ReservEat

Co-Founder

ReservEat is the brainchild of myself & Rohan Rayarikar. We found that making plans with a group of friends is often an arduous process. Figuring out who was available to join, what everyone wanted to eat (food is key), where everyone wanted to hang out, and when it was convenient to meet up took too much personal effort for a single person.

Consequentially, we decided that we wanted to build a platform that could automate all those steps for the lazy yet enterprising individual. ReservEat was manifested as a mobile app (on iOS) to serve just this purpose.

Here are some cool things that ReservEat empowered you to be able to do:

Select contacts & send them automated text invites to your plan. It was able to figure out their availability to join from their response to the text.
Gave you the option of selecting specific places to propose on a plan from options sourced from the Yelp API & our unofficial OpenTable catalog scraper (a delectable marriage of BeautifulSoup & NightmareJS).
Took your choices of cuisine (ex. Thai & Indian) combined with your preferred neighborhoods (ex. Tribeca or the East Village) & presented recommendations that fit the bill.
Allowed you to book your place at your preferred location for the confirmed party of people through a one-tap booking link directly to OpenTable.
Sent out automated reminders to everyone involved prior to the plan along with all the final details.

Throughout the process of bringing ReservEat to life, Rohan and I embarked on a wide array of activities not limited to engineering. In addition to writing code, we had to devise an overview of the competitive landscape, ascertain our value proposition, and identify our target markets. With that data in hand, we created and evaluated different business models to attain profitability, leveraged different marketing mediums to reach our customers (Facebook, Instagram, & others), partnered with OpenTable through their affiliate program, and gathered a myriad of learnings about building a B2C product.

XactSpot

Co-Founder

The lack of digitization in the parking world broadly was & remains appalling. For consumers, knowing when and where to park based on real-time, accurate data is still a missing commodity. For parking providers, knowledge about their premises in real-time (occupancy, enforcement) was equally lacking.

XactSpot was a platform built to solve both sides of this problem. Through the use of computer-vision, XactSpot was able to match incoming & outgoing vehicles to customer knowledge bases for parking providers. In real-time, XactSpot could inform parking providers about the validity of their parking customers, notify them about illegal entrants, and give them real-time occupancy figures without any additional work on the part of parking customers.

How did this work? Through the installation of network-enabled cameras mounted on entry/exit parameters that streamed video to a centralized server which was responsible for real-time inference of license plates to customer data.

Why XactSpot?

Unit-economics played a big factor in the advantage of XactSpot over other parking solution providers. For instance, most parking solution providers used a physical device installed on each and every spot to acknowledge occupancy — this low-level tech did not provide rich detail about the occupant (such as the exact car or customer), scaled in cost along with the size of the lot (cost of digitizing a parking lot depended on the quantity of spaces therein), and maintenance efforts were high. We calculated that the cost of digitizing a single spot was upwards of $200 (fixed cost) & several hundred more over the lifetime of maintenance.

In comparison, XactSpot’s technology only needed clearly designated entries and exits to a parking lot “enable” it for digitization. That is, regardless of the size of the parking lot, the cost only scaled on the number of entries and exits (usually this is only one or two).

For Other Entrepreneurs

Hardly often do you find useful learnings of an unrealized startup — so here are mine:

Get The First Sale Early — For our first customer, we built multiple prototypes, installed on-premise equipment, & spent many hours managing their service. However, when it came to making a sale or get a guarantee of intention to pay, the customer always raised their requirements higher. Lesson: get a commitment of payment early based on written, agreed-upon deliverables.
Choose Your Partners Carefully — Be selective & restrictive with whom you’ve chosen to work with. Remember, these are people that you’re spending nights and weekends working with. If there is a lack of transparency & trust, you can hardly be confident in running a well-oiled machine.
Hire Early — Marketing & Sales are fundamental to having a successful product. As a founder your first instinct is want to do everything yourself & at the lowest cost possible. Do not restrict yourself to this idea — find people who can evangelize your product and build a sales pipeline early.