If he hadn’t been laid off or racked up $5,000 in parking tickets, Mark Lawrence might have never launched his digital parking company.
Today, the 37-year-old sits at the helm of SpotHero, which has booked more than $1 billion in online parking reservations — from at least 10 million drivers across 300 cities in the U.S. and Canada — since launching in 2011, according to the company.
SpotHero declined to provide revenue figures, but its website notes that it takes a 35% cut of each reservation. The company has other revenue streams, too — like selling price data analysis to parking sellers, for example.
The idea came from Lawrence’s frustrations trying to park his car in downtown Chicago, while working as a financial analyst at Bank of America.
“The thing that always got me was the street cleaning,” Lawrence tells CNBC Make It, adding that his demanding job made it tough to remember to move his car and avoid accumulating tickets.
After he got laid off in 2010 in the aftermath of the Great Recession, just two years into his banking career, he and co-founders Jeremy Smith and Larry Kiss decided to channel those frustrations into a business.
“The whole idea was that there’s not enough parking, [and] how do we make it easy to park?” Lawrence says.
Turns out, there was actually plenty of parking, he says: “You just don’t know where it is.”
From Wrigley Field to New York City
In his spare time, Lawrence had already brainstormed solutions for the inefficiency of traditional city parking, where drivers endlessly hunt for open street spots or pull into a garage and hope for a decent rate.
In 2011, the co-founders launched SpotHero as a peer-to-peer marketplace app where people who owned private parking spots could rent them out. They started with a single spot, owned by a friend of Lawrence’s, near Wrigley Field.
The trio put $6,000 of their own savings toward bare essential startup costs, like building the first version of the SpotHero website and app, Lawrence says. But…
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