BOSTON — Boston Made, Inc. has added two consumer platforms to its portfolio, both aimed at the same 60-mile stretch of South Carolina coastline: Grand Strand App, a live local guide and trip concierge, and Spot Check App, a peer-to-peer parking marketplace. A look at the tourism and parking data behind the region shows why the company chose to launch them together, and what the two products will have to prove.

A large market that had a softer year

The Grand Strand is one of the biggest leisure-travel markets on the East Coast. According to Visit Myrtle Beach, the area drew about 18.2 million visitors in 2024, who spent roughly $13.2 billion, up 5.3% from the year before. The organization puts the total economic impact at more than $26 billion and credits tourism with more than 82,000 direct and indirect jobs across the region.

The trend did not hold into 2025. Data released by Visit Myrtle Beach and the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce showed tourism down 3% for the year, WMBF News reported in February. Explanations varied, including severe-weather worries, negative social-media attention, and household budgets that kept some travelers home. Local tourism leaders said the recovery would depend on the experiences the destination offers, such as live music, theater, the beach, and food.

Why it matters: In a softer year, the destinations that win are the ones that are easiest to plan and enjoy. That is the gap Grand Strand App is built for. Rather than a static directory, it opens on live conditions: surf, the next tide from the NOAA gauge at Springmaid Pier, beach-safety notes, and weather. Its concierge then suggests three stops with drive times based on the weather, the tide, and the time of day.

Parking is a seasonal policy question

Parking on the Grand Strand changes with the calendar. In Myrtle Beach’s downtown district, which runs from Sixth Avenue South to 21st Avenue North, paid parking returned on March 1, 2026, and runs through September 30, with enforcement from 9 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week, and tickets starting at $30, according to WMBF News. From October 1 through the end of February, city-metered spaces downtown are free under a City Council decision to restore off-season free parking.

The result is a market where demand peaks in exactly the months when public parking costs the most and is hardest to find, while private driveways and garages a few blocks from the beach often sit empty.

The cost of searching is not trivial anywhere. A widely cited 2017 INRIX study estimated that the average U.S. driver spent about 17 hours a year looking for parking, at a cost of about $345 per driver in wasted time, fuel, and emissions, or $72.7 billion nationally. The figures are national and several years old, but the pattern they describe is sharper in a crowded beach town during peak season.

How the two products fit together

Spot Check’s model is simple. Drivers search a live map of driveway, garage, lot, street, covered, and EV-charging spaces, each showing status and an hourly price. They message a host or send a booking request, park, and leave a review. Hosts list a space in about two minutes by dropping a pin, choosing a type, and setting an hourly price and size or clearance.

Grand Strand App acts as the demand funnel. Its navigation includes a “reserve a driveway” link to Spot Check and a “list a parking space” link for owners, and its Grand Strand Season series covers parking topics directly, including free downtown parking, North Myrtle Beach parking, and whether rental guests should use valet service. Spot Check, in turn, publishes a daily Parking Briefing that is syndicated into Boston Made Reader.

The pairing reflects a strategy Boston Made has used across its portfolio: a content product that earns daily attention, linked to a transactional product that serves the need that content keeps surfacing.

What the platforms will have to prove

• Supply before demand. Any two-sided marketplace has to recruit hosts before drivers will trust the map. Spot Check’s early inventory is small, and growth will depend on reaching homeowners and rental owners near high-traffic areas.
• Local rules. Renting a driveway can be affected by municipal ordinances, HOA covenants, and rental-property agreements. Hosts will need clear guidance, and the platform will need to keep pace with local policy.
• Trust and accountability. Reviews are Spot Check’s main trust mechanism today. Clear booking terms, dispute handling, and verified listings will matter as volume grows.
• Seasonality. With free downtown parking for five months of the year, Spot Check’s value is highest in spring and summer and around events. Grand Strand App’s off-season content, from fall calendars to shoulder-season itineraries, has to keep users engaged in the quieter months.
• Data quality. A live guide is only as good as its feeds. Grand Strand App’s reliance on marine forecasts and NOAA tide data is a strength, as long as those inputs stay current and clearly labeled.

The bottom line

Grand Strand App and Spot Check App are small, early products in a large regional market. Their bet is that a guide people check every morning can create steady demand for a parking marketplace, and that a parking marketplace gives the guide a practical reason to exist beyond inspiration. Both brands are now profiled on the Boston Made Brands page, and the founding story is on bostonmade.com.

Sources

• Visit Myrtle Beach, destination statistics: context.visitmyrtlebeach.com
• WMBF News, “Myrtle Beach tourism down 3% in 2025, local businesses hope for better 2026” (Feb. 5, 2026): wmbfnews.com
• WMBF News, “Paid parking returning to Myrtle Beach downtown district this weekend” (Feb. 27, 2026): wmbfnews.com
• INRIX via Parking.net, “Searching for Parking Costs Americans $73 Billion a Year” (2017): parking.net
• Product details from grandstrand.app and spotcheckapp.com, reviewed October 8, 2026.

ROAD TO THE ROCKETSHIP · Chapter 5

Every rocketship has an engine room nobody photographs.

Behind the Reader, the app and the brand sites sits Paxton-Digital, the technology company that built the Boston Made ecosystem and developed the BOSSTOX platform.

BOSSTOX: intelligence, not hype

BOSSTOX tracks markets and companies with dated, sourced records. That covers the AI-infrastructure watch behind the Picks & Shovels storyline: the compute, cooling, power and networking companies doing the physical work of the AI buildout. Its learning hub, info.bosstox.com, teaches the basics in plain English.

Scout: healthcare intelligence

Paxton-Digital’s newest focus is healthcare. Scout is a healthcare-intelligence search that helps people and organizations find and make sense of healthcare information quickly, using the same source-first approach as BOSSTOX.

Combining the technology

The thread connecting the brands is reuse. The same pieces (sourced data, AI search, publishing, membership) are assembled differently for each audience: investors on BOSSTOX, patients and providers on Scout, readers on the Reader, small businesses on Fenway Web.

ROAD TO THE ROCKETSHIP is the Boston Made Newsroom’s running story of how Boston Made, Inc. is building its ecosystem, told one chapter at a time. Previous: Ch. 4. Next: Ch. 6, Kingswell.

📚 Read every chapter on the Boston Made Reader → Storylines · Join free at app.bostonmade.com/membership.

Forward-looking descriptions reflect current plans and may change. Nothing here is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy securities.

PICKS & SHOVELS · No. 10 · Specialty materials

Follow the supply chain far enough down and you reach a wafer of indium phosphide. Almost nobody makes it.

What it does

AXT Inc (NASDAQ: AXTI) makes compound-semiconductor substrates, mainly indium phosphide (InP) and gallium arsenide wafers. Most of the production happens at its China-based subsidiary, Tongmei.

The shovel it sells

The raw InP wafers that laser makers like Lumentum and Coherent need to build the lasers inside AI transceivers. This is the bottom layer of the optical stack.

What the numbers say

• Q2 2026: revenue was $47.6 million, up 164% year over year. InP revenue was $30.7 million, up from $3.6 million a year earlier.
• Q3 2026 outlook: about $66 million in “realizable revenue,” with upside that depends on more Chinese export permits.
• Capacity plan: quarterly InP capacity rising from about $20 million to $60 million by year-end and more than $130 million by the end of 2027.
• Customers: supply agreements with prepayments or deposits from Lumentum ($43.5 million), Coherent ($25.4 million) and Casella ($22.3 million).

Sources: Semiconductor Today, Aug 4, 2026; SEC 8-K.

What could go wrong

• It depends on Chinese export permits for InP.
• Manufacturing based in China brings geopolitical and tariff exposure.
• Small scale and concentrated customers.

Season one, wrapped

Ten companies, one chain: turbines and fuel cells make the power, switchgear routes it, chillers remove the heat, packaging and burn-in turn silicon into reliable chips, lasers and cables connect them, and a wafer company in the basement makes the lasers possible. Season two looks at Coherent, Fabrinet, Ciena, Astera Labs, Eaton, nVent and Amphenol. Start again at No. 00.

PICKS & SHOVELS is a Boston Made Newsroom storyline from the BOSSTOX intelligence desk: one under-covered AI-infrastructure company at a time, explained in plain English with sources. Previous: No. 09.

📚 Follow the whole storyline on the Boston Made Reader → Storylines · Track the companies in BOSSTOX Learn.

Not investment advice. Boston Made, Inc. and its writers are not licensed financial advisors. Figures come from the company filings and reports linked above, for the periods stated; check the primary filings before making any decision.