touch with you?
You can find me on LinkedIn.You can also contact us through the website – Topmarq.com Or Facebook.
Entrepreneur Interview: Meet Alicea Moore, Founder of Alice. A. Candle Co
