Fixed
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Fixed (YC Winter 2014) was a San Francisco app that automated fighting parking tickets: users snapped a photo of the ticket, and the software cross-referenced Google Street View for broken meters, obscured signs, or citation errors, then generated and submitted a contest letter to the city. It took a cut (25% of the ticket price) only when users won. The company appeared on Shark Tank Season 7.
02 / Fixed FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors
cities blocked Fixed from ticket portals (SF/Oakland/LA), forcing shutdown of parking-ticket ops; a planned fundraise became impossible after the blocks; Bar Association complaints after the traffic-ticket pivot were a further stranglehold.
Cities blocked portal access; parking-ticket business shut for lack of resources to fight back.
September fundraise aborted after city blocks.
Bar Association complaints after traffic-ticket pivot strangled the business.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
after Fixed had to shut its parking-ticket business (fall 2015) under city blocks, Lawgix acquired Fixed for the technology (not talent) on ~15 Jun 2016—an outcome the founder did not desire.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Shut down the parking-ticket business in fall 2015 after San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles blocked its IP addresses, shut off fax machines, and changed laws to prevent third-party bulk contesting.
- 02
Pivoted to traffic citations, but could not overcome the cities' monopoly on the ticketing system and mounting legal pushback.
- 03
Sold remaining assets to law firm Lawgix in June 2016; operations ceased shortly after.