Naren Manikandan isn’t who you think about when you envision the typical entrepreneur.
By day, he’s a junior at Research Triangle High School. By night, he’s stands apart from his peers as the co-founder of a shared parking app called Parkware, a concept he hopes to take with him to college.
At just 16 (17 in two months), Manikandan has a fully developed app and has teamed up with the town of Morrisville in attempts to increase adoption.
In an interview, Manikandan talks about how it all happened and what’s next.
Manikandan said Parkware started with a problem in his neighborhood. Manikandan lives in a house on a narrow street, so narrow that street parking is prohibited. And only two cars can park in his driveway.
“If you want to make an event, if it’s someone’s birthday … you have trouble figuring out parking spaces,” he said.
And calling a friend and begging for driveway space isn’t the most efficient way to organize a get-together. The neighborhood has a Whatsapp chat, but it was becoming clouded with chatter that had nothing to do with parking organization.
So, with some prodding from uncles who work at Cisco and Labcorp, Manikandan decided to tackle the problem with an app.
“We came up with the concept of Parkware, which is basically a platform that allows parking space providers who have unused parking spaces to provide parking spaces to any event organizers, any requesters in need of one,” he said.
It got complicated quickly. First, he had to figure out how to broadcasts requests. But little by little, he figured out the concept, which today has actual users in his neighborhood.
It was further complicated by the fact that, as a high schooler, he didn’t have any formal training as a programmer.
“I knew the basic concepts … but I didn’t really know app development,” he said. “It was a learn and build process where I just learned something and saw how it worked.”
Now the challenge is marketing, expanding the app outside of his neighborhood and into the world. Recently, he presented the concept to the Town of Morrisville’s Smart City Steering Committee, a step in what he hopes is a journey toward broader adoption.
Manikanden said there are other companies doing similar things. But he notes that when looking for solutions within his own neighborhood, he didn’t buy into other products.
“So there’s still need that exists,” he said, and he plans to fill it with his first startup. But he has to balance it with the demands of being a student as well as preparing for his college career.
Manikanden hopes to be a computer science major and has assembled a lengthy list of target schools, from MIT to Carnegie Mellon to UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State.
Regardless of where he attends college, he plans to keep innovating. He’s caught the entrepreneurship bug, and isn’t going back.
“If Parkware goes well, I’ll continue that,” he said. “I just really enjoy the entire process of building, especially talking to people and getting their feedback.”
