Entrepreneurship • App Design & Development • Fundraising
ValPark Mobile App Design, Development and Growth
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A passion project…
While working for a digital ad agency in 2013 I noticed the app space exploding and, most notably, how Uber had really defined the '“on-demand” experience for transportation. As a young man living in Washington, DC, I often used valet at hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. The process was antiquated and primarily cash-based. There was no way to track revenues or vehicles outside of a paper ticket. There was no quality control or oversight. Also, you never really knew if your location had valet at all, there was no database. Enter ValPark Mobile.
ValPark was created to bridge the technological gap in valet parking. The app allowed customers to find & pay for parking at thousands of locations. In addition, once the customer was ready to depart from a night out they could request their car and have it ready and waiting outside. Customers could even tip and leave reviews for locations and attendants.
For vendors ValPark was a huge advantage. They could now use a cashless model which prevented theft as well as tracked sales for the day across multiple locations. They had a real time dashboard of their business and access to a community of customers using one central app.
Design & Developement
Being an Art Director with a lot of front-end development experience, I started the concept of the app with a requirement doc that lead to wireframing my screens and flow. This was my first app but I used my web responsive design knowledge to then fully design each screen and asset. I worked with local developer to get a prototype up and running for proof of concept and continued to iterate until I had something I could use to raise capital. Starting with just $7,000 I was able to grow ValPark into a $380,000 revenue company in less than a year.
Shark Tank & Beyond…
As the app grew in locations and success investors started to take note. I was contacted by the producers of Shark Tank to come on and pitch my app to Mark Cuban and the rest of the Sharks. Although we didn’t get a deal we garnered a lot of attention which led to me selling the majority of my equity to a group that waned to take the app even further. The experience as a whole was amazing and I learned a lot about running a start-up, raising capital, burn rate, and client-facing pitches. The entire experience helped equip me for future endeavors!
