Manchester’s Regit is on a mission to simplify how people buy, sell and maintain their cars – and it’s all done through a vehicle registration number. After entering one into the company’s website, motorists are granted access to their very own, free-to-use, ‘digital garage’ where they’re issued reminders – such as when their MOT or tax are due.

A Northern Stars finalist in 2017, the data-driven company started out as Motoring.co.uk, a new and used car portal, in 2008. It’s now launched a funding round on Crowdcube, where it’s raising money to boost its marketing operations and spread the word in a bid to encourage even more motorists to ‘Regit’ on a regular basis.

In addition to making consumers’ lives easier, Regit aims to be the glue between manufacturers, dealers and other providers and fix what it calls a “fragmented market”.
We spoke to CEO Terry Hogan to find out more about the raise.

Why are you raising on Crowdcube?

Terry Hogan: It’s about acquiring more users while telling the story of Regit. Our customers love the convenience we offer – they pop their reg in and our platform brings everything to them – they don’t have to go to 20 different websites as they can do everything in one. However, we’ve not done a good enough job so far of telling people why they should “Regit” and what they can do as users.

We’re improving messaging all the time and being clear in what we do, but I still think that we could better explain to customers what they can do today, never mind all the new things we’re working on. We have a platform with 1.4m users, and the plan is to get to 6m and make ourselves more famous while getting more revenue and clients. We’d also like to spend a bit more money to employ more of a direct relationship with manufacturing clients than we do currently.

Regit’s campaign on Crowdcube

How will you tap into your existing user base for investment?

We’re hoping that we can leverage our large community of users and that the ones who like what we do will invest, understand that it’s valuable to people, and help push it out going forward.

What do your users say about you?

When we were called Motoring.co.uk, we knew at the time that the name was a bit generic and didn’t really say what we did, or what our value proposition was. It’s much clearer for people with Regit, a name that was spearheaded by Sir John Hegarty, the man behind Levi’s campaigns and Audi’s “Vorsprung Durch Technik”. ‘Just Regit’ kind of trips off the tongue and as John Hegarty would say, ‘we’ve made the action the verb’.

What’s on the horizon for Regit after the raise?

In simple terms, by the time we get to the next three-year period, we’re going to have half of the UK motorists addressable by us. That could be direct registration – so they’re signed up to the site – or having access to a footprint like a cookie, or something that we can market that user in a GDPR-compliant way.

What’s it like being a digital company in Manchester?

There are some good and bad things. Getting team members is easier as people are more accessible but we have to maintain a great environment to keep our team engaged as the competition is fierce.