A TrueCar executive used a medical analogy to describe how the company’s first day of trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market went on Friday.

TrueCar announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 7,775,000 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $9 per share, a bit below the $12 to $14 range the company previously suggested.

Goldman, Sachs & Co. and J.P. Morgan Securities are acting as joint book-running managers for the offering. RBC Capital Markets is also acting as a book-running manager. Cowen and Co. and JMP Securities are acting as co-managers.

In addition, TrueCar granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,166,250 additional shares of common stock from TrueCar at the initial public offering price. The offering is expected to close on Wednesday, subject to customary closing conditions. 

When reached by Auto Remaketing early on Friday afternoon, Larry Dominique, president of ALG and executive vice president of TrueCar, described the IPO as “It’s like waiting for a medical test result to come back, either a good test result or a bad test result.

“But going through the process, having various executives on the road, talking to investors and being able to talk about the TrueCar story and our value proposition to the marketplace and getting that very positive feedback was great. We had a lot of confidence going into that first trade, and we’re up about 17 percent,” Dominique continued when there was about three hours left in the trading day.

TrueCar’s shares closed on Friday up 11.89 percent, settling at $10.07 per share.

According to Bloomberg, the IPO generated about $70 million for the company. Dominique recapped many of the questions the company heard from investors going into Friday’s first trading day, including:

—What are going to do with the money?
—Do you need it?
—Are you short of cash?

“In reality, we had a really good balance sheet to start with. This extra capital gives us that extra cushion to really focus on developing the growth of the business, grow the brand awareness,” Dominique said.

“At the same time, it gives us the flexibility to create a great experience for consumers and a great experience for our dealers. It’s a great way to help us do that,” he added.

Several ways TrueCar is aiming to enhance the experience for dealers and consumers are through solutions the company touched on in its IPO prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including TrueTrade, TrueLoan and TrueLease.

Dominque said he couldn’t share many details about any of the tools yet. What he did divulge was an “Alpha form” of TrueTrade, which TrueCar currently has a variation in use with partner USAA. The tool gives USAA customers a wholesale estimate for their trade-in during their shopping and financing process.

“We have dealers bid for those cars,” Dominique said. “It’s a very early Alpha test to see how a trade-in product can really benefit the dealers who are always looking for more good used cars and helping customers feel like they’re getting a good prices for those trade-in vehicles.”

As far as TrueLoan and TrueLease, Dominique did say the solutions are designed to help consumers in a “very fluid” transaction.

“The typical customer spends about 3.6 hours in the dealership to buy a car. We want to help them out to get that process down to about an hour,” he said.