We bring you the brand story of Airgarage, a startup from California, United States. AirGarage is a peer-to-peer parking marketplace that seeks to revolutionize the way people park at universities and in congested areas. The platform connects homeowners and businesses that have extra parking spaces with students and community members that need affordable parking.
It offers the solution for all parking owner’s needs in terms of logistics, securing new customers, payment collections, management, and so forth with an all-in-one mobile application to monitor the client’s needs. The startup founded in 2017, offers a smartphone application that sums every requirement needed to manage a parking spot in an area.
How did it start?
Scott Fitsimones, Chelsea Border, and Jonathan Barkl initially conceived the idea of AirGarage during their sophomore year at Arizona State University last 2017. The expanding number of students that bring their cars to campus faces the lack of parking spaces within the university’s vicinity.
Initially, Scott Fitsimones was paying $1,800 per semester for a parking spot that has a faraway location from Arizona State. The parking frustration led Fitsimones along with Border and Barkl to associate with nearby homeowners and rent out their parking spaces.
According to Fitsimones, this decision led to the ASU student to pay only $80 for the entire school year. The discovery grew to connect several students in need of parking spaces with homeowners.
The business venture led the trio to partner with local businesses, hotels, and a church to open up their parking spaces to those in need with a 70-30 split in revenues. The trio’s business venture led to opening up numerous parking spots that are available for anyone and not limited to students only.
How AirGarage works?
AirGarage is a platform that connects homeowners that have extra spaces with students and community members that need affordable parking. The marketplace contains both a web application and a mobile application.
Users create accounts, list parking spaces, and search available parking spaces on either platform. The platform is semester based parking on the ASU campus through a web application. The main tool that users utilize when interacting with the AirGarage platform is an interactive map listing of all available parking spaces. Users may search a locale for spaces that they might like, and then click on parking icons on the map in order to acquire more detailed information about each spot. This information will include the general location, price, restrictions, timing of usage, as well as other pertinent information.
The goal is to minify the risk of developing a large product that no users will want by only developing semesterly parking at ASU in the short term and then expanding. AirGarage also offers on-demand, time-optimized parking. This means that users are able to log onto the web or mobile application and reserve parking immediately for as little as 30 minutes in a space near them.
For example, a student that only attends class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday currently only has the option to rent a space 24/7 for a year at ASU. With AirGarage, that user will be able to rent the same space as a student that has Tuesday and Thursday classes, saving each student money while allowing the homeowner to earn more and eliminating waste.
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Funding and Business Rise
The founders of AirGarage dropped out of ASU to focus on AirGarage and its app full-time. By 2018, the trio had 250 parking spaces in downtown Arizona alone. Fitsimones and his company left Arizona and set up a base in San Fransisco, which began to receive its $2 million funding from Angel investors and the so-called “venture capitalists.”
Currently, the company’s first round of investments in 2019 amounts to $2.1 million from Floodgate, Founders Fund, Weekend Fund, and Angels. The company remains as a privately-owned company headed by 23-year-old startups Scott Fitsimones, Chelsea Border, and Jonathan Barkl.
Go-To-Market Plan
AirGarage has a multi-sided platform with two distinct customer segments that must interact in order for the marketplace to be successful. One side consists of homeowners and businesses that have extra parking spaces in their driveways, parking lots, and backyards; the other side, in the short term, students and, in the long term, other community members that are in need of affordable parking.
The company has already begun actively marketing to homeowners, as the supply side of any marketplace tends to be the more difficult side to onboard. Through a variety of means, from door-to-door knocking to localized Facebook advertising, AirGarage has acquired the initial set of homeowners.
Meanwhile, without any active marketing being conducted, students have already begun signing up to display their interest in the platform through its landing page. Word of mouth has been the only form of marketing that has taken place.
The main competitors in the parking marketplace are currently attempting to tackle the entire market at once, which is causing them great delays due to the insurmountable task of bringing a product to mass market. AirGarage’s strategy is to begin with a small niche – parking at ASU – and then expand our market – to other universities, and eventually beyond. This will allow them to become revenue positive in the short term as opposed to parking competitors that are being forced to dole out large advertising costs up front as a result of their failure to target a specific market.
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