Forming an Opportunity Belief

1. I have a suspicion that an opportunity to make money exists with a service that identifies open parking spaces both on UF campus/surrounding area.

2. The unmet need is people needing to spend a lot of time driving around to look for a place to park their car. The need is had by anyone with a car in Gainesville that either a) doesn't have a reserved parking space or b) wants to park their car on campus or in a different part of Gainesville. This need has arisen from the lack of parking in Gainesville, coupled with the absurd prices for private parking spaces. Currently, to meet this need, people are just spending additional time driving around looking for a place to park.

3 a b & c. For the purposes of this assignment, I will assume the prototypical customer is a UF student. For the interview, I talked to 3 of them: Matthew Fagliarone, Dylan Parker, and Janelle Barghout.

4a. Interview 1 Matthew Fagliarone
Matthew said he faces this problem almost every day.  He does not have a reserved parking space and simply uses a city decal so whenever he moves his car he never knows how long it's gonna take him to find another parking space. Matthew has had this need since he first brought his car to Gainesville almost 2 years ago. He currently addresses the problem by trying to move his car more sparingly and consolidate things that he has to do with it, however, that isn't always a feasible solution. Due to these factors, he says that he is not satisfied with this solution.

4b. Interview 2 Dylan Parker
Dylan said that he honestly would not rank this as a top problem in his life. While he has a car and uses city parking, he told me that he does not move his car frequently enough to consider this a major problem for him. He told me he typically has plenty of time to find a place to park and has never had to spend a significant amount of time doing so anyways. He told me that a larger problem is not finding a place to park, but rather how far away he will have to park from his apartment as it is a pain to have to walk back especially if it is after doing something like getting groceries for example. However, Dylan did agree with me that in general, there is not enough parking in the city of Gainesville and that many other people probably face similar needs.

4c. Interview 3 Janelle Barghout
Janelle commutes to school so while she obviously does not face the problem of having to find parking at her house, it is more difficult for her to obtain parking close enough to her job or classes in order for not to have to walk a long distance or face getting a ticket or getting towed. While she could look for parking on the street, that can potentially take significant time lengthening her commute. Currently, in order to meet this need, Janelle simply spends additional time looking for parking or parks much further away and either walks or takes the bus to work or class. She has had this need for her entire time she's been going to UF and says that she is not satisfied with her current solution at all.

5. After performing these 3 interviews, I have gotten slightly different perspectives on the problem, but overall I feel that they all further cemented my initial hypothesis albeit in different ways. I learned that the location of the parking is just as important as the existence of parking in general. The most surprising thing I learned was that Dylan claimed to have never spent more than 5 minutes looking for parking as I know people that have definitely spent more.

7. I still believe my original opportunity is definitely still there and in fact, it may be able to be increased by adding other services. I feel that I have a much better sense of people's true thoughts and responses to this problem so my view of the opportunity is definitely more accurate. I do think that in order to be a successful entrepreneur you have to listen to the customers, however, there may be cases where you have a better sense of what the customer needs than the customer themselves so I suppose you have to consider the scenario and make a trade-off.