Gregory Baranski

The beginning

In May 2022, I decided to solve a problem that my parents, other relatives, and were facing: wasting time looking for free parking spaces.

After thinking about how to do it, I came up with the idea of using CCTV cameras and AI. I had a few steps in mind on how to achieve national and then global success:

1. I will develop the AI model to determine the availability of parking spaces.
2. I will develop and launch the app on App Store & Google Play.
3. I will go to city authorities and private car parks and propose to add them to my app in exchange for data from cameras.

Unfortunately, all of this was limited to my utopian world view, not knowing the bureaucracy and business reality.

Encounter with the reality

I got a lot of encouragement and support from others who agreed that it was a good idea and a much-needed solution to a widespread problem in their cities. But there’s a problem, none of these people were significant enough to give me anything in business terms, they weren’t VCs, they weren’t car park managers, they weren’t city officials.

Nevertheless, after a few months I managed to complete steps one and two, the app was working in a few cities in Poland, but I only got the data from public sources - public cameras or municipal services that collect their data from parking gates.

Now it’s time to contact the city authorities to get access to the cameras in the cities, right?

I first contacted Gdansk, my home town. I expected them to be very interested in the fact that I wanted to improve people’s quality of life, because it’s a cool idea, right?

Yeah… my mind was quickly changed, I started calling the officials in the morning, ended up with literally nothing after a few hours, almost every call ended up in “let me redirect you to X”. You might think I am getting somewhere, but no, the last person at the end happened to be the worst person I have met on my way, rude and really unwilling to help - and all this I spent a few hours and over 20 phone calls?

So I thought, maybe I should go there in person? I went to this branch of the Roads Department, as they were responsible for the whole parking zone. I met a security officer who told me that I couldn’t do anything and that I should go to the mayor.

They had two HQs, so the next day I went to the other one and they just told me to send an email.

That’s what I did, I prepared an e-mail which I later sent not only to them but also to some other cities.

And? No reply from any of them, they don’t give a fuck.

New CEO of wheretopark.app

In July, I met a girl who owns a startup. Unlike wheretopark.app, her team consisted of only business and legal experts, with no developers. I had no one but myself as a one-man army. A few months later, we decided to work together - I became the CTO of her startup, she became the CEO of wheretopark.app, and her co-founder became the CFO. In addition we both exchanged 10% of our companies as security.

Within the partnership, she would be responsible for managing business partners and legal stuff, and I would be responsible for developing her app. That seemed fair.

I had a lot of concerns about the partnership, I know the girl because we went on this Middle East trip together, and the whole time we were fighting at least a couple times a day, I felt like our relationship was very toxic, but still I had no one else to choose from for this role.

How did it end? After a couple of fights in just a month or two, I woke up one morning and decided I definitely didn’t want her on my team, she wasn’t engaged enough, and I felt like this collaboration was just about her having one more thing on her LinkedIn profile and one more thing to flex with.

On October 4, 2023, we canceled our partnership.

Moment of hope

At the end of October - during the E(x)plory competition, which I participated in - one of the jury members was interested enough to show me that he had access to cameras in the city of Lodz and that he could give me access to them.

That was the moment when I really felt that it was going somewhere, that it was gaining some traction.

After the contest, I contacted the guy who was supposed to give me the credentials, and everything went well. I got the credentials, but I couldn’t really connect my service because of some network configuration issues on their end.

Several months later, the issue has still not been resolved by them, even after several calls to different people.

A few days ago, I called them again - both calls went unanswered, with no attempt to call back.

Self-realization

On January 11th, I attended a meeting focused on business for young people. There we had the opportunity to talk to some experienced business people. I spent a lot of time with one guy who spent the last 9 years developing his own start-up as CEO, he mostly told about his failures and how they are struggling, and that sometimes he just thinks about quitting. I could definitely see how tired he was from all this.

All this made me think, does all the work I’m putting into Where To Park even make sense? I’ve been doing it for almost 2 years, spending thousands of hours on business and technical stuff - and what do I have now? I spend most of my time in my dorm room, have almost no social life except for business events and meetings with my friend and some of my family members.

Summary

To offer a balanced perspective, it’s important to acknowledge that my journey wasn’t devoid of achievements.

I also had the opportunity to be invited by radio stations and journalists to tell the public about Where To Park:

This has probably led to my participation in various programs:

• Econverse Cup 2023
• “Przestrzeń Młodych” 2023/2024
• TeenCrunch 2023/2024

And dozens of connections made along the way to what I have now achieved.

I’m not done with Where To Park, I want to give myself some break from development, during which I’ll be researching some funding perspectives, and how I actually want to make money from that, because as it turns out - in this game money is always the most important thing…