How can we identify the next great opportunity?

Founder Vision is a one-on-one podcast that digs into deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets as they get vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.

Today, Brett is speaking with Ethan Glass: co-founder and CEO of Ocra (formerly ParkPlace), a unifying technology to help parking facilities overcome their fractured, paper-based systems to dynamically manage rates and inventory across all of their different sales channels.

Catch the full episode in the player below, or on Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts… pretty much wherever you like to listen.

Key Takeaways

Start With What You Know

Ethan and his co-founder were parking operators themselves before they started building what was then called ParkPlace, so they intimately understood the challenges: a market landscape fairly comparable to the digital shift that the hospitality industry went through not long ago.

At the time Ethan leaped a tech solution, operators were managing dozens of different hardware technologies to usher drivers into the garage as well as ensure they have a good parking experience, ensure they pay correctly, minimize cash slippage, and centralize surveillance. From there, the added complexity of contactless and ticketless payment systems and mobile applications made a ripe space for Ethan and his co-founder to solve for operational efficiency.

So they did: for themselves, first, beta testing systems using their LA Coliseum property, and then outward. They made a full pivot into being a SaaS (and left their parking operations behind) at the start of the pandemic.

Go Robust

Ocra’s biggest headwind: is the fact that parking apps are practically API-free. Their multiple-exit CTO is leading an attack force of devs to bridge a collection of custom API integrations: using bots, scrapers, and any other hacking solutions to do the job.

“Then we partner with these companies as well,” Ethan adds, “to not only have band-aid solutions, but to also have a future true solution that will be more scalable, more dependable and more robust. We have been able to figure out a way to make it all happen where the integrity of our customers’ data is rock solid, where anything they want to do works very well. It has been a battle to accomplish this, which has increased our defensibility because the cost for someone else to come and do the exact same thing, they would have to go through all the learning we went through the last year-and-a-half.”

Use Your Blessings-In-Disguise For All Their Worth

COVID, unsurprisingly, was a big part of Ocra’s journey. Event parking was decimated by COVID. It went from having thousands and thousands of transactions per day to having next to zero, with no events going on to spectate.

“We used our learnings from the industry and also our agileness as a team,” Ethan says, “and went on LinkedIn. We used a scraper and reached out to about 3,000 parking professionals. We talked to everyone from valets to CEOs and in between, and we interviewed them about what problems they had pre-COVID, what problems they had then, and what tech initiatives they were looking at that they have to meet whatever happens in the post-COVID world.”

That’s when they learned about the problem of multiple parking sales channels in an industry without the resources and personnel to build a technology to manage them.

Over and over, they said: if you have it and you license it to us, we needed that yesterday.

“That’s what led Orca towards that pivot,” Ethan tells Brett. “We realized we could start selling this product before we even build it out as a SaaS product, it’s in such high demand. This issue is ubiquitous. We saw a big opportunity not to have to sell to consumers anymore. We don’t have to be a parking operator. Instead, we can just sell to parking operators and really focus on solving this one core problem.”

Spoiler: that was a very successful move.

Keep It Lean

Ocra has been able to stay super lean throughout their story, and Ethan is deeply proud of the precise method behind that leanness.

“Our investors have loved it, of course,” he smiles. “It is now intrinsic to the team, this reflex that — before we go build something — we really try to identify what problem it solves, what the core kernel of it is, and how much we can do manually before we automate, just to make sure what we have already in our heads or validated on paper is truly what’s needed. We have found some truly creative solutions to make that happen.”