Park Circa was conceived in 2010 when co-founders Omid and Chad met at
La Scala, a local coffee shop in Walnut Creek. They were introduced by a mutual friend and through the course of the conversation began discussing the problem with parking in San Francisco (where they used to live and work). Most people they knew had the same frustrating experience of endlessly circling the block, waiting for a space to open up, meanwhile passing wondefully empty driveways that were off limits. They began thinking, “wouldn’t it be great if we could just knock on the door and hand the person $20 for permission to park for a few hours?” Then they asked, why not? They realized they could build a location aware mobile app that allowed for passive communications and transaction between strangers, to legitimize this process of peer-to-peer sharing for parking spaces.
They began meeting together every Sunday for a few months to create a development plan and coordinate all the late night work they produced during the week. When summer came the initial planning was complete. Based on important feedback from advisors and friends, they decided this idea could really work, so they set about building a minimal viable product, which included a promotional website and the mobile app that would allow for real-time parking transactions.
On January 23, 2011, when the platform was completed, and the necessary legal documents were in order, they went to several local neighborhoods in San Francisco to hand out a few flyers and get initial feedback from neighbors. They also twittered a few people who were complaining about parking, and this started an exciting few months of attention from neighbors, local blogs, twitter followers and
media who were eager to share the idea with everyone they knew.
The idea was so unique it sparked people’s imaginations and still continues to spread from person to person. But although drivers are very excited about the peer-to-peer sharing of parking spaces that were previously off limits, the idea can’t go viral until there are enough parking space owners that share their space so that the supply of spaces can support the demand. They realized that the idea will not go viral on it’s own, and since they had no capital necessary to spread the word and motivate owners, they began meeting with a lot of Venture Capital firms and Angel Investors that had contacted them to learn more about what they were doing. But after 2 months of meetings, they realized they were wasting their precious time. While VCs liked the idea, none of them wanted to take the risk in this new market until Park Circa could prove that people would really change their behavior and adopt this new process. Investors wanted to see usage statistics (which is ironically difficult to accomplish without capital).
But Chad and Omid were confident that people want to use a mobile app to find the best parking options around, so they set about planning for the next phase of growing the business organically with limited resources. Fortunately, they have found many new friends who believe in the idea and are volunteering their time to help them build the business. So Park Circa is putting together a motley team of creative thinkers and doers and systematically moving forward with several experiments designed to acquire inventory of spaces in a small local market and to get real-world usage. The process is slow, but steady, and the team continues to make improvements to the app and adapt our platform to meet the needs of the growing user base.
If you like this idea, join us, and help make this work for your neighborhood.
