History
Success Stories — XoomPark xoompark.com Last year’s winner, XoomPark, offers online parking reservations for large, downtown events. These reserved spots are within walking distance of multiple venues such as sports arenas, theaters, restaurants etc. Event attendees no longer need to show up hours in advance to get a decent parking space at events or carry around extra cash to pay parking attendants. They can now simply reserve a close spot at XoomPark.com and show up right at event time to claim their spot. When XoomPark competed in the IBMC last year, they had around two parking garages to test and validate their assumptions. Since then, XoomPark has over 70 parking lots in 18 cities. They have expanded their reserved parking for a greater range of events such as NBA, NFL, and MLB. XoomPark was able to win the Grow America competition, get featured in TechCrunch, and has been featured in newspapers across the nation. XoomPark was accepted into the Utah-based accelerator, BoomStartup. Ken Frei, founder of XoomPark, states that going through the business model process “helps you look at the core fundamentals of your business really quickly, and to see whether or not you are solving a critical pain.” Testing and validating is still an integral part of XoomPark as they continue to test new ways to reach out to more customers. One pivot they have made since the IBMC was changing from cold calling parking garages to making key channel partners who already have a large audience of parking garages.
Success Stories — Excelegrade excelegrade.com Excelegrade is a platform that allows teachers to focus on the art of teaching. Excelegrade aims to give teachers their time back with 21st century technology. Much like textbooks going digital, Excelegrade makes K-12 classroom assessments digital by replacing paper-based tests with assessments on tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Since winning the International Business Model Competition, Excelgrade has finished developing the first version of their platform and released it for public use. Teachers in 150 schools spread across 30 U.S. states and 7 countries are using Excelegrade. The business model process has helped Excelegrade take a structured approach to every aspect of their business. Excelegrade states that the business model process requires the entrepreneurs to operate with an analytical rigor. “Before we spend time and resources building a new feature, we formulate a hypothesis and then try to test it efficiently as possible.”
31