From Spreadsheets to Startups
I spent years in investment banking — Lehman Brothers, RBC Capital Markets, Macquarie Bank. I was good at it. I understood how to model risk, how to build forecasts, how to make a spreadsheet tell you what you wanted to hear. But when Lehman collapsed in 2008, something shifted in me. I’d watched one of the most powerful institutions in the world implode overnight. It shattered my belief that the big end of town had it all figured out.
I started asking myself: if the experts can be that wrong, what else is possible? I began looking for a different path. And then I found a book.
The Book: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
The Lean Startup gave me permission to build something small and imperfect. Its core idea — launch a minimum viable product (MVP), get real feedback from the market, then iterate fast — was the polar opposite of everything I’d learned in banking.
In banking, you over-plan. You over-analyse. You don’t move until the spreadsheet says it’s safe. You build elaborate models to predict outcomes that often don’t materialise. The Lean Startup said: stop predicting, start testing. The market will tell you what to build — if you actually listen to it.
That idea hit me like a truck. In a good way.
Starting Messy: Parking Made Easy
In 2012, I launched Parking Made Easy (now Parksy) with a basic website and a handful of listings. No app. No external funding. No co-founder. Just a hypothesis: people will rent their empty driveways to drivers who can’t find parking.
By banking standards, it was laughably under-resourced. By Lean Startup standards, it was exactly right. I had an MVP. I had a hypothesis. I had real users. And I was listening.
Twelve years later, Parksy has 120,000+ members across Australia and North America. I’ve never taken external funding. The platform has been featured in the Sydney Morning Herald, news.com.au, Smart Company, and dozens of other outlets. I’ve been bootstrapping it ever since — learning, iterating, and occasionally failing in ways that turned out to be the most valuable lessons of all.
The Three Lessons That Actually Stuck
- Starting messy is better than waiting for perfect.
Every month I waited to launch was a month I wasn’t learning. The first version of the site was rough. But it told me things no amount of planning ever could — like which features users actually wanted, and which ones I’d wasted weeks building for no one.
- The market is smarter than your spreadsheet.
In banking I trusted models. In building Parksy, I learned to trust behaviour — what users actually did, not what I assumed they would do. Real traction comes from real feedback loops, not projections.
- Small, fast experiments beat big, slow bets.
Every feature, every marketing channel, every pricing change — I treated them like experiments. Some worked. Many didn’t. But running ten small experiments is far safer — and far more informative — than betting everything on one grand plan.
Writing My Own Book — Paying It Forward
One of the things that struck me most about The Lean Startup was that Eric Ries didn’t have to write it. He’d already built a successful company. He wrote it because he wanted others to avoid the mistakes he’d made.
That spirit stuck with me. A few years ago I wrote my own book — Parking Made Easy: Making Life Easier — partly inspired by the same idea: that sharing what you’ve learned helps others start their own journey. If one chapter saves someone from a mistake I made, or gives them the nudge they need to actually start, then it was worth writing.
Without The Lean Startup, I’d probably still be in banking, building models for institutions that may or may not still exist. Instead, I built something real — something that helps everyday people earn from their unused driveways and find a park without losing their mind.
It all started with a book that gave me permission to begin.
Over to you:
Has there been a book — or a single idea — that gave you permission to start something you’d been putting off? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
By Daniel Battaglia, Founder & CEO, Parksy
About the Author
Daniel Battaglia is the Founder & CEO of Parksy , a peer-to-peer parking marketplace with 120,000+ members across Australia and North America. Before founding the business, Daniel worked in investment banking at Lehman Brothers, RBC Capital Markets, and Macquarie Bank. He holds a double degree from the University of Wollongong and is a CPA Associate. He is also the author of Parking Made Easy: Making Life Easier, available on Amazon. Connect with Daniel at parksy.com or linkedin.com/in/danielmbattaglia/
