DES MOINES, Iowa — 27-year-old Iowa native, Kyle McMahon, created Tractor Zoom so that farmers can easily find farm equipment auctions and search their inventory beforehand.
Less than a year ago, McMahon was baffled at how hard it was to find a Kinze 3600 planter at auction for his family farm. He found himself searching endlessly through website after website, and through local newspaper classifieds.
“Sale bills were being scanned and uploaded onto websites, with no way to easily search for specific equipment on the internet. I was looking through local classified ads, all the while I was sure I was missing something that may have been published in a newspaper I didn’t have. What should have been a simple task of shopping for a planter, turned into weeks of combing through data on and off the internet,” stated Kyle McMahon.
McMahon found himself calling farmers all over the Midwest, approximately 300 of them, to learn more about how they went about finding the information they needed to make equipment purchasing decisions. He soon came to realize that the majority of farmers weren’t satisfied with the time-consuming process of shopping for farm equipment at auction, and decided to create a solution built on the foundation of this feedback.
“Farmers want a way to find auction inventory quickly, to be able to search for exactly what they are looking for, and to get the details and quality pictures of that piece of equipment,” said McMahon. “It’s a simple concept, but it wasn’t being addressed in a meaningful way. Farmers were wanting to shop for equipment the way they could shop for cars or trucks”
Less than a year later McMahon and his team released Tractor Zoom, a platform that made it simple for auctioneers to post their upcoming farm equipment auctions and their inventory. Buyers can now easily search for the specific ag equipment from a comprehensive list of auction inventory aggregated from many auction companies. In this way, Tractor Zoom also helps auctioneers reach new buyers.
“We wanted to help farmers, but also the auction professionals. Many auctioneers are running family owned and operated businesses whose roots date back decades, some even to the early 1900s. In recent years, auctioneers have been expected to become digital marketers, web developers, and social media coordinators in order to promote their events, on top of being an auctioneer. It’s a lot to put on these professionals, and we want to make the digital advertising part of their job easier,” said McMahon.
Currently, Tractor Zoom is a platform dedicated to listing farm machinery. Since launching in November of 2017, Tractor Zoom has seen its user base grow 50% month over month. They currently have 80 auction companies on the platform, and have posted over 6,500 lots since their launch.
Auctioneers can contact Tractor Zoom to list their farm equipment auctions for free for a limited time. Farmers and buyers can use Tractor Zoom for free, by going to tractorzoom.com or downloading their free mobile app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
— Tractor Zoom
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