ParkEvergreen
Ben Canty and his co-founders came out of consulting backgrounds, traveling three or four times a month. That frequent travel exposed them to how broken airport parking was. Ben described paying more than he wanted to park his car at the airport and realizing that a rideshare was often cheaper. The team founded the company in 2016 to modernize how parking is sold and managed.
The first version targeted on-street and off-street parking, including street spots, surface lots, and garages. Ben said the company was "making a couple thousand dollars a month" during a single pilot, and it reported about $15,000 in top-line revenue for 2016. The team realized that competing with parking meters and pay machines meant asking consumers to switch from a decades-old process to a mobile app. Investors were also growing tired of mobile parking apps, which pushed the team toward a different model.
In the on-street phase, the biggest cost was user acquisition. The team sold directly to office managers and tried monthly parking passes for downtown employees, hoping recurring monthly revenue would fund the harder work of winning hourly parkers. In December the company switched to airports. Ben said three deals were booked but kept under wraps because the team was working with cities. He expected the first revenue in June and a ramp to roughly $170,000 in MRR starting in July.
The pivot to airports reflected a larger market. Ben said most U.S. airports were launching multi-year modernization projects with parking expansion budgets. The company charges a flat fee of about $100 per space per month. It also plans to add features such as shuttle tracking and traffic routing, and to use SMS so travelers can pay for parking by text. The team bootstrapped until it raised about $150,000 from 500 Startups. Five co-founders split equity evenly, and most worked without pay while covering expenses through contract work or full-time jobs.
As of the interview, ParkEvergreen had not yet booked the airport revenue it was projecting. It had about eight employees, and the team was waiting for the airport contracts to be signed before starting user acquisition in March. The company's stated long-term aim is for travelers to know exactly when they will reach their gate, and to eventually take over entire airport parking facilities.
- •Founding the company around the founders' own travel pain gave them a deep understanding of the problem and a reason to stay committed without pay.
- •Pivoting from consumer street parking to B2B airport contracts moved the company from a hard-to-acquire consumer market to a buyer with budgets and a recurring per-space fee.
- •A flat monthly per-space fee creates predictable recurring revenue, which matters more than the early one-time pilot income.
- •Using SMS and a parking ticket to capture users at the point of need sidesteps the app-download barrier that had stalled the earlier consumer model.
- •Timing aligned with airports' large modernization and parking expansion budgets, so the company was selling into an active spending cycle.
- 1.Start from a problem you personally experience repeatedly, and validate it by talking to people in the same situation before building.
- 2.If consumer adoption is hard, look for a B2B buyer who has budget and a recurring operational need, and sell to them directly.
- 3.Price per unit managed (for example, per space per month) so revenue scales with the customer's footprint and stays recurring.
- 4.Meet users where they already are, such as with SMS or a physical touchpoint, before asking them to install an app.
- 5.Use a pilot to earn signed, multi-site contracts with expansion clauses tied to success metrics, then build the product around the customer's rollout.
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