
Between Product and Partnerships
Building integrations and a SaaS ecosystem requires close collaboration between product, tech partnerships, and other GTM and technical teams. We're talking to product, partnership, and engineering leaders about how to build, support, and scale integrations and SaaS ecosystems that result in happier customers and more revenue. Watch or listen on YouTube and most podcast directories.
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Between Product and Partnerships
Empowering Consumers and Partners: The Product Principles Behind Carputty’s Platform Success
In this discussion, Cristina Flaschen, CEO of Pandium, interviews Archna Carlstone, Head of Product at Carputty, about building, scaling, and evolving SaaS platforms, with a focus on Carputty’s journey from an internal finance tool to a white-labeled SaaS product for partners and customers.
Carputty’s Origin and Product Evolution
- Carputty was founded in October 2020, with Carlstone as an early team member, focusing on building both consumer-facing and internal tools.
- The company’s flagship product, the Carputty Flexline, offers a line of credit for car purchases, underwriting consumers rather than vehicles, flipping the traditional dealership financing model.
- Initially, the platform was built to serve Carputty’s own finance operations, but as the product matured, the team recognized broader industry pain points and began offering the platform as a white-labeled SaaS solution for other businesses.
Transition to SaaS and White-Labeling
- The decision to transition into SaaS was driven by market demand and the flexibility of being a startup, allowing Carputty to move quickly and adapt the platform for external partners.
- Early challenges included abstracting out company-specific features to make the platform scalable and universal, such as removing Carputty-specific labels and building a more modular, customizable system.
- The team implemented an abstraction layer for integrations (e.g., different banking providers) and a global design system to balance customization with maintainability for partners.
Product Team Structure and Development Approach
- Carputty’s product and engineering teams operate in lean, cross-functional pods focused on core areas: consumer applications, transactions (asset management), and data.
- This structure supports focus, knowledge sharing, and agility as the company grows and adapts to new partner needs.
Integrations and Partnerships
- Integrations are central to Carputty’s strategy, with an API abstraction layer enabling flexibility in vendor selection and servicing partners.
- Carputty partners with various organizations, including banks and companies like Turo, offering tailored solutions based on partner requirements rather than a one-size-fits-all package.
Core Values and Customer Focus
- Carputty’s core values include being data-driven, tenacious, thinking big, empowerment, and transparency, with transparency being especially central.
- The company emphasizes transparency in financing, aiming to disrupt the traditional, opaque dealership model and empower consumers with clear information about rates and valuations.
Advice for Product Managers
- Carlstone advises product managers transitioning internal tools to external products to continually question scalability and universality, recognize and address internal biases, and be willing to push back on internal requests that do not align with long-term vision.
- She emphasizes the importance of admitting mistakes, iterating on architecture, and balancing speed with building a sustainable, scalable product.
Closing Thoughts
- The discussion highlights the complexities of evolving a fintech product into a SaaS platform, the importance of abstraction and modularity, and the ongoing trade-offs between customization and product stability.
- Carputty’s journey offers valuable lessons for teams considering a similar transition, particularly around organizational structure, integration strategy, and maintaining core values throughout growth.
For more insights on tech partnerships, integrations, and APIs, listeners are encouraged to visit Pandium’s blog and resources.
Welcome to Between Product and Partnerships, a podcast focused on bringing together product, partnership and engineering leaders to discuss how to build, support and scale SaaS ecosystems. This podcast is presented by Pandium, an integration platform for building native integrations.
SPEAKER_02:Hi, everyone. My name is Christina Flashen, and I'm the CEO here at Pandium. And thank you so much for listening to our podcast, Between Product and Partnerships. If you're joining us for the first time, we talk about the challenges and what it takes to build integrations, partnerships, and SaaS platforms more generally. We talk to great leaders in the space that are working on these problems. And today, we are so excited to have Archana Carlstone, who is the head of product at Carputty. Archana, can you give us a little bit of info about what you do at Carputty and maybe your journey to get there? Yeah, thanks
SPEAKER_01:for having me. So at Carparty, I am the head of product. So I manage our platform that we're building, both consumer facing as well as internal tools that we're building to support our consumers through their journey. My journey has looked like I've been part of Carparty since day one. So October of 2020 is when we officially kicked things off. So I've really seen everything grow from zero to where we are today, which has been amazing. I I've been in product for about 10 years now, really focused on the consumer side of things. So consumer journey is very important to me, making sure we're low friction, especially when it comes to financial applications. You want to make it as easy as possible for folks so they're not abandoning and they're feeling comfortable and secure with the information they're providing as well.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. Thank you for the background. I know we talked earlier a little bit about Carpuddy and your journey, so I'd love to just dive right in there. Can you tell us, since you've been there from the very beginning, a little bit about how your product has transitioned over the years? I feel like you guys have a little bit of a unique story from what you first built and who it was for to what you guys are doing today.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So I'll give a little bit of a 30-second elevator pitch on what Carputty does and then how we've evolved. So we started, our co-founders started chatting in the summer of 2020 and Patrick Bayless, who is our CEO, and then Josh Tatum, who is our CPO, come from two sides of this coin that are beneficial to us. So Patrick comes from 30 plus years of car dealership, owning car dealerships, understanding the ins and outs of what that looks like, how financing works within there. And then Joshua comes from a background of fintech. So he was at SoFi, a guaranteed rate. So really marrying the two there and understanding where pain points are on both sides of things. So we offer a differential loan product, which is where we started was to give transparency to customers through that differential loan product. So we call it our Car Putty Flex Line. You can think of it almost like a line of credit or really a parent note on what your buying power is. And we underwrite that based on you as a consumer and not the vehicle. So today's world, you go to a dealership, you pick a car, and then you figure out how to pay for that car. We're flipping that around a little bit where you know how much you can afford. You have this buying power in place that we've decision based off of traditional credit information, but as well as cash flow underwriting. and your ability and willingness to repay. And then you go out and find a vehicle. We're still doing loan to value. So you're not spending$50,000 on a 2022 Prius, but you're able to really have that knowledge and your rate is set in stone. So you know what your rate's going to be. You know what your monthly payment's going to be. And you can worry about negotiating the rest of these things. So we've built the platform that supports all of that from end to end on the consumer journey. And so- Our focus in the beginning was how do we get folks in the door, process the application, allow them to transact on their vehicles. And that's now evolved into... Us being able to white label this for other folks who are interested who can't build all of this from scratch and transitioning into this idea where I say Carpuddy is customer. Carpuddy, the finance company, is customer number one of Carpuddy, the tech company.
SPEAKER_02:And how did you guys decide to
SPEAKER_01:do that?
SPEAKER_02:Like to take the thing that you had built and now try to use that as a SaaS product?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, I really think it's from just conversations that we've had over the last five years and understanding where folks' pain points are on a broader business scale. One of the things that we can do being a startup is we can move very quickly. We're very agile. That allows us to build things a lot quicker, test things a lot quicker, where some bigger banks might not have that opportunity, but are still looking for something differential there in the way that they're underwriting, processing, and granting access to funds for vehicles or just any asset, really. I
SPEAKER_02:guess if you guys are competing against more or less large banks, that's a totally different type of product management. But when in your journey did you guys decide to to sort of transition into offering this as a SaaS product too. I'm curious, like just how old the company was.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So I would say that there was always a longer term vision from Patrick and Joshua of where does this fit in largely? right and how how does this benefit consumers not just car putty consumers but any consumer from having this and so it's always been in the back of our mind and then we were able to get that traction with car putty as a finance company to see how people are using the product and to see what the outcomes were and then that traction gave us really a launch launching point to then say okay it's usable It's making money, it's doing things. And so now we can package that up and give it out to other folks. Got it.
SPEAKER_02:I guess like what were some of the, or were there any points of friction when you guys were making that transition from like selling or offering like a service directly to an end user to offering a product that would then offer that service to the end user?
SPEAKER_01:I think when we were figuring out the process flows in the beginning, there were maybe some we'll call it bespoke changes or things that we did that we implemented within the product or the platform in which our operators are working in that are specific to CarBuddy. For instance, a specific vendor as simple as a label on a form field, having a vendor's name in it, whereas it should be more global and universal and be able to plug in any vendor within there. So those were a lot of the steps that we started to take early on. And as our product function began to build more, iterate more, that's something that's always in the back of our mind is, is this specific to CarPuddy or is this universal? Is this something that we need to do to scale? How scalable is it in this version? And how can we abstract that out a little bit more.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think that's definitely a challenge when you're building like a platform, so to speak. It's figuring out, especially I would imagine if you're your own first user, right? It's like, we had a really good idea. We like using it this way. But how much of that, to your point, is universal? And how much of that do you want to enforce and like make it universal right like how much conviction do you have about the way that that product is built so that you're like hey maybe everyone isn't doing it this way today but like we think that they should so we're gonna yeah yeah i wonder what you what you described about like the labeling of you know specific fields and stuff like that is like obviously a sort of cosmetic but actually really important when you're when you're doing like a white labeled product changes is something that can really like erode trust with those users like if you're saying it's something that they can reuse as their own they really want Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And that has been part of our pivot too, is building an abstraction layer. So even if we look at different vendors, right? So if we have a B2B partner that, for instance, we use Plaid as our open banking and they want to use a different open banking source or in a country that uses a different open banking source, we've built an abstraction layer where we know the data we're looking for within that for our underwriting. And it doesn't matter who the end source is, as long as we know we can assign these data points to there. So that's one way we did create some boundaries right even UI for instance so we implemented a global design system that had X number of variables. And those are the variables that you can change as a white-label partner, unless you want to give us more money, of course. And then we can discuss. But we try to stick to that, right? And we're looking, as we iterate and build more, again, just incorporating more of those global components that then can be switched out. And in the same with our application flow, even, we built that purposefully very componentized so we can pull out screens, pull out form fields, add form fields, add screens just so what our partners are looking for or need or what their specific consumers might be able to give us.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, there's this interesting trade-off, right? Especially when you're thinking about like front ends between customization and stability is not the right word, but if you make everything 100% bespoke, it can get quite brittle. Like, you know, how much do you want to offer while still being able to maintain that it's a product and not like a headless solution? It's always like tough, right? And depending on the type of product that you guys have or that we have or that anyone has, like people have more or less stronger opinions about branding and theming. It's something that I've definitely seen challenges with over the years. I've worked at a couple places that white label stuff and it's always like, do we just open it up to do custom HTML and CSS and you could do whatever you want, but then you might do whatever you want for you from a product perspective. It's like, how do you ensure that that's always going to be fine when you guys are building and releasing new stuff? How do you guys structure your product team? Do you have separate teams for... the different kind of like user types? Or again, this is me being curious, like when you guys are looking at different
SPEAKER_01:type of buyer. We run very lean. So right now, and we've pivoted a couple of times, just how we've structured product and engineering. Right now we're working in pods and one's kind of focused on the front end of that consumer flow. So our applications and what it means to have your flex line originate that. And then our transactions team, which is supporting the asset piece of it. So vehicles, valuing vehicles, building out that, So, and then as well as a data team to support all of those data points that flow through it all, whether it be internally, we want to do things with that data or from like a capital market perspective, making sure they're getting what they're needing from a loan sale perspective. We've split it that way for now. As we grow, I think it's going to shift or we're going to add new pods to it. Right now, again, we're running lean, so these pods are covering a lot. But I think that the pod system has worked well for us because there's still a lot of growth. cross-collaboration within those and still a lot of knowledge sharing, but allows for more focus. And so we can, the more we can focus, the more stuff we can get
SPEAKER_02:out. And yeah, again, that was just like a selfish question for me. I'm always curious. And you know, I got to ask about my favorite thing, integrations. So I know you mentioned, not Stripe, but you'd mentioned some payment providers, Plaid, sorry, banking providers. I'm curious what other kinds of integrations you guys have either done, what challenges, or maybe I should say, what how those integrations and partnerships maybe have changed as you guys have evolved to your ICPs and the product that you're building and yeah, any words of wisdom on the integration front. That's what a lot of our folks are interested in here within the audience.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think we've, you know, on day one, we had to figure out who we're going to use for what. And so we, there's this, I remember this huge spreadsheet of just like the compare pricing was obviously a big thing in early days, but going back to what I mentioned before with that abstraction layer, that's been really imperative because it almost doesn't matter what vendor we're using. For instance, from a servicing perspective, if we have a partner that they want to service those loans, our servicing layer just grabs the right pieces of information that they need and can pass it off. So we've kind of built an API layer that we're ingesting ourselves, but also we can push and pull through those APIs where needed. So that's been our approach to create a little bit more of that universal aspect and be able to utilize any vendor that might be needed or switch vendors if we need to without disrupting what we've built.
SPEAKER_02:Do you guys have like a partnership concept within your organization? Like do you guys partner with, I don't know what would be relevant again, like maybe banking partners or something like that? Or is the product more like a standalone because you guys do all of that stuff?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a little of everything, right? We've got banking partners. We've got partnerships with Turo is a big partner of ours so offering flex lines to Turo hosts who have more than one vehicle can have one monthly payment for these vehicles totally ideal we're kind of because again of the flexibility and agility we can offer partnerships of different levels based on the needs and so I think that's where we really excelled is that flexibility has allowed us we're not honed in yet of like this is what our package looks like every time there's just individual pieces of the package depending on the partner and I think that's helped us to get more partnerships and kind of move those along quicker because we're not untangling everything. It's not a one size fits all.
SPEAKER_02:Sounds like you have a complex landscape to navigate as the person running the product org. I'm sure you have your hands full. Changing directions a little bit. I'm curious from an organization perspective at Car Putty, I know that you guys have some really strong core values and I'm sure those feed into every part of the org, how you guys think about your customers and then also how you are building this product. Can you tell us a little bit more about the values of the business and how you see those translate down into a product management?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So we have a handful of core values. being data-driven, being tenacious, thinking big, empowerment, and transparency. And all of those have two definitions, which is internally how we approach that and externally. Transparency is our big one because that's a lot of the reason the company was founded is offering that transparency to consumers about what their rate is. And I think you're also seeing a pivot on that just across the landscape of automotive, right? And there's maybe been some historical like black box in a room somewhere. And so more and more dealerships and OEMs, they're bringing that forward. So transparency within that and bringing that has also then we ask those questions when we're building something or making a decision or even having a partner conversation if they want to do something a specific way is, is this still giving transparency to the consumer? Are we still living that value or are we turning away from our value just to kind of get somebody in the door. So I think it's a question that we constantly ask ourselves. And I think it's an important one because just, again, from a total landscape of automotive and finance, I think that because it's lacked it so much and if we're living it, I think it really just puts us that much further ahead. of what we're doing and how it's differential.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I'm wondering if you guys get pushback about that, maybe not from internal folks. And I'm sure consumers love it, but more generally out in the larger market, I feel like there is, especially around pricing and financing, there's a little bit of that nebulous nature. I haven't bought a car in a really long time. I live in New York. I don't own a car, but I did buy one at one point at a dealership. And I remember when we were talking about financing, there didn't seem to be any rules. It was like, well, now it's this number. And I'm like, well, I don't want to pay that. Now it's this number. Well, what do you want to pay? I'm like, how does that work that I get to pick? And it just seemed like, to your point, we're running into a back room and now we're coming out with a completely different number. But it must have evolved like that for a reason, right? So I'm wondering if you guys, I don't know, maybe pushback's not the right word, but if you guys get feedback about kind of disrupting that model.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Early on we did, but I think one of the benefits of the Flex line, and if you think about it from a dealership perspective, is that we create this customer stickiness because they have this financing available. They don't have to apply every time. It's really just about the transaction and the vehicle piece. And so even from a dealership perspective, their cost of acquisition goes down because they're not having to figure out financing for this person again and track them down. You made it easy for them to transact on this vehicle. And so now You know, nobody is like, oh, I love my Chase loan, right? But we want to say, I love my Flex Line because it makes it easier to do the fun part of buying a car. So we've really seen a lot of partnership with dealerships rather than us being the enemy or them being the enemy. It's really about what's best for the consumer. And I think more and more we see that across any industry is how do we empower a consumer in what's best for them? The other piece of our product that we offer, It's called our V3 valuation tool, which stands for past, present, and future. And so we take thousands of data points to create what a vehicle valuation might look like. And so on your dashboard, you can always see what your loan looks like versus the valuation of that vehicle. Should I be selling it in the next two months because it's going to take a cliff? It's not a linear thing. There's peaks and valleys. And so empowering our customers to know what those peaks and valleys are Also, from a dealership perspective, if you know what those peaks and valleys are, you're able to target those folks more distinctly and more deliberately within that.
SPEAKER_02:I wonder, too, like if and maybe this has to do with kind of generational shifts, like if there's a cohort of folks, like especially dealership folks, that getting them to do something in a new way might help. there might be a little bit of resistance. And I think about like legacy systems generally, right? Like there's always, or not always, but there can be some, a transition period for folks to be thinking about these things in a different way. But to your point, you know, I think these people want to get these deals done. And younger folks, even myself, I don't want to talk to people if I don't have to. I'd rather self-serve. You're going to buy it online. You want to do it. I mean, really. I want to buy everything online. I don't want to ever speak to a human ever again, other than you, of course. But you know what I mean. It's an interesting time where the consumer landscape is both people of a generation, potentially, that don't want to talk to humans, and also still hugely Yeah. Yeah. Because mortgages are also another, obviously another-
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I was in mortgages previously. Were you? The complexity there. And I think too, I was surprised by, obviously we've done a lot of customer research, understanding, and in the online piece, especially again, October 2020, COVID coming ahead of that, right? I think it was pivotal for us. But our demographic currently tends to lean a little bit more into the 40s and 50s. which I think was a little surprising, right? Because you think of it as like a younger generational thing to be online, to want to do these things online. But the ease piece of it, I think is really key. And again, focusing on that fun part of what vehicle do I want to get? You know, what am I looking to do in that way? So I think there's certainly a balance there because for me, at least, I still want to see the car I want to buy. Maybe I don't want to talk to somebody there, but I don't want to touch it, feel it. drive it maybe a little bit. Um, and so I think there's, there's a marrying of the two.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, I, I agree. Same thing with like a house. Like, I don't think that I would do like a virtual house. Well, maybe, but I mean in New York, like I live in New York city and there are definitely people that do virtual like apartment tours and put down deposits, not to buy usually to rent, but I'm like, even that to me feels weird, but I don't know. I think COVID obviously expedited that stuff too, because you couldn't necessarily go to a dealership. You couldn't go look at something in person. It's just such an interesting transition over not that long of a period of time, right? I agree. Yeah. Like when I was back in my day, when I got my first bank account, I had paper checks. Like we didn't have online banking. I remember when like I was able to check my balance online for the first time and being like, oh my God. And that was not that long ago. I'm not that old. So thinking about different ways to do some of these milestone like things, like you guys are describing, like buying a car is a big deal. It's a big investment. And being able to make that stuff faster, more efficient is really exciting. And to your point, I don't think I would have thought that the 40s, 40 and 50 year old kind of demo was the ones that would have been adopting this quickly. Maybe they buy more cars. I don't know. You guys probably, you guys
SPEAKER_01:probably
SPEAKER_02:know.
SPEAKER_01:From going back to like carpet is a finance company, we entered into the prime and super prime market just because the risk, right? And like us being that first customer. So that's maybe why it leans towards that way. But I really think that even across the board, as we open that up based on partnerships, the adoption process. I think is very strong. And we see a lot of positive intent. We see a lot of high intent. Even from an application funnel perspective, our drop-offs are not terrible. It surprised me, especially coming from mortgage. Yeah, because I feel like everyone's got lots of- There's just a really high intent, which I think goes to show that the product and the loan product is appealing to folks in what they're getting. I
SPEAKER_02:imagine in mortgages, it's like it drops off really fast because people want to get pre-approved. And like then, yeah, to your point, you get to like the hard inquiry and it's like, nope, I'm going to bail on this. Yeah. Cool. Well, I think we're coming up on time, but I did want to ask one more question for our listeners. I'm curious if you have any advice for product managers that are going to be, or the org is toying with doing what you guys did, which is taking a product that's like nominally an internal tool and then showing it to the outside world. Like what, maybe if you guys had any kind of points of friction or if there was anything that you learned, I'm sure folks here would love to hear.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, I really think that just approaching it with those questions always in mind. Everything that you're building is, is this scalable? And is this, can we make this universal? And being able to answer those questions and understand if you have bias. So I think like you have to address your own bias, right? And I think if you're using the tool, there is a little bit of bias there in terms of how you want to build it or what you want it to look like. But really taking that step back to really ask those questions every single time you're building something or putting something together of, Is this going to fit into the long term? Which we're looking for things that go into our vision, right? As product folks, we're trying to build out into the future. But I think if you're intentional about asking yourself that, you might surprise yourself with actually the answer is no. And going back to then those internal customers to say, I think that's the is how you push back on those internal customers that we're not going to do it exactly this way, but we're going to do it this way because this is what it can do for us in the future or for future partners. And everyone's really accepting of that and understands it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I bet that... I bet that is some like interesting conversations when you're, you know, with you as a person who works at Carpetti maybe or used to be able to say, hey, we actually need this XYZ thing to like make this work. And now, you know, you're coming up and being like, actually, can we talk about what exactly you're trying to do? Yeah. Yeah, I think the point of taking a step back and looking at your own bias and trying to put, at least for myself, put the emotion aside of the product that you've built and try to look at it in an objective way to be like, okay, is this actually the best way that we could have done this or the best way to do it? Or is it just the way that I think is coolest or is the easiest or something like that? Building scalable stuff is really challenging, especially for multiple different users. It's like this constant battle between fast and and bulletproof, right? And I think at a startup, you never hit both or very rarely do you hit both, but there's always trade-offs, right? Like, are you going to take a little bit longer? Do you need to get it up the door immediately? Like, where does this thing go in the future? It sounds like you've had some experience with that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I think too, right, is we're really good at A, admitting we were wrong, saying we went down this path, we were building it this way, probably wasn't best. So how do we pivot? What changes do we make? And also really from an engineering perspective, looking at things on a regular basis, on an architectural basis, did we do this the right way? And how would we do it if we started over again? We're having a little bit of those conversations of if it was day one again, what would we have done differently? And incorporating bits and pieces, we can't shut down and do it all over, right? But I think if we incorporate bits and pieces of that, we lessen that tech debt a little bit. We're being more forward-thinking and we're giving ourselves that space versus, hey, everything is a total hot mess and now we can't onboard new customers because it's like this. Like, we don't want to get to that point.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, that's like the constant trade-off of like an early PM at a company, right? Is like trying to make sure that you don't get to that point, but also dealing with like the competing priorities. And I'm sure for you, doing it again with like multiple different products, right? Like it's the same product, but a lot of different users and use cases. So like I would call it all that kind of different products, right? For sure. I know so little about your space. Same with like mortgages. I bet there's so much nuance that I could learn. I'm totally going to, I'm going to go troll y'all say I'm not, buying a car, but I will go spend a little more time on it with you in mind. And for our audience, thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a great chat. Thank you for spending some time with us. And if you're interested in more information about product, partnerships, integrations, all the things, you can check out pandium.com, have a look at our blog and listen to some of our other episodes. Thanks again for spending a little bit of time with us here. And I look forward to seeing you out there. Thank you, Christina. Thanks so much.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed our content, subscribe to our channel and give us a thumbs up. For more content on tech partnerships, integrations, and APIs, check out our articles, eBooks, and other resources in the description or visit Pandium's website.