24A - Venture Concept - ParkLocator

In Gainesville, especially on the UF campus and the surrounding residential areas there is very limited parking for students. With many students owning cars, coupled with the rapid growth of Gainesville and UF due to the school’s surging academic prowess this lack of parking has becoming a big problem for many students, faculty, and other residents in the area. While most apartments offer some form of reserved parking spaces, these can be incredibly expensive, costing upwards of 100 dollars per month. If purchasing your own parking space is not an option for someone, they are left with no other option but to purchase a city parking decal, relegating them to parking on the street with no guarantee of location or even availability in general. This may lead many students to try to avoid using their car just so they won’t have to be in the situation where they are unsure of where they are going to find parking. However, some students don’t even have the luxury to have options on when to use their car. Students with part-time jobs may have to drive to work and then go straight to class leaving them very little time to spend searching the streets for an available spot or waiting for someone else to leave one open. I believe that no product or service is currently serving the demand for facilitating the process of finding parking and apart from reserved spaces (which are contingent on whether you have the financial resources to get one) there is no readily available solution for students in this situation. This window of opportunity should be open for a considerable period of time. The only thing that could take this opportunity away would be development of a considerable amount of more parking that is easily accessible and cheap which could either not happen at all or take years to decades to manifest itself. I therefore believe this opportunity is significantly large and would have a large enough consumer base to make it a worthwhile opportunity to find a solution to. The innovation I’m proposing would be one that would allow people using city parking to find spaces easier and know the amount and location of open spaces. I am proposing an app that uses crowdsourced data to compile and distribute this information. Of course, this app would become more and more useful as more and more people used it and that is sort of the beauty of it in a way. With people reporting spaces that are open and reporting when they have parked in a space, the algorithm that the app uses will continuously update the map and show other users where there are currently open parking spaces. You could also input where your home is or to what location you are trying to get to so the app will always show the most convenient parking spaces first. It would also update which parking spaces are currently lifted, so if for example, you were trying to park near your friend’s house on a Saturday, the app would tell you if there is enforced restrictions in that area or not. In order to make the app work, it would have to first be offered to students as a free download and then as the user base was built up, we could begin selling advertising or even paid content if the service becomes large enough. Therefore, the development of the app would require a significant amount of personal capital infusion with a considerable amount of risk behind it as the app would not begin to generate revenue for a portion of time. However, once it does start generating revenue, I am confident that this could be a huge moneymaker. This innovation is deceptively simple but would be hugely influential in the way people at UF live their lives. As there is no current solution to this problem, there is no reason to think that customers looking for more ease in their lives would be willing to try this product out, especially since it will be a free download. As more and more people begin to use the app, it will allow the app to work more efficiently and will attract more people to it in turn. This would work as a positive feedback loop sort of scenario. Also if the app works very efficiently it may even attract some people from outside of the original target market. For example, If I am paying for a reserved spot but see everyone else having no trouble finding parking for free, I may feel that I am being ripped off and look for alternatives. This could even in turn bring the prices of reserved parking spaces down. Current competitors are technically only people offering reserved parking spaces but we are not competing in the same price-point so I would not really even consider that to be competition. The price point is extremely important in the success of the business, especially since I am offering it to college students who generally are extremely frugal. The way that it is distributed on a smart phone is also critical for getting people to use it as well. While there is no “packaging” per say, the aesthetic appeal of the app will be very important in the design process and that will psychologically encourage use of the app. In order to organize a business to support the further use of this app, I would have to have several sectors. For one I would have to have a software/ technical design team that would maintain the servers, code and continuously update and improve the way the app works. They would also be responsible for debugging and servicing the code if we run into any problems.  We would also have an executive team responsible for strategic decisions and financial aspects as well as a marketing team. I believe those aspects would be enough for the initial launch of the business and use of the product. As it grows, the management structure would most likely also have to be expanded as well.