Jonathon Barkl explains why Air Garage replaced parking-management software instead of integrating with it. Legacy systems lack robust APIs and their operators are competitors, making integration brittle. Air Garage built its own stack for payments, enforcement, and pricing, then swapped it in without disrupting owners, layering features that drive revenue and tenant satisfaction.
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I had a question about the supply side. You went from originally approaching people, homeowners or churches with no existing systems, to approaching properties with what you described as like five different platforms that they're using, and you somehow got them to move over to your platform. Did you try to ever integrate with their existing systems, or did you know upfront that they needed to switch over to yours? And I guess the Second part of that question, what advice do you have for other marketplaces that are trying to work with the supply side that might have existing platforms? Asking for a friend.
Yeah, I think that obviously what worked for us is not necessarily gonna work for everybody. And that's why, you know, I highlighted the examples of Uber and, you know, Opendoor and Lyft and companies that had a very different scaling trajectory than we did in terms of how they went to market. For us, it's a very unique situation where the real estate owner, they own the asset and then they're always effectively hiring a management company to run that asset. And the management company, generally speaking, is the people bringing in their disparate systems. And so in some sense, we're going to the owners. There's been a lot of history of technology companies that have been started in the parking industry and tried to change the industry. And the way that they've tried to do that over the last 20 years before Air Garage was basically saying, you know, we're software engineers, we know how to build software, we know how to build technology, but we don't want to do the hard distribution stuff and we don't want to do the hard operational stuff of operating a parking lot, like cleaning and sweeping and, you know, picking up trash and stuff. And so what we're going to do instead of just sell our software to the existing parking management companies because they already have the relationship with the owner and that's the fastest way for us to go to market. And what we found is like you just see time and time again that that has been tried. And what winds up happening is 2 things. First of all, it's much harder to distribute to those existing parking companies than you would think because they're all competitors. And so they don't want to be using the same platform. So it's hard to get a ton of market penetration. And even if you do, like something like SpotHero has, where SpotHero is pretty common now and most parking operators work with SpotHero, you don't really like get that much of the economic transaction value because Most of it is locked away in those sort of legacy systems. And so, you know, I will say at the beginning, we have always had the like buy and build dilemma of do we buy this thing? Do we build this thing? And in the beginning, we really tried to buy things and tried to do these integrations and tried to work with third parties. And what we just found time and time again is that even the companies that claim to be technology forward in the industry, in the parking industry, are super backwards. basically no real technical chops. They were not really software engineering or technology companies, technology companies like you would think of in the traditional Silicon Valley sense. Like, I mean, there's one that we were trying to integrate with and, you know, they didn't even have like an API. It was like some Atom feed that we had to scrape basically and scrape emails and piece together the email scraping with their Atom feed that they were giving us in order to like make things work because they're selling their technology to parking companies who don't even have a way to integrate with an API. So why would they have an API, right? And so yeah, we've just found time and time again that the existing technology and stuff that exists in the industry isn't up to par of where we think it needs to be. And so we've always just had to build the things ourselves in order to make it fully function. And now I'm really glad that we made that investment because based on that foundation that we built, that we had to build at the beginning, which is all the basic stuff, like how do you have the backend move the money around? How do you do accept payments from drivers? How do you do enforcement? The thing I always talk about is You know, there's sort of this era of Air Garage's history where we were doing this hot swap phase where it's just, how do you replace everything that they already have with our own system and basically do it without them noticing? So the scene that I always imagine is the scene in Indiana Jones where he's in the, you know, the temple and he's basically trying to swap out the like golden skull for a bag of sand without setting off the booby traps. It's like, that's what we were trying to do is basically look like and act like and talk like a traditional parking management company, But it turns out we actually have all this cool technology that's powering everything, but the owner doesn't care about that, right? They don't care about the basic technology. And now what they do care about is all the stuff that we've been able to build on top of that technology, like the dynamic pricing system, the license plate reading camera system, the enforcement system, all these things that exist only because that foundation exists in the first place. So it's going to depend a lot obviously on what customers want. But for us, what we knew customers want at the end of the day, the owners of the real estate, is to maximize They want 3 things. They want to maximize the income of the property that they have, and they want to have a reliable partner that they can trust, and they want to make sure that it's a good experience for their tenants and their customers and things like that. And we knew that in the long run, all of those things would be best served by having a unified single-owner platform of a company that is doing both the technology and the operations. My big caveat there is that may not be true in every industry. So it's really just about understanding what a customer wants and then delivering on that.
