33-year-old makes $192K/month negotiating car deals for people
Daily News Article — Posted on May 11, 2026
(by Tomislav Mikula, CNBC) – In 2023, I started negotiating car deals for free for strangers I met on Reddit. I wanted to start a business, but I needed to educate myself first. So I asked a question the car industry wasn’t asking: What would make you happy?
I closed about 50 deals before I took my first paying client.
Three years later, my company, Delivrd, charges a flat $1,000 fee to negotiate a car purchase for anyone who does not want to walk into a dealership. We’ve closed over 3,000 deals, and brought in $2.3 million in revenue last year. We’re on pace for more than $3 million this year. I have 15 employees, all remote.
On average, we save customers $6,300 per deal on car negotiations.
My sales pitch is unusual. I tell almost everyone who calls me not to hire me. I don’t have a magic wand or a secret formula. People hire me not because they can’t do it, but because they don’t want to. I share almost everything I know for free on social media. If you have the time, patience and a dealership you trust, save your money and do it yourself.
I started my career as the number one salesperson in the Verizon ecosystem. Then I moved into car sales and spent six years becoming a top 1% auto finance manager. I was good at the job, but I was also the person customers walked away from saying “I hate buying cars.”
They hated the waiting and all the back-and-forth. The feeling that something was being done to them instead of for them. I tried to fix it from the inside. I made the process faster and was more transparent. People still left saying the same thing.
After hearing it eight deals in a row in the finance office, I realized that I could be the best salesperson and it still wouldn’t matter. The building was the problem.
So I left.
In addition to the Reddit deals, I did something else that might sound crazy. I paid 100 more people $100 Amazon gift cards each to sit down with a third party I hired and tell me, for two hours, what they actually wanted when they bought a car.
I learned that customers don’t care about price the way the industry thinks they do. They care about their time, their sense of control, trust and clarity. The money is almost a footnote. So I built Delivrd around those four things, not around savings.
Five people touch every deal at Delivrd. The client only speaks to two of them, and the rest work in the kitchen where the client never sees them.
In the background, we have a team of researchers going out finding where the best deals are, we have someone monitoring and verifying all paperwork is as promised and someone making sure that cars are delivered in perfect condition.
My best advice for turning a boring skill into a business or side hustle
1. Pay for the truth
I would have built Delivrd wrong if I had trusted my own assumptions about what customers wanted.
Specifically, I asked things like what would actually make this the world’s best buying experience. What were the current pain points when buying a car? What did they consider a “good deal”? How long should it take? How much time would they put into it to make that happen? What would they pay for this themselves.
Paying 100 strangers $100 each to sit with an outside interviewer was the cheapest market research I could have done.
2. Put your worst number on the table first
The fee is my most uncomfortable number in an industry that hides everything. Saying ”$1,000, every time, never changes” in the first 30 seconds of every call killed my short-term conversion rate and built my long-term trust.
3. Tell people not to hire you
If you are actually good at something, you can afford to be honest about who does not need you. Half the people who call me do not need me, and I tell them. The other half become clients for life. The ones who feel talked into something were never going to refer you anyway.
4. Protect the experience, not the price
Everybody in my industry competes on how much they can save you. I stopped doing that in year one. What customers actually want back is their Saturday, their control, their sanity. Build around the experience they want, and the savings take care of themselves.
I pay myself about $186,000 a year, but I bank a full year of salary for every person I hire before I take anything for myself. If someone takes a risk on me, I want their risk covered first.
Delivrd is on pace for 400 to 700 deals a month by summer. I don’t know when this ends, but every deal is one more step toward an industry that does not need a company like mine to exist.
Tomislav Mikula is the founder and CEO of Delivrd. Published at CNBC on May 6. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. May not be reproduced without permission.
Questions
1. a) How did Tomislav Mikula begin his car buying business?
b) How many customers did he negotiate car deals for for free before his first paying client?
2. a) How much does Mr. Mikula charge customers to negotiate their car purchase for them?
b) How much does he save customers on their purchase?
3. a) What is a sales pitch?
b) How does Mr. Mikula's sales pitch differ from the usual?
4. What did Mr. Mikula do before starting to charge clients, besides doing a bunch of deals for free?
5. What is your reaction to Mr. Mikula's strategy for creating a new business? Explain your answer.