About Cars and Bids
Cars & Bids is an automotive entertainment company built around a curated online car auction. It was founded in 2020 by Doug DeMuro, whose YouTube channel gave the marketplace an enthusiast audience from launch day, together with co-founder Blake. Listings are reviewed rather than self-serve, so cars that will not interest the audience get declined. What clears that bar ranges widely in price, from a $2,000 find to a $650,000 collector car, with the occasional oddity such as a tractor or a couch. The company has hosted more than 20,000 auctions and also produces the top-ranked podcast in the automotive category.
What do they do?
Industry
Location
What Cars and Bids needed to solve
The customer Cars & Bids most needs to understand is the seller, and the seller is the hardest thing to see. Car enthusiasts hold on to their cars, so the consideration window runs long. Someone who signed up in 2020 might list a car in 2026, with years of activity in between that gave no real signal they would ever sell. The signals that could have closed that gap, which emails someone opened and which pages they visited, stayed inside the systems that produced them. Email was the largest blank spot, because there was no view at all of how people engaged with what the company sent them.
Matt Clark, Chief Product and Technology Officer, wanted one place where all of the raw data lived and where a reasonable number of people across the company could answer their own questions without waiting on an analyst. Snowflake became that place. Filling it was the harder half of the problem, because Cars & Bids had no managed ingestion tooling and no dedicated data engineer to build any. Whatever handled ingestion had to work quickly and stay out of the way.
How the data stack came together
Before Snowflake and Hevo, consumer analytics data were stored Redshift as raw event data that nobody had transformed or matched against what was happening in the product. Querying it was slow work. The recommendation engine that depended on those events started failing, and as traffic grew the failures became routine.
When Matt joined two and a half years ago, reporting ran through two Tableau seats. Everyone outside those seats worked from screenshots. He moved reporting to Redash, an open source engine pointed straight at the production database replicas, which was faster to work with but still limited to raw application data. Snowflake came next and gave every source a single address. Query speed improved immediately and the recommendation engine stopped breaking.
Storage was settled at that point. Getting data into it was not. Snowflake had no native connector for SendGrid, so their Snowflake solutions engineer recommended Hevo.
Why Cars and Bids chose Hevo
Matt signed up for the trial to evaluate. Connecting SendGrid took an authentication step and a handful of clicks, and the email data was in Snowflake shortly after. He draws the comparison to authorizing a Slack app or an MCP connector in Claude, where the tool shows what it can see and you point at what you want. Pricing made sense at his volumes.
The detail that settled it was that nothing had to be rebuilt afterward. The pipeline he stood up to test the product was the pipeline he kept, which meant the evaluation itself produced working infrastructure. SendGrid answered a question the team had never been able to answer easily, namely which emails people were actually opening and clicking. Once that was in place, adding YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Apple Search Ads, and Stripe was a matter of configuration.
“There's a million ways to ingest data into your warehouse, but that speed to value is where Hevo played the huge role.”
The Hevo advantage in action
Hevo covers the ingestion half of a warehouse that Matt wanted to exist quickly, and the effects show up in a few specific places.
Ingestion without a data hire: The stack is run by Matt and one backend engineer. Every hour that engineer spends maintaining pipelines is an hour taken away from other priorities, and for a lean company who considers themselves an entertainment company not a tech company, that trade is worth avoiding. Hevo removed the need for a dedicated data engineering role.
A connector list that keeps up: SendGrid opened the door and the rest of the marketing and payments sources followed without a build phase. The breadth of the connector catalog is the first thing Matt names when he recommends the product.
An interface non-specialists can use: Point-and-click setup means the people closest to a question can get the source connected. Matt describes the trial as the fastest way to understand the product, since it demonstrates the workflow instead of describing it.
Spreadsheets treated as real sources: Cars & Bids has no admin screen for reference data, so useful facts used to live in unstructured Slack messages and Notion pages. One example is a list of roughly thirty employee names and usernames. Loading it took seconds and made it possible to strip internal test records out of analysis, including test auctions on high-value cars that had looked like pipeline losses.
Support that picks up the phone: Matt singles out the ability to get on a call and talk through a question as one of the three reasons he would recommend Hevo to others.
“I'm the C-level executive, but I don't have a dedicated data engineer. Every hour I use my backend engineer on data infrastructure is an hour he could be improving our infrastructure in AWS and Cloudflare. Headcount is precious for a small, lean company like ours.”
The data stack today
What comes next
Cars & Bids is in a steady state. The near-term work is the HubSpot connection, as the company moves its email and marketing operations onto that platform. After that comes staging the social and content data already sitting in Snowflake, so that the question of how the entertainment side of the business feeds the auction side can be answered by anyone who wants to ask it. Further out, Matt can see a version of the product where high-volume sellers get dashboards of their own, showing how their auctions performed and how long each sale took. The pipeline that feeds the trending auctions feature on the site is an early sign of what data can do on the customer-facing side.
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