From Caravan to 40% of Online Parts: How Partly Built a $1.9T Opportunity

When most people think automotive parts, they see a niche problem. Levi Fawcett saw a $1.9 trillion global opportunity hiding in plain sight.

The CEO of Partly built his startup from a caravan in New Zealand, came within 10% of shutting down during COVID, and now powers 40% of all parts orders done online today. His company has attracted investment from Dylan Field (Figma) and Akshay Kothari (Notion) – investors who typically back world-changing software companies.

In this interview, Fawcett reveals how he pivoted from a failing marketplace to discovering one of the internet's most overlooked problems, why competing against marketplaces is "fundamentally a terrible idea," and the brutal honesty required to build something that actually matters.

Levi Fawcett: Yeah, so I'm Levi Fawcett and I'm the CEO of Partly. Partly solving one problem, and that is we need to make it really easy for buyers to find the right parts online. Partly have grown incredibly quickly over the last 3 years. Our customers power around 40% of all parts orders done online today. We've taken investment from some really incredible people. Dylan Field from Figma, Akshay from Notion. These are all people that have actually helped us really just understand what great looks like, what exceptional looks like.

New Zealand is a relatively small country, population of just 5 million people. As a culture we have a term called number 8 wire mentality that essentially means New Zealanders are very good at just figuring out how to solve problems. They'll just find ways to get things done with very little.

Levi Fawcett: I had a very unusual upbringing. I was homeschooled most of my life. From very young, 5 or 6, I was fixing things. I fixed cars, tractors, motorbikes. I loved solving hard problems. I loved understanding exactly how things worked. I would break things down and really think things through from first principles, and that was just how I learned.

Levi and myself have known each other for a very, very long time. I think probably around 5 or 6 years old. We were both homeschooled in a rural community. My family moved overseas, we moved to Indonesia. I lived there for the majority of my teenage years from around 13 to 18 years old.

When you experience a different culture, you experience a different country, society, the way of doing things is totally different. And all of a sudden you see problems and you see opportunities everywhere around you. And so that's true when going into the culture, but also when you come back to your home country. And that was what was really motivational to me was that there seemed like there was so much obvious problems to solve.

Levi Fawcett: When we first co-founded that original company, we'd always be talking about different business ideas, different solutions to different problems. I'd experienced living in China and experiencing how advanced the e-commerce landscape, how integrated technology was with society and people's day to day life. Coming back or having that experience of where New Zealand was at in that landscape, it felt like a step 10 years back into the past. So it was sort of a glaringly obvious problem that someone needed to solve.

At the time, Levi had actually constructed a caravan. I had renovated the garage and I've been living in there, and then Levi parked his caravan in the driveway, and so we had this makeshift, very odd group of people all living in this one property. And that's kind of comes down to what we call a New Zealand number 8 wire mentality.

It was not a good office at all. Every day, we would fold up the bed. We would take out all of the different bits and pieces from inside. We would carry in desks into the caravan and then work around 12 hours coding away, writing away. We did that for 6 months, just nonstop altogether in this one space. And that was the environment of the melting pot of ingenuity, innovation and entrepreneurship that the business was birthed out of.

Levi Fawcett: Allgoods was designed to help SMBs, help small to medium businesses sell online. We built quite a good business around it. Grown to just over 1000 business customers, 400,000 monthly users on the platform, but it was extremely low margin. It was clear that the business was never gonna be wildly successful. We kind of ended up competing with a local marketplace. Competing with marketplaces is fundamentally a terrible idea. Marketplaces have these deep network effects and so it just doesn't make sense to compete.

It was a long journey, we built this company from nothing. Just a few guys coding away or writing away inside this dark caravan. It was a great sort of deep dive into how do you get your first customers? How do you do any marketing. It was just a wild experience for a young group of 20 year olds to have this taste of wow, we could actually do something impactful in the world.

Levi Fawcett: On top of that, there were all of these kind of weird dynamics. About 20% of our customers sold parts online. So they were always telling us, hey, can you make it easier? Every other category, most orders were coming from within New Zealand. Parts, 85% were coming from outside of New Zealand. And so the more we looked into this and the more we tied this back to my previous experience building things, it became a lot more clear, real global problem wasn't helping small to medium businesses.

We thought about it for a long time. We didn't change the business for about 2 months because Allgoods wasn't failing. It was just not wildly successful, right? And we felt like every week we would be doing something that was gonna bring us to the next level or cross the line. It took us 2 weeks before we finally said, look, we're gonna shut down Allgoods.

Levi Fawcett: From day one, we exist in New Zealand, but we're not a New Zealand-focused company. A lot of people, when they think of automotive, when they think of parts, they think, oh wow, that's a niche problem. But I think having a second thought about that, they realize this is an industry where everyone in their lifetime is buying parts multiple times. The latest numbers that we have on this is there's around about $1.9 trillion spent on parts.

When I go and look for parts, I go door handle for my 2015 Toyota. There's actually 300 different variants of Toyota Corolla. Each one of those cars has a different door handle. The core thesis there was because there are so many parts and they fit so many different vehicles, because the data is so complicated, as a buyer, I want to put in my exact vehicle, and then I want to see all of the exact parts that fit. That's incredibly difficult problem. It's painful for me as a buyer, but the question was, can it actually be solved technically at scale?

Levi Fawcett: The way we went about proving that was talking to customers. We talked and have continued to talk to hundreds of customers all the time. It's not statistical, it's a bit more anecdotal, but really understanding the business helps a lot. The second thing we did was go talk to buyers, where they were, how they thought, the types of problems they faced. And so I think that's what we did, we tried to really understand based on these conversations and based on information we could find on forums and other.

Levi Fawcett: One of the most challenging things I think we've faced, for us, we came extremely close to running out of money. This was during COVID actually. Those times were particularly hard because the enormity of the problem just felt overwhelming. I think at the time we thought maybe there's like a 10% chance of solving it. That period was one of the hardest. The problem just looked so large and overwhelming that it didn't seem possible for a few people to solve it. It just seemed like there was no path forward.

What was really difficult was not so much the lack of money or worried about running out of money. It was more the pressure to turn what we've been spending the past 3 years on to turn what we've been building, the relationships with customers that we'd formed over all of that time, trying to turn that into something bigger. For me, I'd been living without a salary for 3 years at that point. I think we're all very ambitious. I think we wanted to do something very impactful with our lives. It was a moment of taking a step back and really having to think, OK, what are we gonna have to do here? What are we gonna have to do to really achieve our ambitions, to really make the impact on the world that we want to make.

Levi Fawcett: We worked ridiculously hard, 7 days a week, 16 hours a day, and we just solved each problem as it came. There was no alternative, right? The alternative was to stop and then we probably never would solve the problem. We would have found those natural optimization. So I think it was just that, just worked incredibly hard, didn't give up and get it in front of customers well before it was ready.

I think one of the biggest aha moments, actually I think it was probably when we launched with eBay Australia. They were one of our earliest marketplace customers. Within a few months of launching with them, we could see we were increasing their conversion rates enormously. That was really the aha moment for us because suddenly that was clear the value we're providing, and it was clear that it made a much better buyer experience, which was our number one goal.

Levi Fawcett: So I guess earlier on in the Partly story, we're working with smaller businesses and we discovered that the problem was far more fundamental. It was a case of asking why 5 times to actually get to the root cause. So it really was this layer and layer until we finally reached this fundamental problem.

I think the biggest lesson I've learned is who you spend time with and who, what people you surround yourself with. The people you spend time with are the people that you become more like and I think that that's proven to be incredibly true. Those are the people that influence each other. So that's probably been the biggest reinforcement of a lesson that I think many people have been taught since they were a child.

Levi Fawcett: I would say the number one most important thing is actually to never give up. The thing that separates successful founders or successful companies, I really do think is just never giving up. The second most important thing is to be brutally honest about the business. Are you really solving a painful customer problem. Make sure that your business can actually make sense and be really honest about it, right? If your plan is to start a company and it'll be free until you figure out how to make money, that is a terrible plan.

Finally, to tie all that together in terms of pivoting, I would say you can very clearly see that those fundamentals are not strong. Still don't give up, but be very willing to really fundamentally shift the focus of the business and don't be afraid to solve the global problem.

Levi Fawcett: People who had built clearly successful world-class businesses invested in partly. Dylan Field from Figma, Akshay from Notion. These are all people that have actually helped us along our journey. I say that's a lesson learned because this is something that Dylan told me, that everyone has told me, don't sacrifice for the quality of the team. It's much better to take a long time to hire than it is to hire someone who lowers the bar of the team overall. And a great team with a very, very clear mission is pretty hard to beat.

Levi Fawcett: Now is when I feel the momentum is as fast as it's ever been. I think that the speed of growth has only ever gotten faster, so with every day, for me, it feels like we've gained more momentum. To me, I don't care much, to be honest. It's a great title, fastest growing, but the reality is it all comes down to how we execute. None of this will matter in 5 years, right? What will matter in 5 years is have we built solid business foundations.

Today we have an office in London, we're powering eBay, planning to scale, we will be spending a lot more of our time in Europe. The structure of the business already lets us scale fairly well.

Levi Fawcett: I don't think every entrepreneur needs to be solving a global problem. However, in my experience, solving the big hairy audacious problem is almost the same level of difficulty as a small localized problem. If I'm going to put all of my energy, all of my effort, all of my thought and time into solving a problem, I'm gonna put that into the big global problem as opposed to a localized problem.

Levi Fawcett: The dream for Partly would be to achieve 3 things. Number one, it would be create value. This is not zero-sum. This is to create value for everyone. To make things considerably easy for everyone in the industry. Number 2, a valuable business, right? Create commercial value for everyone in the business. And then number 3, it would be to do a lot of good generally. As a company we're extremely focused on impact and so we'll use that in ways that drives the most impact. But yeah, I think that would be the dream in the long run, doing those 3 things.