A response from the CEO of Justpark

Please find below a response (to our post) from the CEO of Justpark to the news about staff layoffs and other issues...........

Hi Rob,

Happy to share openly and honestly what has actually happened and not what has been sensationalised in the media.

I normally wouldn't respond to a post like this which has been taken out of context and misrepresented but feel a duty to the 2,900 people who backed us who may be reading this.

The company DID make some hiring mistakes but only in that we did not focus enough on what was driving real value to the business. We grew a few of our teams too fast but realised quickly enough and made the tough but necessary decision decisively.

The number of people we had to let go has been blown way out of proportion and the original article has since been amended.

We are not running out of money. We raised over £3.7m and still have over 24 months of runway. Revenues are strong as is growth of our key metrics. The decision we made is very good for shareholders. The only people that have suffered have been my former colleagues and friends.

If you have experience of advising or working with startups you will know that this is quite common and not always a bad thing.

I'm not going to comment on individual trustpilot reviews as they are all unique and each one is dealt with by our customer happiness team who continue to beat industry standards in terms of response and resolution time. We've had over 250,000 reviews on our website with over 95% 4*/5 or higher. Our trustpilot rating is also very high (over 9/10).

Unfortunately when operating a business like ours it is impossible to prevent certain situations. We do our best to prevent these issues from arising and also sort out any problems as quickly as possible.

We have a team dedicated to ensuring the quality of our listings and quickly demote and remove listings that offer drivers a poor experience.

Regarding your point about security, I answered your question at the time in the crowdcube forum regarding a terrorist potentially using JustPark to park in a car park.

With everything that has recently happened in Paris, I would rather not comment further but hope that anyone reading this would agree that someone using JustPark would only increase the security of the general public and the parking location rather than decrease it as we would know the identity of the driver.

I am happy answering any other questions you have about JustPark and hope that this clarifies a few things.

Anthony
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A few points.

Firstly we never had a real response to the security issue and as you can see we still dont. There are a variety of central London spaces which can be booked for months on end which are hidden away. Using a false name and payment system would be very simple. We joined the list of space vendors with fake details with no problem.

Of course new businesses go through some trial error, stress testing etc but then they dont value themselves at around level Justpark did only months ago.

The Trustpilot reviews have two facets - the group of reviews which we wrote about before which were all within a few days (hundreds of them) and ALL 5 star and the more general reviews which if you removed the block mentioned above would be nowhere near to the 9.3 average they have today. The problem seems to be a consistent one - poor customer service and lack of control over their only suppy ie spaces. They can change the first but not the second.

For the sake of their investors we hope things improve. We do love the idea that 2,900 people might be reading this blog!

PS - The original number of layoffs has not been corrected as the CEO suggests here - so this is highly misleading and his fellow CEO Alex Stephany has just announced he is leaving. All sounds solid to us.