Executive Summary
Business Goals : to capitalize on a decentralized parking system, to introduce secure payments, to increase business transparency, and to establish a digital renting environment for all consumers.
Management Plan : to identify contingencies, to win support from the city administration, to allocate responsibilities among essential employees.
Market Research : there are two popular applications (Parkgene and Parkaide) that offer blockchain-based parking assistance. The proposal utilizes non-fungible tokens as the key source of competitive advantage.
Marketing Plan : the buyer persona for the current proposal is a male or a female car driver aged from 18 to 40. New customers will be found on social media, via referrals, and with the support of social media influencers and native advertising.
Operational Plan : sales (set monetary milestones), marketing (attract people to the product), research and development (investigate the market), operations (connect with more stakeholders), people (motivate locals to engage in testing), financial and administration (scale the business and continue improving the blockchain system).
Action Plan : to generate a decentralized platform for blockchain-based parking lots in order to avoid the issue of the application being disconnected; to implement real-time navigation to provide car users with relevant evidence regarding available parking spots nearby; to investigate the blockchain network to introduce new transactions based on non-fungible tokens.
Bottom Line : the approximate budget for the proposal is around $200.000. The majority of financial resources are required to cover employees’ efforts and advertising.
Business Plan
Finding a parking spot is one of the hardest tasks that have to be completed by local citizens and visitors across busy metropolitan cities. In addition to the time required to help a person find the best parking spot, they have to waste fuel to park their car and avoid tickets. With approximately 20 hours per annum spent by an average driver to find a parking spot, it can be safe to say that the issue has to be resolved as soon as possible (Yang et al., 2017). In addition, there are plenty of overpayments caused by unreasonably high prices for parking spaces that turn into an approximate income of $20 billion. The scarcity of parking places and their high cost could be the two intertwined reasons contributing to an increased number of road traffic accidents (Dzulkurnain et al., 2019). The inability to find a parking spot quickly could also lead to massive traffic jams. From the existing evidence, it is also clear that most governments cannot resolve that problem by simply creating new parking lots and augmenting the number of parking spots across metropolitan areas.
Business Goals
The primary business goal of the current proposal is to promote the value of decentralized parking and introduce blockchain as one of the most efficient instruments intended to contribute to a transparent network. Blockchain could become a crucial contributor to car parking improvements, as there are virtually no limits to how it could be applied to the process of developing a car parking platform (see Figure 1). Blockchain-based data storage would contribute to a real-time connection between respective sensors across parking facilities and the application developed to support blockchain parking. With the help of the Internet of Things, developers would have the opportunity to generate additional value by reading the data from the GPS signal and offering the optimal routes to the respective parking spots. With additional insights regarding the traffic situations, drivers using the system would have access to alternative routes. Blockchain technology would be the backbone of the project that ensures data credibility during the journey. Hong Kong does not invest too much resources in blockchain and cryptocurrency on a nationwide level, so it is reasonable to make the first move and attain the business goal of deploying decentralized, blockchain-based parking.
Another business goal that is pursued by the author is to introduce secure payments and monetize parking lots in the most efficient ways. The growing influence of digital wallets keeps affecting different businesses, so it is important to reckon with digital currencies and accept crypto payments (Howell et al., 2020). For example, smart contracts could aid consumers in reserving a parking spot in advance while giving the facility administration a chance to run a preliminary check on the driver’s identity. This way, the facility would be required to confirm the payment only in the case the customer adheres to all the guidelines and does not represent a threat. As for the process of monetization, the author expects to expand the existing automotive solutions by providing consumers with access to a complex blockchain platform. At the same time, it would not be an application informing drivers of free parking spots but rather a distributed marketplace operating in real-time to bring together car users and parking providers. The fast pace of technology development could be the main reason why blockchain became the focus of this proposal.