"I bought my first car a few years back. One day while driving through Ranelagh, I got stuck for 25 minutes driving around in circles looking for spots. It was a nightmare," he explains. "I started to see lots of empty driveways and spaces owned by local businesses and thought why isn’t there a way that I can just park in these empty spaces, there should be an app for this."
Research
The Longford man is no stranger to business, having set up Krust Bakery whilst still in college. Krust has since grown into one of the country's foremost bakery wholesalers, exporting to the UK and Canada. Once the idea for a parking had arose, Flower set about making it happen.
"All successful businesses start with an insane amount of research. Before getting going we spent a lot of time looking into the parking sector in Ireland and globally. The sharing economy is working wonders in solving parking nightmares in the US & India but when we looked around Europe we realised we’re lightyears behind. Every car sitting bumper to bumper on the M50 each Monday morning is leaving an empty space behind it, in search of a space for the day. When you look at commuter patterns in Dublin you see there is a massive overlap in where spaces are vacated and where they are needed." says Flower.
"At Parkpnp we’ve simply built the product to solve this problem, we already have almost 1,000 spaces listed on the platform and we’re still only in beta form. Every day commuters and companies are knocking down the door trying to snap up spaces and we’re ensuring their parking nightmare comes to an end," he continues.
The company currently has a team of 14 people and are looking to grow their business in Ireland and across Europe.
Users can find or list their spaces at parkpnp.com or by downloading the app on iOS or Android.