Spot Angels’ first learnings + welcome NYC!

We’ve been working on Spot Angels for 4 months now and we are excited to share our progress.

Our goal is to fix parking with data. We’re starting by saving drivers from parking tickets. We send them a first push notification when they park to inform them about the parking rules. If they are at risk of getting a ticket we send them a second push notification 20 minutes before they need to move the car.

More coverage : hello New York!

We worked hard to make our data better and to expand our coverage. Last month, we added all parking regulations of New York City’s 5 boroughs. It was a huge accomplishment. New York is notorious for its complicated parking regulations. The city collects more than $550M a year in parking fines. We now protect drivers in San Francisco and New York City and we plan to cover the 20 largest US cities before the end of the year.

We are excited by the engagement observed so far in New York City and San Francisco. Users have already sent more than 250 pictures of parking signs in those 2 cities alone to make our data better.

More users saved from parking tickets!

We consider that we save a user from a ticket when the second notification — which is a reminder to move the car — is sent. Just last week we sent more than 1,300 of these notifications. And the numbers are growing pretty quickly week after week ;)

Welcome to Zubie, Mojio and Vinli!

We were excited to announce our partnership with Automatic a few months ago. They sell an OBD dongle that connects the car to the phone. Automatic owners are able to link their account to Spot Angels and enjoy a seamless experience. They receive automated push notifications every time they park without even opening the Spot Angels app. They love it!

We are now excited to announce integrations with 3 other leading OBD dongle providers: Zubie, Mojio and Vinli. With these partnerships we are making more users benefit from a seamless Spot Angels experience. Welcome!

Learnings

There are 2 ways users benefit from Spot Angels.

Either they own an OBD dongle that they link to Spot Angels to receive automated notifications. Or they have to “park” manually in the app after parking their car to receive reminders when they have to move the car. Here is what we noticed:

1- There is a friction for a user to “park” manually. There is always a cost-benefit trade-off. Users are not ready to open an app and click on a button every time they park even if it can save them from tickets.

2- Users want to have more control on which notifications they receive and on when they receive them.

We’re working on new features to answer these needs and adding a new city soon.

Stay tuned, an app update is on its way!

As always, we love your feedback ;) Send us an email at [email protected]

Hamza and the Spot Angels team