Admyt takes advantage of licence plate recognition systems to finally do away with the idea of coin-fed meters and the frustration that came with keeping track of paper tickets. Their mission is to provide a seamless experience for anyone visiting a shopping mall, an office park, and pretty much any venue with a parking lot.

It allows property owners to significantly cut their overhead, make a first-time visitor into a returning one, and provides comprehensive metrics to help owners craft a better experience, improve security, and better understand their clients’ needs. All that makes the company grow and expand to new markets.

In this interview I talk to Jaco van der Merwe—CTO, and Devon Beynon—COO, about car parking systems and delivering meaningful software that solves real-life problems and why creating a five-year strategy is no longer sufficient in the contemporary tech landscape.

Karolina: Admyt is a car parking system that’s competing with the regular paper ticket-based approach. What’s unique about your solution?

Devon Beynon, COO at Admyt: The original idea was straightforward. Visiting a shopping mall means you have to take a parking ticket, keep track of it, have change in your pocket, all that kind of stuff. So Jordan [Wainer], the founder of Admyt, spent a lot of time figuring out if he could make it a little bit better. We realized that knowing who is coming in and out and when can be of tremendous value to mall operators and that we could be giving them much better metrics on their parking usage and thus better information about their customers in general.

One of the bigger property owners in South Africa came to us and asked whether it would be possible to deploy our system in their office buildings. Office tenants sign leases, move in and then move out, so as an owner you be able to manage garage and parking access, otherwise you can easily lose track of who’s coming in and out, people start fighting for spaces, and all that. So we started developing an office building-oriented product. We let the market guide us. We had this great idea to begin with, but if people approach us and are willing to pay for something it means that there’s considerable demand for such a service.

In the short term we want to get as many signups as possible, but the medium-term objective is to start doing deals with bigger retailers to provide customers with free parking. How do we reward people? How do we bring them back to the shopping centers? We want to start making it more than just a way to get in and out, to add a reward element to it.

For example, your favorite retailer can send you a message like_ “We see you arrived at the shopping center—grab a free coffee or get a 20% discount.”_ We want to do this, but we’re very cautious about it. There’s so much spam on our phones.

#mobile development #user experience