Re:Vatler (YC S14) wants to be your on-demand valet
by hamzaouazzanic on Monday August 18, 2014 @07:03PM
(#8195174)
thank you @sargun for the brilliant analysis. I am Vatler co-founder. The reason why we start with the office use-case is essentially because we can predict the demand, break deals with garages nearby and build our network of valet at low cost. Next step is the anywhere, anytime use-case. It's going to be huge :)
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Re:Vatler (YC S14) wants to be your on-demand valet
by sargun on Monday August 18, 2014 @08:33PM
(#8195457)
Excellent! I think that's the right way to go to be honest. Become an arbitrage service, and then use the monthly service fee to "hide" the irregularity in "cost" to the market.
Once you have an overall picture of market demand (parkers), and market capacity (free garages), and can predict the supply vs. demand well, you can introduce greater amounts of liquidity to the market. This results in a win for the customer, as well as the parking facilities themselves. Removing the need for facilities to be licensed, and have all the same requirements they do now (deregulation), also results in dropping costs (slightly).
I feel like the next logical conclusion is a hybrid model of Zipcar, and Vatler. In which, you allow people to check out other's vehicles during the day.