Authored by: Can Cui , Fengbo Zhu , Guanchen Guo , Yuelin Wang , Ziyi Yun
Summary
The parking industry is plagued by inefficiencies, with existing navigation systems unable to deliver real-time parking solutions. Drivers often struggle to find convenient spaces, while parking facilities require costly upgrades for even basic functionality. Our company seeks to bridge these gaps by creating an AI-powered platform that consolidates parking resources from shopping malls and on-street locations, providing real-time availability, personalized recommendations, and affordable upgrades for parking lots. This platform will enhance accessibility for drivers, benefit parking facilities, and support merchants through targeted advertising.
Our approach involves developing a platform that leverages AI and machine learning to predict parking availability based on user inputs like destination and departure time. For parking facilities, we offer cost-effective upgrades that include automatic vehicle recognition and IoT-enabled parking guidance systems. The platform will be accessible via a WeChat mini-program, ensuring a seamless user experience. Our marketing strategy will combine online and offline initiatives, targeting Gen Z on platforms like TikTok and Xiaohongshu while implementing offline promotions to enhance brand visibility in high-traffic areas.
Within three years, we aim to reach 30% of drivers in Xi’an and expand to other major cities. The platform will generate revenue through targeted advertising, subscription fees, and commissions from parking upgrades. Our low initial costs will enable us to achieve profitability within two years. Ultimately, our long-term vision is to position the platform as an essential tool for urban drivers, facilitating improved traffic management and fostering economic development through more intelligent parking solutions.
Describe the Business Idea
We plan to create a platform that integrates parking resources and uses artificial intelligence to recommend the best parking solutions to users. This platform will integrate resources from shopping mall car parks and on-street parking, creating a detailed database. By installing data collection devices, we will monitor the availability of parking spaces in real-time. Users only need to enter their destination and departure time, and the platform will use machine learning and AI technologies to analyze the collected data and predict parking availability in real time, considering factors such as parking lot location, walking distance, convenience, and parking fees to provide the most convenient navigation and parking solution. Our customers include drivers in need of parking, car parks and nearby merchants. We offer products and services such as intelligent parking solutions recommendations, intelligent parking lot upgrades, and personalized advertising. In terms of revenue, we will generate profit from both the user side and the business side. On the user side, the platform will feature advertising, analyze user destinations to recommend personalized ads and generate revenue through exposure. In addition, subscription members can enjoy an ad-free experience and receive reserved parking spaces or parking vouchers in partnership with car parks, with the platform charging subscription fees. On the business side, we will charge commissions to merchants around car parks to promote nearby businesses. We will also charge car parks to install our equipment, perform intelligent upgrades, and perform ongoing maintenance. Smart upgraded car parks will receive higher recommendation weights, and the platform will take a commission from the parking fees generated through our platform.
Explain Value Creation
Drivers:
Time is money. Users simply enter their destination and departure time, and the platform provides the most convenient parking solution, saving time and effort in finding a space. Subscribers enjoy an ad-free experience and can reserve parking spaces to ensure availability even during peak hours. Drivers can also receive parking vouchers to reduce their parking costs.
Car Parks:
By installing our data collection equipment and intelligent management system, car parks can improve management efficiency and space utilization. Intelligently upgraded car parks will receive higher recommendation weights, attracting more users and increasing parking revenues.
Local Merchants:
Merchants can promote their businesses through the platform to attract more users who come to park, thereby increasing footfall and sales. The platform can recommend personalized advertisements based on the user’s parking location and time, helping merchants market more effectively.
Map Service Companies:
Our platform leverages the navigation services of well-established mapping companies that charge for each API call. The mapping service company earns revenue every time a user utilizes the navigation feature.
Explain Business Innovation
Diverse Parking Solutions Most of the existing mapping software only navigates users to their destinations but rarely recommends parking solutions based on the availability of parking spaces at the destination. We don't just focus on "getting your car to your destination" but also on "parking your car most conveniently." If the car park at the destination is too large or challenging to park, we recommend that the user park the car in a nearby car park and walk a short distance to the destination. Through the integration of parking resources near the destination, we aim to save time by recommending a variety of "Parking + Walking" combinations, avoiding the difficulty of finding a parking space due to the driver's unfamiliarity with the neighborhood and saving time and effort. Integration of Parking Resources In most areas, existing mapping software does not integrate data such as on-street parking spaces beyond large car parks in shopping malls, the number of car park spaces, and their availability, making it difficult for users who are not familiar with the neighborhood of their destinations to make full use of the parking resources in the area. We integrate the above information to provide users with more abundant and detailed parking information to avoid wasting time searching for parking spaces after arriving at the destination. Parking Space Availability Online Although car park entrances often display parking space availability, users often rely more on navigation software, and this data is not displayed in existing mapping software, resulting in drivers arriving at their destination only to find that there is no parking space available. We upload real-time parking space availability to our servers and analyze it using artificial intelligence algorithms in combination with historical data so that we can predict whether there are enough spaces in a car park or recommend nearby car parks that have spaces available before the user leaves. Low-Cost Intelligent Car Park Reconstruction Existing car parks usually need to replace all the equipment, which is costly, and only have simple management, monitoring, and charging functions, at most limited to "which car is parked in which spot." Our solution has a cost advantage: there is no need to remove or modify the existing system; you can just add and install the primary IoT cameras and equip an ordinary PC as the management terminal to achieve intelligent reconstruction. We can not only achieve the functions of the existing solution but also achieve the networking of the remaining information that is accurate to the specific parking spot. On this basis, we can add a common display screen for the road in the car park and even guide each car to the specific parking space when it enters, which significantly improves parking efficiency and convenience and reduces the management cost of complex car parks.
Explain CSR Policy
Our biggest CSR is this platform itself: reducing carbon emissions and being environmentally friendly. Assuming that every time a user travels an extra kilometer to park their car, they will emit an average of 259 grams of carbon dioxide, and every time they wait in a slow queue in a car park, they will emit even more carbon dioxide. If our platform is used in advance to avoid detours and queues for parking spaces, this can add up to a significant reduction in carbon emissions and energy wastage with minimal walking distances.
Our ability to help users park faster also helps to ease traffic jams in the community. Traffic near large shopping centers is often jammed due to parking queues taking up lanes, and dispersing drivers to parking spaces around their destinations can effectively relieve traffic pressure at a single point in a community and improve overall efficiency.
We can also join hands with traffic departments to promote traffic safety awareness among the public. We will encourage users to go to regulated parking spaces in the interface to reduce the potential traffic safety risks caused by illegal parking; we will also contribute to traffic safety by reminding users not to drink and drive when they go to certain destinations, such as bars.
Sustainability and Scalability
Sustainability of the Business
The number of cars in our city is approaching 5 million, with a daily growth of about 2,000 cars. According to this speed, it is expected that 2.19 million new cars will be added in three years, while according to the government's plan, only 510,000 new parking spaces will be added in three years. This means that not only do we have a vast potential user group now, but 'parking difficulty' will still be a big problem in the future. Therefore, from the demand side, our products will continue to have room for growth.
The marginal effect of our platform in terms of expansion costs is not apparent: with the increase of users and cooperating car parks, we only need to proportionally invest in more computing power for analysis and a lot of maintenance staff, with no additional warehousing and shipping costs; and in the increasingly advanced network and digital technology, the cost of the network and computing power resources will be lower and lower.
By not providing navigation services directly but purchasing APIs with map navigation software, we can effectively avoid head-on competition; even if navigation software viciously raises prices, we can still choose their competitors. Meanwhile, to avoid imitators from engaging in price wars with us, we can protect our innovation and technology by applying for patents, or in the worst case, we can transfer the patents to the map navigation software and give up the competition to collect royalties instead.
Scalability of the Business
As stated in the previous Sustainability section, we have a vast and growing number of potential users, so there is steady potential for expansion. As we primarily provide online services, fewer objective factors are limiting our expansion - low warehousing and shipping costs are only a tiny part of the business, and cloud computing services are a fully competitive market, so network and computing resources are cheap and easy to obtain.
In terms of company management, our platform requires only a thin team and can avoid the management chaos experienced by large-scale businesses with many employees. Like a small game studio, a team of 50 people can cover a range of tasks, such as development, finance, public relations, promotion, etc., without the need for complex, layered management.
In our city, the government has begun a trial to encourage drivers traveling to hospitals and tourist attractions to park around their destinations to reduce congestion, and we are confident that our platform is responding to this call without resistance from this aspect of the policy.
69% of drivers surveyed in our research would like to use our product, and according to government data, the average driver has 0.69 cars per driving license holder. Based on the growth data, optimistically, in three years, there will be about 10 million drivers in the city of Xi'an, with a total of 7 million vehicles, and we could have up to 6.9 million users in our city. Of course, in addition to this figure, we have to subtract people who have a driver's license but hardly ever travel by car, senior citizens who are not used to using intelligent software, and people who do not need to look for a parking space.
Business Plan
Comments from the Evaluation Panel
This project introduces a smart parking solution that aims to cut down the time spent by drivers hunting for parking spots by providing them with real-time parking availability. It's a win-win, adding value for car owners and contributing to reduced carbon emissions and improved urban traffic flow. The business concept is truly praiseworthy.
Regarding the business plan, it covers all the critical aspects with a logical flow. However, there's scope for enhancing certain finer points. For example, incorporating the schematic diagrams shown in the video into the business plan would enhance its appeal. Moreover, the plan could benefit from more detailed analysis in areas such as industry and market research, management and organizational structure, and financial projections. All in all, it's a solid business plan with room for further refinement.
Comments