How we accidentally gave one user a lifetime supply of ParkEasy

“Win a lifetime supply of chocolate!”, “Fly free for the rest of your life!”, “Get unlimited donuts forever!”

I'm sure you may have heard of competitions like these before. It's where a brand promotes themselves by advertising the dream of enjoying their service for the rest of your life. Doing some research on the matter, it was quite funny to find this article on people who won a lifetime supply of something talk about how that's working out for them. To summarize quite simply - yes, you can actually get sick of chocolate. 

But what's an interesting take from the article is how a company usually delivers their prize. Quite often, the winner is awarded in one shot. For example, if you win a year's supply of burritos, the company would award you with 52 burrito coupons so you can have 1 burrito a week. 

So that leads to something that happened at ParkEasy. Without really intending to do so, we accidentally gave one of our users a lifetime supply of ParkEasy. It all started with this: 

I guess this is what people call going viral. Because over the course of a few days, Fahmy's post got over 2,800 shares, 800 likes, and 310,000 video views. 

Fahmy was pretty clever about the whole thing. Because in his post he said "download dan masukkan code "GNG7R2E7"... nanti korang dpt 10 credit free". Now that sounds very nice, he somehow got some free credits code and he's sharing it with friends. But what people did not know was that this code was Fahmy's referral code. And every time that someone claimed those codes, Fahmy was awarded with 5 credits.

Step 1: tap 'free credit' in app menu   |   step 2: tap 'share'

So let's make a guess how many points do you think Fahmy got? 

*Drum roll*

Fahmy got a total of 1,050 Credits! In iOi City Mall, we charge 1c (c = credit) during off-peak hours, and 3c during peak hours. So let's do some maths. Assuming that Fahmy only goes during peak hours, he can use ParkEasy a total of 350 times for free. And if he goes twice a month, every month, that means he can use ParkEasy for 14 years and 7 months! And if he goes during off-peak hours, he can go for free for 43 years and 9 months!!!

So we just gave away 43 years worth of credit. How did we feel about it? Great! We saw a spike in downloads comparable to a news article and we didn't know where they were coming from.

When we eventually figured out it was Fahmy, we reached out to him and to go watch Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2 together. The movie was great, Fahmy and his friend are cool people and we had an awesome night. And by the way, ParkEasy's car parks are directly next to the iOi City Mall TGV Cinemas lift, so it was pretty convenient too ;)

I guess there are 2 messages to this story. First, is that if you're a ParkEasy user and you want more credits, the easiest way is to use our referral function and share with your friends so they get free credits and so do you.

Secondly, is that as a small Malaysian startup, we really are grateful for our wonderful users. While you may not think that sharing us on social media, or talking to your friends about us is a big deal. It is in fact, a HUGE deal to us. And for that, we're very grateful happy to give away that free credit. If you enjoy ParkEasy, please do let others know about us. With your help, we hope to stick around and grow to offer you more locations where you can forget the hassle of parking and just ParkEasy.

fahmy and friend with parkeasy team after movie.