NYLP: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod the New York Press Club award winning podcast highlighting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City Area. I’m Hal Coopersmith and this episode is all about parking. It is no secret that driving in New York City is a nightmare, and the only thing worse is parking your car. In this episode we speak to Josh Futterman, Founder of Park You a startup based in Harlem. Josh is a veteran entrepreneur with a brand new product and is passionate about solving the parking dilemma in New York.
Josh: This is a labor of love. I want to solve this problem for me. Anthony grew up in Queens driving. My lead developer, Matt, grew up and still lives in Brooklyn driving. Between us, I think, there is 60 to 70 years of driving and parking in New York City. We want to solve this problem for our city. And it’s one of these problems that unfortunately the city itself can’t solve
NYLP: As you will hear, ParkYou! has a very interesting solution to the parking crisis in New York City so let’s find out all about it and go to the interview.
So, you’re trying to solve something that all New Yorkers hate, parking.
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. Of course, I’m a native New Yorker and I grew up here. I’d been driving in New York City for, what is it now? 34 years, I think.
NYLP: You’ve been driving in New York City for 34 years, are you crazy?
Josh: 34 years.
NYLP: I didn’t know that people drive in New York, isn’t that nuts?
Josh: My father made me learn on a stick in New York City. So, I took my driving test back in, when was it? 1984 on a stick in New York City downtown. And so, I’m quite knowledgeable when it comes to driving in this town, and when it comes to dealing with the parking problem. And, yes, all of us who own cars here who park on the street hate it with a passion.
NYLP: I can’t believe that you’ve been doing something so terrible as driving in New York for 34 years.
Josh: But I’ve done it in other cities that are almost as bad as well. So, there’ve been times that I’ve lived in other places and it’s unpleasant no matter which density you’re in. It’s not fun driving around for 15 or 20 minutes, or even an hour sometimes to find spots.
NYLP: And, you’re trying to solve the problem through a platform which you’re building.
Josh: Absolutely. But it really isn’t just a platform. So, the platform is a tool, and what I recognized initially when I said, hey, you know, I’m going to make this happen. I’m really going to solve the problem is, I knew that there had been a number of attempts to solve it already and all of them essentially had failed miserably. And, one of the things that I recognized was that this wasn’t something that you could just solve with technology, that you had to use the technology as a tool for people. So, I thought of it as the first true sharing platform. For six, seven years now they’ve been talking about the Gig Economy and Sharing, but in reality that’s just leveraging some asset that you have to make some extra money off of it. In this case, what I recognized we needed to do is, we needed to bring drivers in New York City together. Starting in micro communities, small areas, and then over time, over six to eight months in Manhattan, you know, a year to a year and a half in New York City, bring all the drivers in New York City who wanted to participate together. That was the first insight that brought me to this. It was all about community and all about getting them to collaborate together.
NYLP: And, you mentioned that there were other attempts to solve this problem. What were those attempts and why did they fail?
Josh: So there’s been a number of different attempts as I mentioned. Probably a half a dozen of them have been serious, but you see them pop up all the time and in fact one of the interesting things that they tap in with us, because we’re starting to raise money is, there’s been so many attempts to solve this problem that have been unsuccessful that it scares a lot of people off. So, let me tell you a little bit about some of these attempts. One of the ones that got the most press a was one called Parking Monkey, and what Parking Monkey tried to do was, essentially create a marketplace where you could bid on people’s street parking spots. Now to me, I would look at that right at the beginning and say, one that’s unethical and it’s almost certainly illegal. But the young guys who’s started it, they didn’t recognize this and they thought they could run roughshod over the cities that they launched it in. They launched in Boston and I believe they were trying to get it off the ground in San Francisco as well, and the cities flipped out. The city council’s flipped out, shut them down within a couple of months. Thankfully, the guys who had it recognized the improprieties, and had not spent all the money from the investors, and gave a lot of the money back. And, I got a chance to talk to one of the guys who was involved with it early on when I was working on ParkYou! That was one example. Another example, and there are a few of these around, one of them that I can think of off the bat is Parknav, which I believe is now owned by INRIX, and if you know INRIX whose sort of this big holding company for urban mobility data. They try, and use technology and statistics to identify where you’re likely to find a parking spot. And, basically every area in New York City on their App screen is red or yellow. Meaning, unlikely to find spots anywhere. And, the case in cities like San Francisco and Seattle, Philadelphia. Any of the big cities that are a bit older, that weren’t designed originally for cars. You have this problem and so, it doesn’t work really anywhere. But for people who are technologists first and foremost, they really get excited about trying to solve these things technologically and don’t think a lot of the times about what’s really happening. That’s another example. Then there have been some pseudo attempts at doing it in a, I guess you would call it something like crowd sourced, right? You have a few sites, a few apps out there that allow people to say, “Hey, I’m leaving a parking spot” and they put it into the App, and then people can rush for it. But they don’t even track if the spot is still there and of course when you get to it, 95% of the time it’s gone already, right? That doesn’t make any sense. And, there’s a couple that have tried to take that and do things like, if you remember The Community, you reserve a spot with each other ahead of time. That’s not how people in cities drive, people get in their car, they don’t know most of the time when they’re going to use it, they don’t know when they need to park. What does that bring us to? Not only does it bring us to having to do it in a really community driven, collaborative manner, but it also means you’ve got to make it completely automated and you got to have it work in real time. That’s what we did with ParkYou!, we brought all of that together, and we just launched, as I mentioned to you earlier today. Soft launched a couple of days ago, but really rolled it out to the 500 pre-launch members who are in our launch community, which is in Harlem where I live and I’m really excited about launching it there. We want to be the first really serious startup to come out of Harlem and make a name for the community as a new tech hotbed going forward. We’ve got these 500 members and with the launch today and then being able to download, we’ve actually had several hundred of the 500 already download today and we’re really excited to see it work over the next few weeks.
NYLP: Well, congratulations on your launch, and your launch in Harlem. Certainly a wonderful place in the city to launch. And, you talked about how certain apps did not work, why will your app work? Why will it solve this problem?
Josh: Well, for one thing, we really did the work beforehand. Before we ever started designing or developing, my head of growth, Anthony Giordano and I went out back in from the very end of December 2017, to the very beginning of February 2018 in the bitter cold, during alternate side parking in the mornings, and we ended up interviewing and surveying 120 New York City drivers. I thought maybe we’d get three minutes with them and it turned out we got 15 to 20 minutes on average with every single person that we talked to, and we learned a bunch of things. We actually asked 27 questions. Some of them were just about their driving and parking habits in general. Then at the end, we talk to them about what we were doing and what their thoughts were on it. And so, one of the things that we found was that over 90% of the people that we spoke to when we did those interviews and surveys said they wanted what we were doing, they were really excited about this community and collaborative aspect of it, and the fact that it would be instantaneous. Second thing that we found out that people were really excited about the opportunity to help each other, right? As long as everybody was doing it for each other. And of course, when people look from the outside and they look at New Yorkers, they think we’re always on the go, and no time to help each other, and we don’t really want to be helpful, but I got to tell you, having grown up here, having lived in multiple other cities around the world as well, people in New York City are some of the most helpful and friendly people in the world. And, if you take the opportunity to talk to them and you give them that chance, they will really take it.
NYLP: I agree. I grew up here. I’m a big advocate of New York, I strongly believe in New York. I also thought that it’s crazy to alternate side street park your car. I’ve never really had a car. If I have, it’s been garaged. Who are these people who are alternate side of the street parking? Who are street parking their car? Why are they doing that and what are they using their car for?
Josh: Sure. So, 80% of the people who own cars in New York City park their cars on the street. And of course, some of them in the outer boroughs, when we say parking on the street, some park there extra cars on the street itself and then a lot of them of course have driveways out there. But in Manhattan it’s definitely 80% of the people, because almost nobody has a garage or driveway here. In the other boroughs we’re probably talking 40%, 50%. There are 2 million cars in New York City alone-
NYLP: 2 million in New York City-
Josh: 2 million in New York City alone, and 6 million in the metro area.
NYLP: And how many in Manhattan?
Josh: In Manhattan, I’ve got an estimate, but at somewhere around 200,000.
NYLP: 200,000 or 80%-
Josh: Are parking on the street and it’s only getting worse, because garages are disappearing at this point, so it’s all sorts of people. But obviously you’ve got to have a life that enables you to move your car or in a lot of cases you’ve got doormen and concierges who make a bit of extra money by moving people’s cars for them back and forth. And so, it’s everybody from people who just can’t afford to garage it, to people who will not pay those ludicrous prices, which includes me.
NYLP: They’re insane those garage prices.
Josh: Yeah. To people who just pay, they don’t mind doing it. They love having their car and that’s fine. They’d rather do that than, than put it in garage and have to walk a couple blocks and grab it.
NYLP: So, we’re talking 200,000 cars in Manhattan by your estimate. 160,000 are alternate side street parking.
Josh: Yeah.
NYLP: What are people using their cars in Manhattan for? This is something I’ve always been curious about.
Josh: So, it really varies. I mean, there isn’t a specific thing that people use it for. What we found when we were doing these interviews and in signing up people, over the past four or five months … And by the way, the way we do our user acquisition is we actually put brand ambassadors on the street during alternate side parking, and places like Fairway and 125th Street where they have a free outdoor parking lot, and people have to walk from their cars to the store. We do tabling over there and it’s crazy. Our brand ambassadors sign up about five or six people per hour and they do three hour shifts. So, it’s one, takeaway the walking and it’s one every six to eight minutes. And, when we table at Fairway, two of us, two hours, we sign up 25 to 30 people on average. That’s how crazy it is, and they are all across the board. We get people, and it’s not just Manhattan, we get people come down from the Bronx or come up from Brooklyn, come in from Queens, Staten Island’s not a big problem. But from there, and they saying, when are you going to get to our boroughs to. We’ve got so many places where there are problems with this. You asked me what people use their cars for? It’s a variety of things. I find with professionals, and middle class, and upper middle class people, they use their car a lot to go out of the city, right? And so, when they come back, they get back and, [7:00] on a Sunday night and they need a spot, and they end up having to spend half an hour after having driven 200 miles of the last couple of days looking for a spot.
Josh: But also across the board, people use their cars to run errands. People do use their car a lot to go to grocery stores, you’d be surprised about it. Fairway is obvious, because they have a parking lot there. But even when you go in six, seven blocks away and you don’t want to spend $10 or $15 on the delivery, or whatever it is, a lot of people will go and they’ll park in a metered spot. Then they got to come back and look for a spot, by their house. That’s another way that people use it. There is a decent number of people who use their cars just in general to go visit their friends, or to go to an event, or a restaurant that isn’t say in midtown, right? Because, in midtown or straight downtown Brooklyn, those are areas where there’s very little parking anyway, so people will avoid that. But pretty much any other area you do get people using it a fair amount.
NYLP: Well, the reason why I wanted to ask is, we didn’t really talk about exactly how your app works or how your platform works, but it seems to me that a lot of people want their parking space at the same time. People want their spot in the evening before they go to sleep. People are leaving for work or do whatever they’re doing on a Saturday, so they’re all leaving at the same time. How is your platform designed for sharing design for community going to work when a lot of people want the limited real estate, those limited spots at the same time or are leaving their spot at the same time?
Josh: Absolutely. What we found in doing our research … I went out before we did the design and I actually counted cars in micro communities to determine what we needed for critical mass in each area, so that this would work effectively. Then I actually on numerous different blocks spend hours outside counting how many cars came and went at different times. And you’ll be amazed, while there is more at certain hours of the early evening coming in, it really is across the board, because you have a lot of people also who use their cars for work in different ways too. So, you’ve got a lot of Uber and Lyft drivers who need to work, who need to park, who drop their cars off at varying different times. Got drivers who work for organizations like Instacart, right? So, we’re working with all of these, and what we’ve done with it in order to make sure we have a balance, and let me step back, and just dig into how it works, right? Because, I think you need to know that to understand how we get the balance.
NYLP: That might be a good idea.
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. The way it works is, when you are a member of the community, you get access to a very powerful app platform that we’ve developed, and I mentioned that it’s really a platform. It’s the tool for the community. When you are leaving a spot, you’re at your car and you’re getting ready to leave, you offer your spot to the community through the app. All you do is tap a button, we know where you are right then, you can offer a free or metered spot. If it’s a metered spot, which you’re rarely going to offer, but you may offer it if you’re in a commercial area, and coming home from going to some event, or a restaurant, something like that, you’d set the max amount of time at the meter and we actually include that … you’d set the max amount of time at the meter and we actually include that in our matching algorithm when we’re matching up cars. And then you just confirm and you tap a button that says, “Offer spot.” And now you’re waiting. You agree to wait a certain number of minutes. The default is five but we have it set so you can wait anywhere from four to 10 minutes for another person. So you’re actually holding the spot for them, right? So that’s on the offering side. On the finding side, what you do is you hit find a spot. You type in your destination just like in a map app, or you can actually tap on the screen if you’re going somewhere close. Once again, you can choose a free or metered spot and you’d set the max for a meter so that matches up. And you can put up to two cars into your account. So we actually know what car you have and we know the length of your car because we’re going to include that in the match as well. And then you hit find the stop and you start driving to wherever you’re going. When you get three minutes away from your destination, we automatically match you to the best spot for you based on the length of your car and walking distance to your final destination. There’s no choice, we do it all for you. So that way it works hand in hand with the way you already park and drive. And if we don’t have a spot, you just keep looking the way you would normally look. Because that’s the whole thing, we’re not saying that this is going to be 100% foolproof. In fact, there’s no chance it will ever be that, right? Our goal is early on as we’re starting to build the community that somewhere between one out of three and one out of two times, this is going to work, and so that’s going to save you a fair amount of time. And eventually, over the course of a couple of years in each city we get into, as we build more and more critical mass throughout the city and we cover more and more areas, it will probably get to 75 to 80%. And all of that is a heck of a lot better than what we’ve got now. Now, you also asked me how do we make sure that we have some kind of balance. So like I said earlier, this is all about community and collaboration. We all know that there’s a certain percentage of people out there who they’re not really interested in giving to others. So we have forced altruism built into our app. What does that mean? It’s a one to one point system. You cannot take spots unless you give them up. So when you offer a spot and somebody actually takes it, you get what’s called a parking unit. And that parking unit, one parking unit allows you to take a parking spot. So you actually have to be giving to the community. You also get a parking unit-
NYLP: That’s genius.
Josh: Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, this is sort of our special sauce around it. But there’s something even better and that is-
NYLP: And that works even if someone doesn’t take your spot.
Josh: You got it. So if a person waits for a total of 10 minutes over one or more sessions, they also get a parking unit. So you’re always rewarded for contributing to the community. And, you know, I know you. You actually saw the app.
NYLP: Yeah.
Josh: So you know we’ve made it really fun. I mean, if you can imagine making parking fun, that’s what we’re done with this. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. And when I told Anthony, our head of growth, this is what I wanted to do. This is what I wanted the user experience to be. He’s like, “Really? You’re going to be able to make parking fun.” I said, “Trust me on this. We’re going to do it.”
NYLP: Well, it seems like you have the community element of Waze, the traffic app, and a logistical element of Uber in terms of matching.
Josh: Yeah.
NYLP: And is it true that if I’m doing a two-hour drive or three-hour drive from wherever, I enter in my final destination and then you’ll geo-locate me?
Josh: Yes.
NYLP: And once I’m close after whatever period of time, then I don’t need to open up the phone, I don’t need to have distracted driving, anything else like that.
Josh: No. So right now, we have a few buttons you have to tap on. And of course, we highly recommend that people use some kind of holder for their phone. We actually have a number of rules associated with the community. And if you don’t abide by the rules, the first time you get a warning. The second time you get suspended for 30 days. And the third time, you’re booted out. And we have reasons for doing this. One of which is we wanted to be fair for everybody. So let me give you a couple of examples with the rule. When you offer a spot, you can cancel that offer at any time before somebody accepts it. But once somebody has accepted it, you have to wait for that person to arrive. If you take off and that stop is not there when they arrive, you get a warning. So that’s on the offer side. Another thing that we do on the finder side is once you have accepted and offer a spot, you actually have to take that spot. You can’t, even if you pass another spot, you can’t take it, because this is partly about improving traffic around the city and it’s about being fair to each other. And it’s also about not being … about being fair to the people who aren’t members of the community. So because we have this one to one balance and these rules, all those spots that are there that aren’t being offered by members of the community, those are all there for the people who aren’t members of the community. And that means that in the end, it all balances out. It’s no different for the non-members but for the members over time, it’s a lot better. We expect the people are going to end up saving … Right now in New York City, people spend about two and a half work weeks per year looking for parking. It’s somewhere around 107 hours, I think. And we expect to give people back probably over time 75 of those hours. So what would you do with another 75 hours over the course of your year?
NYLP: Right. Well, that’s part of the reason why I chose not to have a car is that it’s so much time and it’s a lot of energy to have a car in New York City. And I feel like a lot of people have chosen that as a result.
Josh: Yeah. There’s probably two to three million people that have access to a car with that. So that’s a pretty large minority of people who live in New York and frankly, people really like to have the freedom that a car gives them. And I think in the end, that’s why so many people do keep their car even though it’s such a pain in the butt to have it here.
NYLP: Well, you mentioned you’ve been driving around New York City for 34 years. Those two and a half weeks spent looking for parking every year is paying off in terms of how you thought about this. Why do you think no one else thought about community-driven parking?
Josh: Well, from what I’ve been able to learn, from what I’ve been able to ascertain, most of the previous attempts to solve this problem weren’t started by people who had a passion for solving the problem because they had experienced it so much themselves. The closest I’ve heard is somebody wanted to solve the problem because their father had a problem. And I think if you’re not intimately aware and passionate about it, very difficult to see the logistics of how all of these things work and how all of them fit together. And so for me, because I had been doing this for a really long time, and because I took what I had found and I looked at what had been done before. And because I, in many of the things that I do, I have a … I guess I would say I have a tendency towards wanting to create community. It just was there, it was just obvious and present that the only way to do this is to get people working together and working together in a way that’s seamless.
NYLP: So your idea is fantastic, it’s well throughout. You will as a business live by user acquisition and use and die by user acquisition and use.
Josh: Absolutely.
NYLP: It’s not just about having brand ambassadors getting a few people per hour sitting at a Fairway. Obviously, that’s important and gets your business off the ground. How will you make sure that you get that critical mass that you need?
Josh: Oh, I think you’re completely misunderstanding the power of the brand ambassadors right here. I think you’re not getting-
NYLP: Okay. Let’s talk about their power.
Josh: Yeah. I think you’re not getting the size of these numbers for something that’s focused on micro-community. So you know, I mentioned Anthony Giordano, my head of growth earlier. Anthony was the head of business development for MEC for the United States. It’s the world’s largest media buying company and then Anthony went over to the Middle East to head up their innovation operations over there. So when we started doing this and we started signing people up, Anthony turned to me and he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life in terms of user acquisition.” When we go out, we sign up 85% of the people that we talk to. I mean, it’s crazy. So what does that mean? It’s just an issue, how many brand ambassadors can I put on the street. And our goal in each city is to have over the first six to 12 months that we’re in each city a minimum of 25 to 30 brand ambassadors at a time. And with them now actually downloading the app right onto people’s phones for them when they talk to them, we’re signing up literally thousands of people every single month.
NYLP: Thousands.
Josh: Thousands of people every single month with those numbers of brand ambassadors. Right now, we have five on the street. We sign up about 150 people a week and it costs us … user acquisition is very inexpensive doing it this way, amazingly. You would think that it would be more expensive than doing digital acquisition. It’s not. Much more efficient. We really dug into it and we do some supporting stuff around digital and we’ll do more. But this is so sticky and the network effects are so strong. And by doing it the way we’re doing, we’re creating such great personal loyalty and stake in it that these people are all going to be staying with us until they give up their cars or if they move to a city where we don’t use it. And even in that case, some are going to stick with it because we’re going to be in 30 to 40 cities worldwide. So my expectation over the next 12 months is 30,000 active users in New York City by the tag-end of next year moving into two or three other places. And within three or four years, with just brand ambassadors and supplementing it with more traditional marketing and digital marketing, I think we get to a minimum of a million-two through our cities and possibly as many as three million. And that doesn’t include if we make deals, partnership deals with Google or Waze or some of the auto manufacturers or the auto insurance companies. We do that and we’re probably talking 10 to 15 million people worldwide. And from what we’ve experienced through all our testing and even just these first couple of days now, people are really getting a kick out of it. They’re really digging it. So I’m excited about that.
NYLP: And how do you keep that novelty because it’s fun when you see the brand ambassador and they download it on your phone? And you mentioned earlier, you want a success rate at one out of three, one out of two in the early stages.
Josh: Yeah.
NYLP: How do you make sure that someone who had their failure the first time, the second time, maybe it’s the averages game, the third time, something like that continues to use your app, continues to believe in it, continues to share it.
Josh: Well, there’s a few different things that we do. So the first thing is we’re very transparent in our communication. So we’re very clear that this is going to take time to build. This is going to take time to build and all we’re asking is to give a little bit of your time, right? At the beginning, we’re not asking anybody to pay anything. We’re not going to ask anybody to pay anything until it’s working reasonably well. I think that that’s really important with this and luckily, we’ve been able to structure this. We’ve been able to build it in a way where we can keep our costs very low upfront. So that’s one aspect of it. People aren’t expecting it to work phenomenally at the beginning. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is right from now moving forward, we communicate very effectively with our member-base. Just to give you an example, we send out MailChimp campaigns every three or four weeks. We have a 40 to 50% open rate on our campaigns with the people on list. I don’t know if you know about open rates but in our … those kind of open rates are unheard of. When we send something to them, we actually send them something that they’re going to appreciate. We really write a letter. The letters tend to be heartfelt. They share with them information that often times other companies wouldn’t share because we want them to have a stake in this. They’re not users. They really are members of this community. And they’re seeing us on the street all the time. I have people coming up to me going, “We’re so excited about this that we’ve signed up months ago,” who remember me and say, “Hey, you’re Josh from the parking app,” right. Now, how often does that happen with companies in general, let along tech companies? It just doesn’t. So those are a couple of the things that we’re doing. And then we have some other things to keep people active and to keep people involved. So I mentioned parking units before, that one to one point system to park. But we have another set of points as well. Those are PUs. So everything we do is fun. And by the way, I don’t know if I mentioned earlier what our tagline is. You know the name of the company is Park You! And I think some of you out there can get that joke. Our tagline is Park You or go park yourself. So we’re always having fun with these kind of things. That’s very New York and we get a kick out of it and we find a lot of other people do as well. So we have this second set of points called usage points. So PUs and UPs. Usage points you get for essentially doing anything related to the community. So using it to park, offering spots, inviting friends to become a member of the community. Those friends becoming paid members of the community. And we’ll have other ways as well. And what can you do with those usage points? So everybody who uses Waze knows they get those points and everything. And they’re useless, right? It’s just like simple gamification to keep people excited about it. The points you get from us are actually going to have real value. What does that mean? So when you get a certain number of points, you’re going to hit different levels. Few things are going to happen when you hit those levels. The first thing is you’re going to get a badge in the app. And so that’s sort of the gamification aspect of it. And that’s actually a step beyond what Waze is doing because Waze, they just sort of show you points. So you’re going to get a badge. For those people who accumulate the most usage points in say a given month or a given year, we’re actually going to honor you to the rest of the community for contributing to the app. I think for some people, that’s really exciting. And for those who really contribute the most in a year in each city, we’re actually going to have live events like cook-outs and dinners, and things like that. And those people contribute the most, we’re going to invite them to that. So they’re going to have opportunities to do that. And then the second thing that we’re doing with the usage points is we are creating hyper-local rewards program. So what’s a hyper-local rewards program? It’s not doing it with big chains or large brands. We’re actually creating a really simple rewards program with local merchants, your local coffee shop, your local retailer, your local grocery store. You hit certain levels and, say, the first time you hit a level, you go into one of the shops that’s one of our rewards partners and maybe you get a free coffee. And then the next time you go back a month and a half later when you’ve hit the next level, maybe get 10% off your bill, things like that. There’s some real value and what does that do from a community standpoint? It’s not just we’re strengthening and giving those who contribute something of value beyond the parking spot, but we’re also helping all of those local merchants as well. We really are focused on those micro-communities. That’s the second thing. There’s a third thing that we’re probably going to do and I’m not 100% certain about it right now because I’ve got to really go through the legalities. But it’s sort of the only company that I know of that has done anything remotely like this before was Juno where they offered stock to their driver’s ride as they drove more and more. And then, I guess when they got sold six months ago, a year ago, they shut that down. As far as I could tell other than that, nobody has done this. So, here’s what we’re going to do. From the time that we launch to the time we have an exit event, all of the people in the various cities that are members, that are part of our community are going to be accumulating usage points. And so for the top contributors by usage points, we’re going to carve out a small amount of whatever revenue or equity that we get from that exit event. And that’s going to actually get distributed to the top contributors then as a thank you for that. And as far as we know, nobody’s ever done this. It’s almost like we’re creating the co-op with our members.
NYLP: Right. That’s a wonderful idea. My question is, how are you going to make money?
Josh: Absolutely very simple. It’s a monthly membership fee. And one of the questions that we ask, and I didn’t mention this before when we were talking about the survey, was if this works, how much would you be willing to pay per month? 70% of the people who said they wanted this said they would pay $10 or more per month for it. Right now, think about in New York City. Most of us who own a car and park on the street, we’re going to get at least one parking ticket a year. When you use ParkYou!, your chances of getting that parking ticket go way down. One parking ticket you avoid pays for ParkYou! one and a half times over. That’s beyond just the de-stressing, the ease, the actual making parking fun. I think 25% or 30% said they will pay $20 or more a month, but we’re only going to charge $10. And that $10 will be if you pay through our website. If you pay through the apps, we’re going to charge $13 because, unfortunately, Apple and Google are charging a 30% overage charge. In order for us to be able to run the company and really make sure that the community is doing well, we’ll have to charge that back if you want the ease of paying through the app. But if you don’t mind taking two extra minutes to go through the website, you don’t have to worry about that.
NYLP: Well, based off of the hours that you save alone, the $10 or $13 if you’re paying through the app seems well worth it for people times money.
Josh: Look, we wanted to set that price at a point that any person who owns a car in any of the cities that we’re in will be able to afford it. Because for me, like I said, this is a labor of love. I want to solve this problem for me. Anthony grew up in Queens driving. My lead developer, Matt, grew up and still lives in Brooklyn driving. Between us, I think, there is 60 to 70 years of driving and parking in New York City. We want to solve this problem for our city. And it’s one of these problems that unfortunately the city itself can’t solve and I think they’re trying to sort of remedy it by taking away parking spots but it’s actually making it worse because people have to drive around even more and we didn’t talk about by the way what the experts say about the impact of people having to drive around looking for parking in cities like New York. The experts say that 30% of the time that people spent driving in a city like New York is actually spent looking for parking. That’s driving around and around and around, or idling your car on some block spewing pollution into the air. We actually believed that we’re going to cut that substantially. You got traffic, you got pollution, you got gasoline that doesn’t need to be burned. We actually think that we can, by doing this, cut down on traffic in New York and the other cities we’re going to by probably 3% to 5%. Now, 3% to 5% in a macro sense may not sound a lot, but it’s actually huge. It’s actually huge. And then there’s another estimate that came out. I mentioned INRIX earlier which is very active in New York maneuverability space and they do a lot of white papers. And they did a study, I think it came out early this year, the very tag end of last year. And the study said that in 2017, the problems around parking in the major cities in the United States cost those cities almost $73 billion in cost, $73 billion. That includes lost productivity. That includes all the things associated with spewing carbon into the air. That includes having to deal with car accidents and pedestrians getting run over by people scrambling around looking for parking. We have the opportunity in a really community-oriented and collaborative way now to make a difference for the whole city.
NYLP: I’m glad you brought up that point. I was going to ask you, is this a problem that we should solve? Should we make street parking easier? Is it a good idea to have a high barrier, a high cost to having cars in our cities because they do take up space, they create traffic, mobility? Cities are better with, let’s say, more pedestrians, more bicycles. That’s certainly a counterpoint if I want to play devil’s advocate.
Josh: Absolutely.
NYLP: Should we just remove parking spaces as you said? That may sound crazy but it was also a crazy idea that cut off Broadway from Time Square.
Josh: And that’s infuriated people and some of the approach … Let me step back. I was a triathlete for a number of years. I’m a serious bike rider and I actually pay attention to the bike rules. And even as somebody who is a serious cyclist, I feel that it’s great that they added all these bike lanes but the way they did it caused even more problems. And I’m not sure it’s really cut down that much on people getting injured on bikes. That’s one thing that we’re going to look at. But in terms of having cars in the city, whether you believe we should have them or not, they’re there and it’s politically untenable. It’s politically untenable to get rid of all those cars. They’re not going away. If they’re not going away, isn’t it better for us to do things that are going to reduce pollution, that are going to reduce traffic, that are going to actually make it better for pedestrians because people aren’t rushing around anymore? That’s the way that I feel about it. Now here’s another thing. In an ideal world, sure. Maybe we wouldn’t need to have cars in cities. But we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a city where our subways are falling apart. We live in a city where our buses run terribly. And let me tell you something. I lived in Singapore for three years. Singapore is one of the most modern cities in the world. If we had public transport like Singapore had, then sure. Tax the heck out of owning cars. Put in really heavy congestion pricing and cut the use of cars by 80%. But that’s just not reality. That’s not reality. We can live in a fantasy world, or we can as citizens solve the problem that our government clearly isn’t able to solve.
NYLP: Well, congestion pricing seems on the table now. It seems like there’s more and more motivation for that particularly after the election.
Josh: Frankly, there’s talk about it but if you look at all of the polls, most people are opposed to congestion pricing. And the reason they’re opposed to congestion pricing, one is the approach that they want to take here in New York is terrible where they just have one price. It has nothing to do with managing traffic. Frankly, I think mostly the state wants it so they can put more money into the state coffers.
NYLP: Well, if I could pay $10 a month for your app, your platform, and if you grow to where you say you’re going to grow have a 75% success rate of getting a spot, I’d absolutely do that. I feel like it would encourage more cars.
Josh: That’s absolutely our goal.
NYLP: To encourage more cars?
Josh: Oh, no, not to encourage more cars, no. Our goal is to enable people to find spots 75% of the time. Just in response to that, it will encourage a little bit. If they improve the public transportation system here though, I don’t think it will have a big impact. One, if you’ll look at younger millennials and what I call Gen Z now, I think less and less of them are going to have their own personal cars. But for the next 30 years, that’s not going to have a big impact on the number of cars on the road. And one of the things that we ask when we’re doing our surveys is, do you think you’re going to own your car in five years? And 95% of the people said yes. People aren’t giving up their cars right now.
NYLP: Is your goal here to be bought? Who buys you isn’t like a Google buying Waze? Is it that sort of play in the end?
Josh: Yeah. Look, I’m not going to deny it. We would like to get it to the point where we’re bought by much bigger organization that can really expand the community. But I will say something and that is any deal I would do to sell the company would require whoever buys it to run it in the way that our philosophy says it needs to be run for a significant period of time. I won’t sell the company to any acquirer that won’t do that. Because, frankly look, let’s say we get to two and a half million people. Not a huge number of people when you’re talking about a hundred plus million people in these cities around the world. And at that time, we’re generating say an average of $15 a month per user between the membership fees. Generally, we’ll never do specific data. We don’t sell information at all, but more general data for use by cities and companies that really want to dig into urban mobility or nonprofits, that kind of thing. This company is going to generate a lot of cash and unless I can find an acquirer that shares our philosophy and our belief in community that isn’t just buying this as a business but says, “Hey, you know we buy this and we integrate it into our company and we run it as a separate business,” it’s going to make a difference in how we are viewed and what we can contribute to all of those cities, we won’t sell it.
NYLP: Well, that is a wonderful note to end things on. How do people find out more about you and ParkYou!?
Josh: Absolutely. Well, you can find out about me obviously on LinkedIn. If you go and look me up, I’ll come up, Josh Futterman. And if you want to learn more about ParkYou!, you can go to our website at park-you.com. And you can, of course, find the app on the Google Play Store and on the Apple App Store. There’s many ways that you can find out about us.
NYLP: Well, it sounds like you are going to be doing wonderful things. Josh Futterman, thank you for stepping onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us.
Josh: Hey, thank you so much. And one can only hope. We’re definitely excited about solving this problem. Thank you very much for letting us share this with all of the people who listened to your great podcast.
NYLP: It’s a wonderful solution for New York. And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can visit us online at NYLaunchPod.com for transcripts of every episode including this one. And you can follow us on social media, @NYLaunchPod. And if you are a super fan … Josh, are you a super fan?
Josh: I am a super fan of the podcast. It’s an awesome podcast.
NYLP: It is an awesome podcast.
Josh: And by the way, I want to say that there’s like 25 or 30 podcasts out there where they talk to founders. And New York Launch Pod is definitely in the top two or three.
NYLP: Thank you.
Josh: You really need to spend some time listening to it if you want to learn what it really takes to get a company off the ground and what it’s really like for us as founders.
NYLP: We’re going to have to record that plug. And if you are a super fan like Josh, or even if you’re less of a fan like Josh, leave a review on iTunes and Apple Podcast. It does help people discover the show and it is greatly appreciated, and it will help us be recognized as the top two or three podcast interview on founders and telling their stories.
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