The quest to find a parking spot in New York City has never been easy, but SpotHero is looking to make the process a bit less painful.
The Chicago-based on-demand parking app wrapped up a $20 million Series B just a couple months ago and is now beginning to shift their attention to conquering NYC.
New York definitely has its own unique driving culture that differs strongly from San Francisco and Chicago, but SpotHero CEO Mark Lawrence tells me his team is ready to put it all out there as it seeks to make NYC its top priority. “We’re here for the long haul. We’re not going anywhere,” he said.
Part of Lawrence’s strategy involves hiring people on that are already quite familiar with the market. SpotHero announced today that it has hired John Horton, the former NYC General Manager of Zipcar to lead and grow out their team in New York City.
“SpotHero is the clear leader in this space,” Horton said in a statement. “I look forward to building upon this year’s momentum, partnering with parking operators and making parking easier for drivers in New York.”
In the past year, SpotHero has seen its business accelerate greatly in NYC with the number of parking facilities in its marketplace increasing from 183 to 645. The company is also seeing use of their mobile app take off with over half of all spots being reserved through the app.
Lawrence told me that he expects NYC to eventually become the company’s most important market and that he wants to be sure that the company sets itself up to succeed early on. To Lawrence, right now that means hiring talent that knows the market well and can give the company an early advantage in tackling the issue of parking in a city of 8.4 million people.