Your truck moves. Everything that tells people where it is does not.
A restaurant has one address and it is right forever. A truck has a different one four days a week, and every listing, pin and profile that mentions you is still pointing at wherever you were the day somebody typed it in. This page is about closing that gap, what it costs to run, and when it is not worth doing.
The short version of this page
Four things. Tap any row to go straight to that part.
- What is brokenThree places tell people where you are. You put none of them there.
- How it worksYou text a number like a person. The page changes, and it texts you back.
- What it costs to runThe carrier rates, the arithmetic, and why the allowance is capped.
- When not to buy itFive reasons, and the first one is that plenty of trucks do not need this.
Three places say where you are. None of them asked you.
Search a truck by name and you get addresses. Not a schedule. Addresses, stated as fact, the way they would be for a building. One from a directory that scraped a review, one from a listing app somebody filled in two summers ago, one from a delivery platform that needed a pin to draw a map.
Every one of them is a parking lot you stood in once.
I have pulled this up on a phone in front of an owner and watched him read three different addresses for his own truck. None of them was where we were standing. He had not put a single one of them there, and he could not take them down.
The part that costs money is not the wrong pin. It is the person who liked your food in June, went looking for you in September, drove to the address the search handed them, found an empty lot, and did not try again. You never hear about that one. It doesn't leave a review.
Instagram is the usual answer and it is a real one, right up until the address lives in a story that deletes itself at midnight, or in a post the feed shows to some fraction of the people who follow you. I am not going to invent that fraction. Open your own Insights, read the reach on your last post against your follower count, and you will have the true number for your account in about ten seconds. Whatever it turns out to be, it is not everybody, and it is gone by tomorrow.
You text a number. The page changes.
That is the loop, all of it, and it stops there on purpose: anything with a login is a thing that doesn't get done at six in the morning with one hand.
- You text it like a personIt is an ordinary phone number and it goes in your contacts next to everybody else. "Cobb Pkwy till 8" is a complete update. No app, no password, and nothing to remember on a morning you are already behind.
- The page changes in secondsAnybody who opens it after that sees where you are and how long you are there for.
- It texts you backYou get a confirmation with what it heard, the spot and the time, so you know it landed without having to open the site and check for yourself. If it read you wrong, send it again and the last one wins.
- It stops claiming you are thereWhen the hour you gave it passes, the page stops saying today. If you did not give one, it holds about eighteen hours and then drops to last seen by itself. A site that confidently sends somebody to yesterday is worse than one that says nothing at all, and it is the part these things usually get wrong.
- Somebody else can send itWhoever opens the window can update it from their own phone. It does not have to be you every morning.
- Your regular spots have namesThe lots you work every week get set up once, so the usual by the Chevron is enough on its own and you are not typing a street address into a phone at six in the morning.
None of that is clever. It is the shortest path between a decision you already made in the cab and the person deciding whether to drive over.
Cobb Pkwy lot
until 8pm
Updated 10:41am
Cobb Pkwy lot
yesterday
No word since 10:41am yesterday
The text you sent. The confirmation that came back. What your customers saw all afternoon. And the same page the next morning, after you did not send another one. Nobody touched it in between. Everything else on the internet that claims to know where you are is waiting for somebody to remember to go and change it.
All of that costs something to run every month, and it is the part most people selling it to you will not put in writing.
- A number of your own
- $1.15/mo
- One text, one person
- $0.0079
- Eight sends to 500 people
- $32/mo
- The same text every day
- $119/mo
Twilio would most likely be carrying yours. They publish a US number at about a dollar fifteen a month and a message out at $0.0079. Go and read the current ones on their pricing page, because they move and I don't watch them for you.
Eight sends a month to five hundred people is four thousand messages, or about thirty-two dollars. Sent every day instead, it is fifteen thousand messages and about a hundred and nineteen. Which is why the allowance in your agreement is a capped number and not the word unlimited.
One nobody mentions: a text over a hundred and sixty characters bills as two. Write long and the bill doubles without a second message reaching anybody. Past the cap it is billed at cost, pennies at a time. Better you know the shape of that now than meet it on a statement in March.
The number on the window is worth more than the followers.
A location page answers the person who is already looking for you. A list reaches the person who is not. The regular who would have come on Thursday if he had known you were four minutes away.
On a truck there is no checkout to collect it from, so it comes off the window: a card with a code by the reader, and a word people can text to the same number. Somebody standing in your line with a phone already in their hand is the cheapest sign-up you will ever get, and it is the minute they are happiest to give it to you.
It belongs to the business. Exported whenever you ask, in a format anything can read, and it stays yours the day you decide you are done with me. That is the difference between a list and an audience. An audience is rented from whoever owns the app, on terms that can change on a Tuesday without anybody telling you.
Two things about texting people, and neither one is optional.
The first is that STOP has to work, immediately and every time, and it is handled at the carrier end rather than by me remembering to build it. That is the only version of it I would be willing to sign. The second is a scheduling fact rather than a legal one: a business number has to be registered with the US carriers before it can send to a list at all, and that registration takes somewhere between one and three weeks. It starts the day a deposit clears, not the week you want to send. Anybody who tells you a text list can go live on Friday hasn't set one up.
What it will not do.
Five of these, and the first one is a reason not to buy it.
If you park in the same lot every day, you don't need this.
You need a Google listing that is right and a page that opens fast on a phone. That is a smaller job and a cheaper one, and you will hear it from me on the call rather than after the invoice. This is for a truck that moves. A truck that sits is a restaurant with a smaller kitchen and it should be sold to like one.
It cannot update itself.
The page is only ever as true as your last text. Nobody has built the thing that knows where your truck is without you telling it. GPS in the cab sounds like the answer right up until the truck is parked at your house on a Tuesday and the site is telling four hundred people you are open in the driveway. Two seconds a morning is the real price of this. If that's not going to happen, don't buy it.
It will not build the list for you.
A hundred numbers is a few months of asking at the window. Month one it is forty people and it feels like nothing. Forty people who chose to be on it beat four hundred who scrolled past, so it is not nothing — but it is slow at the start, and anybody selling you a list that is already big is selling you somebody else who bought it.
It does not take the order.
This is a find-us page. Ordering and payment is a larger build and a different conversation, and plenty of trucks never want it. On a truck the line out front is doing work a checkout cannot do. It is worth reading about before you decide either way.
It will not fix a slow Saturday.
If the food is not moving, more people knowing where you are gets you a busier version of the same problem. Nothing on this page is a substitute for the part you are actually good at.
I am in Marietta and I drive out. For a truck that usually means meeting you at the window during a service, buying lunch, and watching how people actually find you. That is where most of the list above got decided in the first place.
The rest of it
- Every systemEight systems and the website under them: what each one does, what it needs from you, and its price.
- PricingThe packages for trucks and restaurants, the discount for building more than one at once, and the terms.
- Online orderingWhy marking a plate up on the app raises the fee with it, and what your own order page has to do to be worth having.
- WebsitesThe ten things I measure on a food business site, the thresholds I measure them against, and what each one costs you.
- AI phoneWhat an AI phone line does on a real call, what it gets wrong, and how to catch it getting things wrong in week one.
- Google listingHours, categories, the attributes people filter on, photos and reviews — and the one ranking factor nobody can sell you.
- Start hereThe homepage, and the free report — type your name, it pulls your Google listing and your site and tells you what it finds. About ten seconds, no email.
Tell me where you parked last Saturday, and where people thought you were. We can do the rest from there.