The Term Sheet That Died in Lockdown — and the Pivot That Saved the Company Anyway

Eden Shirley had a term sheet on the table, signed and ready to close, when international borders shut in March 2020. "We ran into the airports being locked down," he says. "We never realised that investment." The deal didn't stall — it simply stopped existing.

What kept the company alive wasn't luck. "We were already pretty close to breakeven," he says. "If we weren't close to breakeven, we would have been dead."

The Booking.com of car servicing

Shirley built AutoGuru out of an advertising agency, bootstrapping it before raising a first seed round in 2015 and eventually more than $10 million. The pitch was simple: a marketplace for booking car servicing and repairs, the category equivalent of Booking.com. It grew into Australia's leading automotive marketplace, pulling more than four million site visits a year and outpacing rivals like Hipages, Airtasker and Oneflare in its category.

Then COVID hit, and the marketplace's whole premise — people driving, and therefore needing their cars serviced — stopped applying. "They're worried about their finances," Shirley says of consumers in early lockdown, "so they'll buy food and alcohol and lipstick, but they will kick the car service down the road." Bookings collapsed. The company scrambled together a 300-strong mobile mechanic network just to keep the business moving while people avoided workshops entirely.

Disrupting the thing that already worked

The advice every founder gets, Shirley says, is to stay laser-focused: refine the model you have until it works, rather than chase something adjacent. He argues the opposite is sometimes the only way through. "The biggest challenge for a founder is to be willing to disrupt themselves," he says — to seriously entertain an adjacent opportunity even when the current model is the one that built the company.

During the same lockdowns that killed consumer bookings, AutoGuru landed its first serious B2B fleet customer — and discovered that essential-service vehicle fleets kept running no matter what happened to consumer demand. That accidental discovery became FleetGuru, a B2B SaaS and embedded-payments product for fleet servicing. Within eighteen months, it had eclipsed the consumer marketplace that had been the entire business until then.

"The biggest challenge for a founder is to be willing to disrupt themselves, or think open-minded about the model that they have. Every investor you meet tells you to refine, refine, refine until you get it right. But sometimes you have to ask, what about this adjacent opportunity? We leant into one of those, and it took off."

The second wave nobody talks about

The COVID crisis wasn't the only one. About twelve months after the pandemic disruption, inflation hit and investor appetite for marketplace businesses evaporated across the board — a shift Shirley describes as the tech market "completely" changing shape. AutoGuru recapitalised its cap table and took convertible loans from existing investors rather than chase a market that had stopped funding companies like it, later repaying those loans as the FleetGuru pivot proved itself out.

His advice on capital, hard-won from both sides of that experience, is blunt: "Unless you can take that dollar and turn it into 10, don't raise." Asked what he'd do differently, he doesn't hesitate: "Bootstrap as long as you can. We wish we did that better."

Moving the wall

By the time of this conversation, AutoGuru had grown past fifty staff, expanded into New Zealand, and was processing roughly thirty-five thousand B2B fleet transactions a month, approaching a million dollars a day in transaction volume and expecting to double again within eight months. Shirley has since moved from founder-led management to a distributed model, with department leads running what he calls their own subcultures across tech, marketing, operations and finance. His own job, he says, has been reduced to three things: "Set the direction, make sure I've got the right people on the bus, and make sure it's full of gas."

For the moments when a crisis feels unavoidable, he describes a personal reframe he calls "moving the wall": treating what feels like an oncoming, unstoppable problem as something you still have the agency to shift, rather than something happening to you. It's the same instinct that turned a dead term sheet and a collapsed marketplace into a bigger business than the one COVID nearly killed.