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You could buy a Chrysler for under $3,000. I want people to stop saying I hate buying cars. Hey, I just want to see if you guys have a car available. I'm openly talking about how to fix this industry. So if a dealership is claiming that they can order one, they are a liar. I'm building a business that hopefully puts itself out of business. No, you're not disappointing. You just said it's a tough conversation to have. Like, do you want me to go have the conversation for you? I can certainly like, if you want to give me to the manager, I'll have the conversation. If you're not brave enough to do it. My name is Tomi Mikula and I'm 33 years old.
I negotiate car deals for a living. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I'm the founder and CEO of Delivrd. My remote business brought in about $2.3 million in 2025. Your call may be recorded to improve the guest experience. Delivrd is my goal on reinventing the way we buy cars. The simplest terms is we skip the dealership while still getting you the deal. For 2026, it would have to be a 2027. We handle everything for you. The price of the car, the trade, the add ons, the accessories. You sit back, relax. We do the entire thing. So what will they do?
We don't charge a different fee depending on if you're buying a Toyota Corolla or a BMW X5. Because the general concepts of negotiating a new car are almost all the same. I mean, it depends on what you consider small. What I consider small, I think it's small in the grand scheme of the price. I'm interested in the car. I've been looking for one okay with timeline. Was hoping just to get a little bit better deal than that though. So Delivrd gross revenue, the very large majority ended up coming from negotiating car deals.
Anytime we hire somebody, we try to have about a year's worth of salary set aside because that person is taking a huge risk on somebody they found on TikTok. When it comes down to the profits, they get reinvested a lot back into the business. Our biggest lead generation tool is our live streams. We stream on multiple platforms: TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Twitch. Out of those concurrent viewers, we're averaging anywhere between 6 to 8,000 people watching at any given time on all platforms combined. Ended up selling my first car. And just like when I sold phones, you get hooked. In 2022, I reconnected with my brother. He helps build businesses for a living. If you can fix something by saving people time, energy and anxiety and obviously
money, and you can do 2 or 3 of those things for somebody while solving their problems, you've got a pretty darn good business. So I started trying to find ways to solve problems. It was January 3rd, 2023. I had eight people go through my finance office. All should have been good deals. All of them said no and they all said the same phrase to me; I hate buying cars. That was such an impactful thing for me because they didn't say, I hate the dealership. They just said I hate buying cars. That was the moment when I realized this is a problem. No matter how good I am at finance, no matter how good I am at doing dealership, no matter how good I am at making this experience faster, quicker,
more efficient, I can't fix this problem from within. So it became my life mission. I went at the end of that day, told my finance director that I was leaving and started Delivrd. Deliverd does not have any investors when it comes down to a monetary value. My brother, which helped me start from the business from the very beginning. He does own 25% of the business. He's heavily involved in the operation side. He didn't invest a dime to do that. One of the things that I wanted to do is understand not only my client base, but who is my client base, who is willing to pay, what are they willing to
pay? I didn't want to charge anybody a dime until I had a foolproof process that people told me they would pay money for. Once I had that. I wanted to start charging that fee. So that took ten months. I ended up doing it not only for free. I ended up hiring a third party to come in to do interviews for that were about two hours long. I paid the people I was doing these deals for free, $100, just to do that two hour interview for. It was one of the best things that I ever did for this business. I ended up having about $120,000 in savings when I started Delivrd. I've lived in Iowa most of my life, and the beautiful thing about Iowa is it's very cheap to live. So I had a lot of savings. I ended up being blessed to have one video that ended up going at
the time I considered viral. I am pissed off. Lying is never the answer in order to help you get a sale. Ended up getting three clients out of that which paid our bills. The next month we ended up doing 20 deals and the train started going. We actually have more inbound business than we can personally handle. The way Delivrd finds customers at this point is probably unique to a lot of businesses because we go off of anti sales model. I actually tell people why they shouldn't hire me instead of why they should. I can't save you thousands of dollars more than you can on your own. I take the car buying stress out for you. I save you time, energy and anxiety. I think that
resonates with consumers, at least in the car industry world, where they're used to people lying, being deceitful and charging all these things for the first time. They're hearing somebody say, you don't need this, but if you want it, it's there. One of the things that I know is I understand the industry really well, not just as a car salesman, but as a manager and as a finance manager. I have numbers in my head that I believe, and some people are going to call me crazy for asking for them, but I know my data says they're right. So I'm willing to ask no matter what, even if it results to a dealership yelling at me or getting mad at me, or saying that I'm taking money out of their own pocket. Okay, I'm trying to be at 3K off. So you're not even willing
to bring the offer to the manager? I'm not concerned that the more I get recognized, the less likely I'm able to get deals. So one of the things that we're doing here at Delivrd is I have an entire team behind me at this point negotiating car deals. You can recognize me, but you can't recognize five other voices and you can keep learning more and more people that we're working with, but the chances are low. Yeah. I mean, you're just giving like no confidence to me. You said you want to move a little bit on the price. Depends on what that is. I believe a founder should be willing to get their hands dirty. So I still negotiate a large portion of the deals here Delivrd. I'm proud to say that number is going down more dramatically. And then
I'm the entire marketing arm of Delivrd. Generally, I'm working anywhere between 14 to 16 hour days and I'm now doing that. I'm proud to say five days a week. I work about 4 to 5 hours over the weekend, trying to just step back a little bit to give myself a little work life balance. Are we trying to sell cars or what? What are we doing? We're currently in that scale phase right now, and we spent a lot of time, me and my brother, building out a process that we felt could handle a certain amount of clients. So we ended up building this. We call it the conveyor belt. We have pressure tested this, and we believe that system will get us up to 400 deals reliably every single month without my involvement at all. Obviously, our first goal by end of
summer be able to get to about 500 deals. And by end of year, we're doing anywhere between 7 to 800 deals on a monthly basis. Once I feel confident we are able to meet that demand, it'll be the first thing we do is open up a Canadian division. Delivrd does plan expanding beyond cars so we can go into boats, we can go to RVs, we can go into planes. The second I sell the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, I'm selling out. You know, money is great, but when it comes down to my kids, my fiance, my family, I can tell them I made a lot of money and I can be proud of that. Or I can have a Wikipedia page that says Tomi Mikula is the reason why an entire country
looks at car buying in a whole different way. I reinvented a multitrillion dollar industry. You know exciting that is. That Wikipedia page, as silly as it sounds, is worth so much more than me than it is a buyout or a number.
