Start-Up Spotlight: Kellogg’s David Hegarty and Fixed
This article was originally sourced from Start-Me-Up: David Hegarty ’07, part of Kellogg’s “Start Me Up” series, which spotlights members of the Kellogg community who are putting their entrepreneurial visions into practice.
David Hegarty constantly had issues with parking tickets. A Dubliner living in San Francisco, the Kellogg School of Management alum managed to accumulate four parking tickets over a few weeks last year. It was at that time that the idea for his Fixed app came to him.
The iOS-only app designed so that anyone who gets a ticket in San Fran simply needs to take a photo of the citation and submit it through the downloaded Fixed app. The Fixed team, in turns, drafts a letter to contest the ticket and submits it to the city. Hegarty’s business makes money by charging users 25 percent of the cost of the ticket if they overturn it successfully. If they fail to overturn it, there’s no financial obligation to Fixed — the user must simply pay the ticket to the city.
Initially, Fixed used a less-refined, more subjective process to fight parking tickets that he called “an appeal to fairness.” But Hegarty soon realized that the company’s future success hinged upon the ability to combat tickets using legally legitimate means.
“The art of persuasion is essential for any business owner big or small,” Hegarty said, “and that’s a tool I definitely picked up while at Kellogg.”
Now Fixed has about 40,000 unique signups, contesting about 600 tickets every week. Hegarty says the company’s current success rate in challenging tickets is between 20 and 30 percent. Before the app, only about 5 percent of tickets were contested in San Francisco, with about a 30 percent overturn rate.
Fixed only operates in San Francisco right now, but Hegarty says the company’s expansion plan will put the company in several cities by the first quarter of next year and 100 by the end of 2015. The app will also be available for Android users sometime next year.
“It’s off the charts. We have people begging for us to come to several cities,” he says. “Even in San Francisco, we struggle to keep up with the users we have here.”
About the Author
Max Pulcini
Max Pulcini is a Philadelphia-based writer and reporter. He has an affinity for Philly sports teams, Super Smash Bros. and cured meats and cheeses. Max has written for Philadelphia-based publications such as Spirit News, Philadelphia City Paper, and Billy Penn, as well as national news outlets like The Daily Beast.
