Reconditioning pipeline board for used car dealers

The idea

Every day a used car sits in recon instead of on the frontline costs the dealer roughly 40 to 85 dollars in depreciation and floor-plan interest, and dealers can quote that number from memory because it hurts. Yet at most independent lots, ‘where is the white Silverado’ is answered by phoning the detailer. Rapid Recon proved the category and charges 500-plus a month, which is absurd for a 30-car independent lot.

The wedge is a kanban board where every column move is timestamped and every vendor gets an automatic SMS. The holding-cost counter on the dashboard converts the board from a tracking tool into a scoreboard the owner checks daily, and the bottleneck metric tells them which vendor to lean on.

Who pays

The dealer principal at an independent lot turning 15 to 60 cars a month pays 99 dollars, one fifth of Rapid Recon, recovered by shaving a single day off average recon time across a month’s inventory. Dealers cluster in reachable places: state independent dealer associations (NIADA chapters), dealer Facebook groups, and auction-house relationships. The vendor SMS flow needs no vendor accounts, which removes the adoption blocker that kills heavier tools.

MVP scope

• VIN-decoded vehicle cards on a customisable kanban board
• Timestamped step history per vehicle with per-step durations
• Vendor SMS on column entry and DONE-reply handling
• Dashboard: average days-to-frontline, bottleneck step, holding cost estimate
• Skip for v1: DMS integrations, work-order costing and parts, photo hosting for listings, multi-rooftop reporting

Build FrontlineFast, a reconditioning pipeline board for independent used car dealers. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (auth and Postgres), Twilio for SMS, a free VIN decode API (NHTSA vPIC) for vehicle data.

Core flow: when a car is acquired, the dealer enters the VIN (decode year/make/model/trim automatically via NHTSA vPIC) plus purchase date and target retail date. The car becomes a card on a kanban board whose columns are the dealer's own recon steps, defaulting to: inspection, mechanical, body/paint, detail, photos, frontline. Cards drag between columns; every move stamps a timestamp, so each car accumulates a per-step duration history. Each column can have an assigned vendor (the mechanic shop, the detailer) with a mobile number; moving a car into their column fires an SMS via Twilio ('2018 CR-V, stock 4412, arriving for mechanical') and the vendor can reply DONE to a Twilio webhook to flag the car ready for pickup, which highlights the card.

The dashboard shows the numbers dealers actually feel: average days-to-frontline over the trailing 30 days, current cars in recon with per-car day counts, the bottleneck step (highest average duration), and estimated holding cost (days in recon times a per-day figure the dealer sets, default 60 dollars).

Pages: /board, /dashboard, /vehicles/[id] (timeline, notes, photos), /vendors, /settings (steps, holding cost). Magic-link auth, up to 5 users per rooftop.

Pricing: 99 dollars/month per rooftop. 30-day trial.