Vatler (YC S14) wants to be your on-demand valet | Hacker News Reader

Vatler (YC S14) wants to be your on-demand valet

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I briefly did some math around the capacity curve for said services. I'm not entirely sure how they're able to make it work effectively, and scale revenue superlinearly to cost. Also, the demand curves are less than awesome, given you have to deal with two spikes a day, and then no business at all. Additionally, fault-tolerance was problematic. I had modelled it with the idea of providing valet services that are available in FiDi, at a cost-competitive rate, and using a parking lot in Mission Bay or Hunter's Point during the day. A failure in the arterials roads could be incredibly problematic (i.e. 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th) to the model, because it would cause service time to unexpectedly go up.

I think there are work arounds to this model, but I fear for Vatler. I'm sure that the Vatler team has done math to make these things make sense for their model. Best of luck to them.

thank you @sargun for the brilliant analysis. I am Vatler co-founder. The reason why we start with the office use-case is essentially because we can predict the demand, break deals with garages nearby and build our network of valet at low cost. Next step is the anywhere, anytime use-case. It's going to be huge :)

Excellent! I think that's the right way to go to be honest. Become an arbitrage service, and then use the monthly service fee to "hide" the irregularity in "cost" to the market.

Once you have an overall picture of market demand (parkers), and market capacity (free garages), and can predict the supply vs. demand well, you can introduce greater amounts of liquidity to the market. This results in a win for the customer, as well as the parking facilities themselves. Removing the need for facilities to be licensed, and have all the same requirements they do now (deregulation), also results in dropping costs (slightly).

I feel like the next logical conclusion is a hybrid model of Zipcar, and Vatler. In which, you allow people to check out other's vehicles during the day.

You "fear for Vatler"? Dramatize much? This doesn't have to be scalable. Valets have been around since before cars were invented. In the past, parking garages were small businesses that had valets on staff. Before the cost of labor and land made it impossible, this was very common. One way Vatler's model could work is by licensing their software to garages or franchises that want to go back to having valets on staff, and make it inexpensive enough to be possible. The app would make it possible for a group of valets to service lots of different garages, instead of a single one.

in what cold, clinical terms could the parent have expressed him or herself so that you wouldn't accuse him or her of dramatizing the situation?

Their fear is the result of the analysis explained earlier in the post. A negative outlook on the proposition after analysis seems anything but 'dramatic'.

I don't propose any terms. The analysis reads like it was written by a competitor for the same seed money who wants to cast doubt on their business model.

sargun, you should write up a blog post on how you ran this analysis. It would be awesome. Also, put some contact info in your bio!

Would be interested in the math you did around this. That said, there are a few interesting things that could be added on to the service to make it more profitable--so it's not necessarily just the economics of parking.

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