# Rick Delgado, Director of Operations (Southwest Region) at Apex Parking Group — read of Parking Manager AI, May 10 2026 > 14 years in parking ops, currently running 23 surface lots and 2 garages across Arizona and southern Nevada, 8 enforcement officers on staff, trying to retire Excel before it kills me. ## How I got here There's a Facebook group called Parking Operators Network (about 3,400 members, mostly small-to-mid operators) and someone posted "anyone tried this?" with the link. I clicked it on my lunch break Thursday, sitting in the Raising Cane's near our Tucson facility. I had about 12 minutes before a call with our permit software vendor about a reconciliation bug that has been wrong for four months. That context matters — I was already irritable about software. ## What I clicked first "Parking operators stop drowning in spreadsheet lot management" — okay, that's me. That's genuinely the first line I've read in a product pitch that didn't make me roll my eyes in a while. It's specific. It's not "transform your parking operations with AI-powered insights." It's just: you use spreadsheets and it's drowning you. Yes. Correct. I kept reading. ## Where I paused "Reduce manual inspection overhead by 70%." I stopped here for a while. Not because I doubted it, but because I wanted to know: 70% of what baseline? One officer doing 6-hour foot patrols? A garage with 600 spaces and one guy walking with a clipboard? My eight officers cover 1,800 spaces across four sites on a busy Saturday. The math of "70%" means something completely different in those two scenarios and the page never tells me which world they're modeling. I spent maybe 90 seconds trying to find the methodology and couldn't. ## What I distrusted "Trusted by 200+ parking facilities across North America" — I want to believe this but the page gives me nothing to hang it on. No facility names. No city. No "a regional operator in Phoenix with 12 lots." Not even a logo I'd recognize from an industry trade show. In parking, operators talk. I know the people running lots in Vegas, Scottsdale, Denver. If this thing has 200 installs someone in my network has heard of it. I haven't. That's not a dealbreaker but it makes me squint. Also the "built by Wishdeal Studio" section at the bottom is where the page becomes a different product entirely. Suddenly it's talking about "B2B operators looking for productized point-solutions" and "12 to 18 weeks to MVP" and "probability of meaningful success around 13%." That's a studio pitching an unbuilt product idea to developers, not a SaaS vendor pitching to operators. I had to read it twice. So does this software exist or not? "No live customer revenue claimed" in tiny text at the bottom. Okay, so the 200 facilities claim is aspirational or hypothetical? That's a significant trust problem. ## What would convince me One real facility. City, state, number of spaces, what their violation recovery looked like before and after, with specific dollar amounts and a timeframe. Not a stat from "200+ installations" but one installation I can mentally drive past. The kind of case study where the operator says "we were collecting $4,200/month in violations, now we're at $9,800, and here's the three months of data." That's it. I don't need a PDF. I need one real operator's name and a number I can verify if I chose to. ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. The bottom of your page says "no live customer revenue claimed" and mentions this is a studio concept build. Is this product currently live and in production at any facilities, or are you looking for early-adopter operators to help build it out? 2. The sensor integration page mentions Bosch and Hikvision RTSP feeds. We have a mix of old Genetec cameras and newer Axis units at our garages. Has anyone tested the occupancy tracking against Axis hardware or is that on the roadmap? 3. What does the $5 dossier unlock that isn't already on the page? The copy says "ICP, MVP scope, first 7 build tasks" which sounds like a product spec doc, not a sales deck. I'm trying to figure out if I'm buying a pitch deck or a software subscription. ## Verdict: on-the-fence The top half of this page is the best-written cold pitch for a parking ops tool I've seen and I'd have probably booked a demo if the bottom hadn't revealed it's a studio concept with no confirmed revenue. The honesty is actually refreshing, but it leaves me unsure what I'm being invited to do. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-10. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*