Assignment 25A What's Next?

Existing Market

What I Think Is Next:

I think the next step for my service of providing parking garages to college towns that are in need of parking spots is to expand to not only car parking spots, but to offer scooter and motorcycle spots for college students. Currently, in many college towns especially those with large and spread out campuses more and more students are beginning to have motorcycle or scooters to help them get around campus more efficiently and quickly. As of now at my current college campus, there are no designated parking spots on the street parking available for motorcycles or scooters. This creates an unsafe and unaccessible environment for the people who use these as their form of transportation. Creating parking spots available for scooter and motorcycles would allow my service to expand and be able to offer more than just car parking spots. 

Existing Market Interview:

1. The first interviewee that I conducted mentioned to me that I should have bike spots as well on the street so that people do not have to worry about a place to park their bikes as well as their bikes being stolen. I thought this was a really good idea since a lot of people are starting to lean more towards automobiles and forgetting that a lot of people use biking as their form of transportation.
2. The second interviewee that I talked to told me that I should implement more scooter parking and to her surprise I told her that was the exact new idea that I was looking to implement in my business. This leads me to believe that this really is an unmet need as well.
3. The third interviewee that I interviewed told me that going along with my new scooter parking introduction, I should try to make it to where everyone can have their own assigned parking spot so that way it is not a "free for all" when it comes to finding a spot.

Reflection: 

     After listening to what each of the three people that I interviewed had to say about what is next for my service and what new services I should look at implementing into my company. All three of the people were surprisingly very similar with the new idea that I had come up with, which gives me a great sense of reassurance that I am implementing a new service to my company that will be able to benefit a bunch of customers. 

     My first interview provided me with a new insight and a new form of transportation to cater parking spots toward, bicycles. I had not thought about the issue of the lack of bike parking until this interviewee really made me think about it, and the more I thought I realized I do not see any or hardly any bicycle parking available on campus and especially off campus.

     My second interviewee surprised me when she told me that my new ideas for my company should be more scooter parking spots because that was exactly my idea that I was planning on implementing so this helped me confirm that I was coming up with good ideas and moving my company in the right direction.

     My final interviewee helped to provide an efficient idea that I should make each parking spot for the scooters have an assigned spot so that they would not have to worry about finding a parking spot or having their spot that they pay for be taken by someone. 

     In the conclusion after all of these interviews I really gained informative insight on my new product to introduce in my company. 

New Market:

A new market that I had previously not thought about was for college students that live on campus. I do not have control over how many parking spots or garages that the University's would provide for their students on campus but, my service and my company could be able to come in and talk to the right people at the University's and propose plans and ideas on how to make expansions for on-campus parking. I know first hand that this is a HUGE issue, the lack of parking is not the University's fault but rather just a space fault. The University has hardly any control over how many parking spots to put into their campus so if I was able to form a contract and a plan to help the University's expand their number of parking spots on campus so that way I would be able to help expand and meet the unmet needs of college students on campus that drive and park on campus. 

New Market Interviews: 

1. My first interviewee was with a student who is currently living on campus at his university and he has a car at school that he parks on campus. When I asked him if he could find any benefit from having more parking spots built on campus he was very quick to say YES and he informed me how hard and how time consuming it can become to find a parking spot on campus. 
2. My second interviewee was a student who also lives on campus, she told me that she as well parks her car on campus and says that there are often nights when she can not find any parking spots located near her dorm and she has to drive further away to find a parking spot or in a parking garage which also makes her feel unsafe when this happens at night.

Reflection:

     When I was first reflecting on the new market that I could appeal and market towards I could not think of any one group of people until I thought of college students living on campus. After I conducted these interviews I felt so much more confident in my decision to have on campus college student as the new market that I am going to appeal to. 

     My first interview gave me a little bit more of a perspective of just how busy the parking lot can become and how crowded they can become. As well as my second interview, it let me know that these students on campus also have safety issues when they have to find parking spots that are far from their dorms.

     In conclusion, these two interviews helped me gain insight on my new market and the potential customers that maybe one day I could work with my company to expand on.