In building what he hopes is the perfect parking app, Chicago entrepreneur Eyal Amir has pivoted four times, dipped into personal savings, brought on a half-dozen partners (most of them coders), identified what customers need — even what he needs from them — and brought his startup Faspark from a dead stop to 20,000 users and the cusp of success.
Faspark’s story is typical of many startups, where success comes down to an alchemy of good ideas, seamless execution, persistence and enforced realism.
“We have — in a biased way of saying it — transforming technology,” Amir, Faspark’s CEO, said from a corner of NextSpace in River North, envisioning how fleet managers, car manufacturers and commuters will benefit. “We have technology that will change the way quite a few businesses work.”
But he’s realistic. People are interested but not paying yet. And technological solutions aren’t money.
“We are close to proving a business model,” Amir says with a smile.
So far, Faspark’s entrepreneurship lessons to its founders include:
style=”line-height: 30px;”>build capabilities around the idea (in this case, an app that can track the relative likelihood of available parking places within a few blocks of a driver’s location on Google maps);
More Top Picks Best Climbing Harnesses For Beginners
style=”line-height: 30px;”>expand the user base as quickly as possible when feedback is important to a business, even if the revenue model isn’t perfected. “Eat your savings.” Funding yourself can enable owners to maintain control of the company and underscore cost discipline. But set what Amir calls a “red line” for how much of your savings you’ll tap. (He won’t endanger his retirement fund or mortgage);
style=”line-height: 30px;”>build customer feedback quickly into new iterations of the business. Your first business model may start a conversation about their pain points, but feedback will pinpoint their problems;
style=”line-height: 30px;”>let your revenue model follow the customer pain solved by your business model. And be ready: It may take awhile.
It’s not as if no one else knows it’s a pain in the neck to find a place to park in Chicago. ParkWhiz, ParkMe and SpotHero allow users to search online for available parking lot options. Apps like Chicago Parking, iSpotSwap, Parking Mate and Parker offer a mobile experience that includes street-parking spots vacated by other users.
At least others agree there’s a problem there worth solving. As a matter of fact, Faspark and ParkWhiz announced a partnership on Thursday.
In 2 1/2 years, Amir has taken his machine learning background from the University of Illinois and Stanford and parlayed it into a classic startup tale of pain, solution, market, strategy and pivoting around surprise obstacles.
Finding the right revenue model has required consistent evolution.
“It took us a long time to do the research and development, trying to understand the right product that people will use and how to scale it,” he said.
After a year of tinkering, it took 18 months to decide who would pay for the service. Would the consumers pay? Car makers? Fleet managers?
“Now we know they’ll all pay; we just need to do it in the right way,” Amir said. The right way with their technology meant quickly getting to scale, and that made Chicago an essential test market: It is big enough, dense enough, and “also a market where you feel the problem,” he said.
Meanwhile, Amir says he seeks “stickiness” in customer behavior.
Having started to build incentives to get customers to return to the app, and with his business poised to scale, Amir and his team feel they’re ready to seek investors.
At last Amir’s obsession with Faspark is at a crossroads, in an encouraging kind of way.