StopCar books the exact spot your car will sit in, and walks you there.
The hackathon theme was Vertical Smart Cities. We picked parking because everyone in the room had lived the problem. Research showed us we did not actually understand it.
There were three of us. Eight teams entered and half made it to the end. I ran the research, the flows, the interface and the pitch.
The problem was not finding a spot, it was fear
Eleven people answered. Eleven over a weekend is not a sample to generalise from, it is a sample to find direction. Seven park every day, and not one answered that they never struggle to find a spot. But the thing that came up most was not scarcity:
"The risk of coming back and not finding the car."
Eight of the eleven answers about frustration talk about fear, theft or safety. The problem was not parking fast. It was leaving the car alone.
Both research findings, on the first screen.The map shows live availability, and the search line talks about a safe spot.
Three decisions that came out of the research
Two front doors. Someone already on the street needs this solved in seconds; someone leaving home in three hours wants to compare. The entry splits, and the paths meet again further down.
People planning start by looking for a place.The same booking, two different beginnings.
A spot has an address. Nobody knew the category, so the barrier was not learning the app, it was trusting it. The choice goes all the way down to one specific spot, which in this garage means a floor and a number.
The spot has a floor and a number.This is how the product answers the theme: verticality as a decision, not as a word in the brief.
It does not end at payment. Confirming does not finish the task. You still have to arrive, get in, and sometimes stay longer than planned.
Start the trip and let on-screen navigation take you there.
The product existed to take insecurity away. Stopping at the payment screen would have contradicted that.
First place, and the thing I had missed
The jury called out how new the proposal was. But a hackathon rewards a proposal, not a product in use: StopCar never launched and has no adoption numbers to show.
The board that went to the jury.Brand, product and positioning in a single composition.
I came back to the project in 2024 and found what taught me the most: I had collected the research and never synthesised it. The decisions were right by well-informed instinct, not by reasoning I could audit later.