Location calendar and alerts for food trucks

The idea

A food truck’s daily revenue depends almost entirely on fans knowing where it is today, and the announcement system is an Instagram story that the algorithm shows to a fraction of followers, hours late. Owners retype the same schedule into Instagram, their website, and nowhere else, while their Google listing, the thing hungry people actually search, goes stale for months.

The wedge is write-once distribution: one schedule entry pushes to a public find-us page, a website embed, the Google Business Profile via API, and an opt-in SMS list that reaches every subscriber, not an algorithmic slice. Recurring gigs with one-off cancellations is the unglamorous detail that makes the schedule editor match how trucks actually operate.

Who pays

The buyer is the truck owner, who pays $29/mo without blinking because a single extra lunch rush is $300+ in sales. There are 35,000+ food trucks in the US and they cluster: commissary kitchens, food truck associations, and city rally organisers are all multi-truck distribution points. The SMS keyword on the truck’s serving window grows the fan list at every stop.

MVP scope

• Weekly schedule editor with recurring gigs and single-occurrence cancellations
• Public find-us page with today’s stop and a map
• Embeddable calendar widget
• Google Business Profile sync via API
• Opt-in fan SMS list with automated morning alerts and manual blasts
• Skip for v1: online ordering, menus, multi-truck fleets, Instagram auto-posting, event organiser marketplace

Build TruckStop, a write-once location publisher for food trucks. Stack: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres, magic-link auth), Twilio for fan SMS. Bill with Stripe Checkout.

Core flow: the owner enters gigs into a weekly schedule: location name, address, date, hours. Gigs can be recurring (every Tuesday at the brewery) with one-off cancellations or overrides that touch a single occurrence without breaking the series. Saving publishes everywhere at once: a public find-us page at truckstop.app/truckname with today's location pinned on a map, an embeddable calendar widget for their own site, and the Google Business Profile API updated so the truck's Google listing shows current info. Fans join the SMS list by texting a keyword to the truck's number or via the find-us page; the app sends them a morning text on days the truck is out, listing where and when. Owners can also fire a one-off blast for cancellations or surprise stops.

Pages: schedule editor with recurring-gig support, find-us public page, embed instructions, subscribers list with growth chart, message log, settings and billing.

Implementation details: model recurrences as a rule plus exception rows, never materialised copies; throttle fan sends to respect Twilio rate limits and dedupe so a fan never gets two texts in a day.

Pricing: $29/mo including 500 SMS, then metered, via Stripe.