Nothing throws us into a fit of rage quite like a parking ticket. Not only does that tiny piece of paper dangling from your windshield wiper come with a fee, it comes with the ultimate quest of navigating a government website to pay it (if you even get that far). Shelling out your forced donation to the city should be easy and with new mobile app Quickit, it is. Just scan and pay the ticket using your cell phone and avoid late fees or a towed car like Jim Carey in “Liar Liar”.
Nothing feels better than shredding that slip once it’s paid, so it’s no surprise that Quickit already closed a $200k seed round and are wrapping up another round of equity funding this month. We know just about everyone will need this app at some point (unfortunately), so we caught up with CEO + Founder, Tristan Steele, to find out how they’re tackling tickets with Quickit.
Tell us about Quickit:
Quickit is a mobile app that lets users scan and pay their parking tickets using their smartphone. No more fumbling for your checkbook or navigating clunky municipal websites. Quickit Corporation, based in Savannah, GA, is the leading provider of mobile payments solutions for parking citations. Unlike the previous generation of mobile parking ticket solutions that simply “scrape” a city or university website, Quickit integrates with the parking infrastructure directly to provide a seamless and reliable payment experience. Currently live at Georgia Southern University, Quickit is under contract and planning rollouts in more than a dozen other cities and universities.
Revenue Model:
Performance-based revenue model. Quickit makes money when tickets are paid, with a sliding scale for tickets collected within a certain timeframe or above a certain collection percentage threshold.
What is the market/industry impact?
The parking industry is a $100B+ industry. With average collection rates hovering around 50%, the parking ticket segment is leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. At Quickit, we believe that by providing users a more convenient and customer-friendly option to pay, people will pay more tickets and pay them sooner, resulting in overall growth in the industry.
What problem is Quickit solving?
Hundreds of millions of dollars are left on the table every year from uncollected parking tickets. Outdated analog payment solutions are just not cutting it, and our app fits into the model of how people WANT to pay for things. Not only do we have an app to pay, but we also send gentle push notifications to remind users of upcoming due dates and changes in balance. Our unique service and our sharp focus on increasing these revenue percentages provide us a distinct advantage.
How’d you get the idea for it?
The idea for Quickit stems from our first parking industry startup, which revolved around the customer service side of parking tickets. People would visit our site and give us their ticket information and we would manually go through the process of paying their ticket for them, with a markup of course. After hundreds of tickets, we quickly realized that tickets weren’t going unpaid because people didn’t have money; it was because the process was broken! We built the Quickit app to address this problem and streamline the process of paying tickets. By integrating directly with a parking providers middleware system, we are able to instantly pay tickets with the touch of a screen.
Who are your competitors and how does Quickit stand out?
Our competitors can range from large middleware providers to other parking startup companies. However, unlike the previous generation of mobile parking ticket solutions that simply “scrape” a city or university website, Quickit integrates with the parking infrastructure directly to provide a seamless and reliable payment experience. Our distinct advantage lies in the fact that our company’s focus is squarely on collecting this forgotten revenue, and we put all our efforts towards this goal.
How does Georgia weave into your story?
Quickit owes its success to the fact that we chose to do our startup in Georgia. All of our fundraising efforts have yielded Georgia investment money, including Forge (X) Investments, the angel fund associated with The Guild Hall. We located our headquarters in Savannah because it has a nascent, but exciting, startup scene, and we’re trying to do our part to make the Low Country a destination of choice for young technology companies. We were lucky to receive mentoring from the Creative Coast, Georgia Tech’s ATDC and The Guild Hall. Once we raised funding and got to work building our product, those organizations continued to be instrumental in our progress. That being said, the State of Georgia as a whole has had a tremendous impact on our company’s future, and we owe it all to the fact that Georgia is a great place to live and build an awesome technology startup!
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