A Phoenix-based startup is looking to make it easier for consumers to find and buy car parts.
Stan Mirzayev, along with Isaac Bain and Aleks Basalilov, founded Parts Pass, which developed an app to alleviate customers' challenges with shopping for car parts, including comparing prices and scheduling deliveries.
“Part of it was having to go into brick-and-mortar businesses and wait in line,” Mirzayev said. “I watched how customers engaged with the counter reps and could see frustration on their faces and wanted to alleviate that for the consumer.”
The Parts Pass app leverages artificial intelligence, allowing users to view parts specific to their vehicles via uploading photos of their cars. Customers can also search for parts in the app by manually selecting the make and model of their cars.
Parts Pass carries more than 2 million car parts at wholesale prices and offers 48-hour delivery.
“We have 25 distribution centers across the country that allow us to get the parts to customers daily,” Mirzavev said.
Mirzavev and his family immigrated from the Soviet Union to the U.S. when he was 4 years old. His passion for cars was sparked while working for his father at the family’s automotive shop in New York.
After his family relocated to Arizona, Mirzavev and his father opened In & Out Lube and Repairs in the Valley in 2011.
While operating the auto shop, Mirzavev encountered difficulty with sourcing car parts, leading him to create a solution to a problem that he says many mechanics face. In 2016, Mirzavev founded Parts Detect, a business-to-business shop management app for mechanics to source car parts from suppliers.
Parts Detect later evolved into Parts Pass, a separate business geared toward consumers that Mirzavev founded in 2022. That same year, he quit the auto industry to focus on the startup full-time.
“I knew I wanted to give it my all,” he said. “The auto industry is near and dear to my heart, but it was also time for me to grow as an individual.”
Mirzavev’s idea for Parts Pass was also prompted by the pandemic, when car parts became much more scarce due to supply chain delays, he said.
The first iteration of the Parts Pass app took about eight months to develop. The company has been releasing updated versions of the app weekly for the past four months, adding improvements based on customer feedback, Mirzavev said.
The company generates revenue via a small percentage of car part sales, he said.
The Parts Pass app is free, but the company plans to create a membership model with features for customers to monitor service history and tutorials with steps for installing parts. There's even potential for the company to add parts for heavy-duty trucks on the app in the future, although it would need to hire more workers to implement it, Mirzavev said.
Parts Pass is currently available in the Apple Store. The company will launch an Android app in the Google Play store in the third quarter.
“As we continue to evolve and grow, we want to bring in value for the automotive industry,” Mirzavev said. “We want to be the go-to for car parts.”
