Forming an Opportunity Belief

Forming an Opportunity Belief

Beginning point: 

I believe that there are a large group of Americans that are frustrated with the overall organization of parking all over the place (specifically airports) and the idea for paying for parking even though you're just leaving your car at some random place.

Describing my belief

The unmet need is people to not paying for parking and use their car for what it is (an asset). Almost any American with a car has the unmet need of what to do with their car when they are not using it. This is mainly because the car depreciates even if it is just sitting there and I think most people would be willing to use their car to their advantage instead of it just taking up space. Most people who want to use their car to their advantage put it up for rental use on a website called Turo (basically an Airbnb for cars.) After analyzing all of these points I think that this opportunity doesn't exist in people's minds but I 80% sure that this is the right direction for the future of our communal-style economy  

The prototypical customer for this business is anyone who is going off for vacation/business trip and is just leaving their car in their driveway or even leaving it at an airport. 

Iteration #1

The first person that I talked to about this problem was my father. He is an avid traveler and is used to paying for parking at airports and doesn't put much thought into it. When I told him that there could be a solution for people to park their cars at airports for free he became very skeptical. He asked, how is a business expected to thrive like that?" When I later explained to him that I would like to incorporate the idea of a shared parking application for airports he got interested.

My idea was simple, create a shared parking company that manages peoples cars to be rented out once they leave for vacation/business trips. Instead of paying for parking, you would be getting paid for people using your car when you're gone. And when you go to the city you are traveling to, you can go to one of our "airport centralized parking stores" and rent out someone else's car that is going on a similar trip.

Once I told him my whole pitch for the solution to the problem that he didn't think existed, he had a new perspective to look through. By providing the solution to a problem he didn't know he had, he couldn't go back to the old mindset of airport parking. Most of his rebuttals consisted of insurance and other logistics that have already been figured out by companies like Turo. 

Iteration #2

 

After talking to my father, I decided to talk to another prototypical client, a businessman. I decided to pick my uncle, who works for a large investment firm and travels across the country. It seemed to me that he didn't have the problem like my father because most of his expenses were paid for by the company. This included a taxi to the airport or free airport parking.

After noticing that he wasn't the ideal client for the business I decided that the business owners are the right ones to target since they have a vested interest in saving their company a lot of money.

 

Summarize: 

I believe that a lot of the opportunity I had is still there and I think that talking to prototypical customers made the idea more concrete and branched out like I wouldn't expect. 

Yes, I think my idea is structurally more sound after hearing a lot of questions and formulating an answer that seemed intuitive to me. 

I believe that most entrepreneurs must listen to customer feedback with somewhat of a filter because sometimes the feedback is coming from a valid source and other times it is coming from someone you thought was a target customer but just simply isn't the target you hoped they were. However, I do think that it is important to readjust the idea whenever you have a constructive conversation with a real customer or even a fake one.