Doug DeMuro: How A YouTube Car Reviewer Sold His Company For $40M

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
How does it feel to be wealthy now? After grinding after this for so long.

**Doug DeMuro** (0:04)
It's better than before. It is definitely nice.

**Sam Parr** (0:18)
Doug, I wanna give you an intro because I've been a fan of yours forever.
And I, in 2019 or 2020, when our podcast was much smaller, I told Shawn about you. I go, this guy, Doug, is very fascinating. I think he should launch some type of car website. I'm not sure. Then you did. And then we talked about it. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure this is gonna be huge.
And so I wanna take a little bit, I wanna take like 1%, you know, I helped you succeed. I get a little bit of credit because I picked you. You're my horse that I bet on.

**Doug DeMuro** (0:48)
There's something real, I'm sure we'll discuss this, but there's something real about that. I tell all my friends now in this space, you need to start businesses. This will not last forever. You need to start businesses.
And I think smart people who learn the business world kind of realize that.

**Sam Parr** (1:01)
And you are my guy. And so for the audience who don't know, so Doug DeMuro has a, it started as a, you're just a YouTuber, I guess. I mean, you were originally a journalist for a bunch of different websites where you would write these funny, quirky blogs. Then you parlayed that into a YouTube channel that I think now has like 4 million subscribers. But the reason why you're huge and lovable is for a few different reasons. One, you dress really funny.
So you'll wear khaki shorts from the early 2000s with a red polo shirt. And then your white undershirt will be longer than the sleeves of your polo shirt. So it's like hanging out with those sleeves. And you just dress horribly, even though your videos each get 2 or 3 million views.
You're on Jay Leno's pod, or you're on Jay Leno's YouTube a few days ago, and you're wearing Sakoni running shoes. I'm like, what are you doing, dude?

**Doug DeMuro** (1:56)
Well, Jay is not like Jay's dressing up, you know? So I feel like there's not a high bar there.

**Sam Parr** (2:02)
Anyway, you're just like, you're very likable because of the way you dress. You're very funny. You're very quirky, because that's one of your things is you talk about the quirks of cars. You're very quirky. You're very relatable.
And so you've grown this YouTube channel to like 4 million subscribers. You launched this company called Cars and Bids, which is like almost like eBay, but for different types of cars, cars enthusiasts. So cars from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. And then recently you sold the majority of the business to Churning Group for around $40 million, I believe, when it was only like two or three years old. And I've bought cars from the website. So anyway, I'm a big fan.

**Doug DeMuro** (2:35)
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you for having me on.

**Shaan Puri** (2:38)
I just listened to, so I just bought a car a couple of months ago, for three or three, four months ago. And it was your YouTube video that put me over the edge. So I bought a Cadillac, I bought an Escalade and I was looking for a review. Your review has 1.7 million views. I was like, okay, this gotta be the best one.
Like Sam said, I was surprised because I'm not a car guy at all.
And also I had never seen your stuff. I had only heard Sam talk about you on the podcast. So I actually didn't put two and two together that, oh, that's the same guy that Sam's been talking about until I watched the video. And I was like, I don't know why I trust this guy. What's the key to being the sort of likable, trustworthy guy? Is that just who you are? Did you play anything up in your YouTube videos? Is there any strategy here or is it all just, that's just who you were?

**Doug DeMuro** (3:28)
No, that's a good question. And the answer is there is remarkably little strategy.
I just, in fact, if you go and watch the videos from before I had a lot of subscribers, they're pretty much the same. So it's not like I knew what the hell I was doing when I had 200,000 subscribers. It's not like I knew where this was gonna go.
But I really think, I think one of the reasons though that I kind of did it this way is that a lot of people come to me and they're like, I'm gonna make the best car videos with 4K drones and high quality sound and music and all this stuff. And I just wanted to like kind of show people like, you actually can do this. As long as the content is good, you can just do this. Like you can just do it in your garage.