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Senior Tyler Cagle takes on parking shortage problems in Boulder and other densely populated cities with his new app, Drivewayz

Nikki Edwards | Photos By Elliot Whitehead

When traveling to a densely populated city, one may find themselves driving row after row,street after street—in search of a parking spot. Whether it be a lack of parking structures, filling up the parking meter every hour, or dealing with unfair parking tickets, finding a parking spot is a continuous hassle. Mechanical Engineering Senior Tyler Cagle hopes to find a solution to this problem with the new app, Drivewayz.

Cagle created Drivewayz in 2018. After recognizing the insufficient parking spots in the Boulder area, Cagle and his team (Reese Barracks and Karina Micheli) designed an application that enables commuters to make use of alternative parking options, like other people’s driveways. The user enters their desired location and Drivewayz shows the parking options within the selected area, and the user is able to reserve someone’s driveway for a certain amount of time.

While commuters have a convenient place to park, homeowners are able to make a profit from their driveway. “Drivewayz is a shared marketplace that helps create public parking options around every corner: people’s own driveways. Motorists now have the option to discover simple and affordable parking while monetizing empty driveways and creating a source of passive income for local homeowners,” Cagle said.

Reese Barracks, co-founder of Drivewayz, contacted Cagle about this new business opportunity, when he came up with the idea while working as a valet for Hotel Boulderado. “He realized that there are not many parking spaces and you have to drive by empty driveways all the time,” Cagle said. By utilizing people’s driveways, an abundance of new parking options opens up to the public. 

Initially, Cagle was hesitant to take on Drivewayz- he wasn’t sure if the project would be successful.. “I then asked a few friends and coworkers about the idea and every one of them loved it,” Cagle said “I went to New York to visit a friend and realized that public parking in New York was extremely expensive and this business could help mitigate the stress that comes with parking in a busy city. I accepted Reese’s offer right after.”  

After several iterations of the app’s interface, Cagle released the team’s minimum viable product to Apple’s App Store. To establish hosts for the parking spaces, they reached out to homeowners near Folsom Field. “Our first marketing campaign to reach out to our beachhead market (fans at Folsom field) was to go door-to-door and sign people’s driveways up to be rented during the [football] games,” Cagle said. “We sold each of the spaces at a much lower cost than other parking in the area and sold out in under an hour.” 

Getting feedback and validation for Drivewayz motivated the team to keep pursuing their product. Cagle is finalizing the app before they conduct any further advertising. He listened to the customers’ critiques and is building the app to be, “quick and seamless for the user.” 

“We heard from users that they were spending about eight minutes on average to find a spot on our app. So we really focused on just reducing that time and I think we’ve got it down to less than a minute or two minutes max,” Cagle said. Cagle and his team worked every day to have a fully functioning and aesthetically pleasing product before CU’s New Venture Challenge. 

CU’s New Venture Challenge is an annual competition that gives entrepreneurs the chance to present their ideas in front of investors and the Boulder community. Through this challenge, Cagle has been able to collaborate with various mentors who have given even more feedback on how to effectively execute Drivewayz. These mentors have helped him and his team prepare for the challenge, making sure that the team is, “checking all our blind spots and making sure we’re not missing anything,” according to Cagle. Out of 35 teams, Drivewayz was one of the nine to move onto the New Venture Challenge 11 IT Track finals. Driveways then took second place in finals, winning $2,500 towards funding for their company. 

CU’s New Venture Challenge has helped Cagle and his team network and make many connections to develop Drivewayz. With these contacts, Cagle arranged a meeting with the President and CEO of the Boulder Chamber of Commerce, John Tayer, who manages the organization and 1,800 businesses in the Boulder community. Cagle pitched Driveways to Tayer, who was then on board to implement Drivewayz to better the parking situation on Pearl Street and Folsom Field. Cagle and his team are forming a partnership with Tayer and a few other chamber members to help with parking for large events. “We’re trying to create overflow or supplemental parking for the city to take traffic off the street, rather than trying to compete with the city,” Cagle said. This partnership has helped them gain more contacts, improve transportation in the Boulder Community, and bring awareness to the company. 

In his efforts to promote Drivewayz, Cagle plans to continue the door-to-door salesman strategy. “Door-to-door salesman ship is the best form for small scale. We want to create relationships with people and tell them that our grand idea is to change the transportation industry. If we really emphasize that to them, that is the best way to get hosts,” Cagle said. 

Once they have the hosts for the parking spots, Cagle wants to start using social media to advertise Drivewayz. “We’re going to focus on Instagram for now and we are also doing geofencing. You send your advertisement to Google and those ads only show up if the person lives within the certain radius that we set,” Cagle said. The radius will target the Boulder Community for now, but once they build enough revenue in Boulder, they are going to target cities with a large commuter populace. 

After college Cagle and his team are going to travel to beachhead markets such as Portland, San Diego, and Pacific Beach to begin implementing Drivewayz. “We’re planning a traveling schedule where we’ll live for a month in each of the beachhead cities then move. Right now we’re doing Boulder, we’ll then go to Pacific Beach, then move to Portland. We’re trying to build a foundation in a few key cities and target the cities based on how large their commuter populace is.” Once Cagle has the funding to expand Drivewayz, he wants to hire more salesmen to go door-to-door and computer scientists to start developing the Java side of Drivewayz. “Hiring a team for the IOS side and Java side will be huge because then we can implement all these new features that we’ve always been talking about, but haven’t had the time to work on,” Cagle said. 

Cagle plans to finalize Drivewayz by April 3, which is the NVC championship. He wants the app to be as convenient and user-friendly as possible. “The end goal is to have someone use this like they would maps, but to get a parking space. We plan to have the user type in where they want to go and have the app be able to choose the closest spot, for the cheapest price, and be able to direct you straight to your parking spot,” Cagle said. Cagle and his team want to have these features and more, but they need more staff to start making these ideas a reality. Cagle said, “I definitely want to get those ideas going. The sky’s the limit with something like Drivewayz. There are so many cool avenues to take and I am hoping to hit a few of those.” Tyler Cagle never really wanted to be an engineer. He wanted to manage engineers, so he had to get the background first. When he taught himself how to code it opened so many opportunities and allowed him to learn how to operate a business. Cagle said, “I started with my original company and failed, but it opened up doors for another company. Having a little bit of prior business experience allowed me to teach myself how to code and how to do software.” As they develop Drivewayz and look toward the future, Cagle wants to pursue Drivewayz full-time and be able to turn his ideas into reality. “I love to see something turn from just an idea or an initial concept to something that people can use and enjoy using,” Cagle said. “My company is something that I am very proud of and I want it to succeed in every way that it can. We have a lot of exciting plans for the future and look forward to pursuing them.”