Solo Founder Built SaaS Selling to Food Trucks

**Lucas** (0:01)
So, we've spent over 100 episodes now watching solo founders pick a vertical nobody else is looking at and build a SaaS that solves one very specific problem. Today's episode is maybe the most literal example of that yet. We're talking about a founder who built a software platform for food trucks.

**Luna** (0:19)
Food trucks, that's one of those spaces where you think, okay, they must already have software, but they really don't, do they?

**Lucas** (0:27)
They mostly don't.
And the stuff that exists is either square peg, round hole, general point of sale systems built for brick and mortar restaurants, or it's some clunky spreadsheet situation the owner manages from their phone while they're also trying to flip burgers. The founder we talked to, his name is Marcus, he spent a week working out of a taco truck in Austin before he even wrote a line of code.

**Luna** (0:49)
He embedded, that's smart. And I imagine he learned pretty fast that the core problem isn't just payments, it's knowing where the truck is going to be and what's on the menu today.

**Lucas** (1:01)
Exactly. The platform he built is called Curbside Command and the name tells you everything. It's a booking and operations tool. Customers can see the truck's real time location, what's available right now, and prepay for a pickup window. On the truck side, the owner gets a dashboard that updates inventory as items sell out, so they can stop taking orders for the brisket tacos when they're down to the last 10
It's dead simple, but nobody had built it because the food truck market looks small from a distance.

**Luna** (1:32)
But it's not small. There are something like 35,000 food trucks in the US, and that number has been growing, especially after the pandemic pushed a lot of chefs into mobile concepts.

**Lucas** (1:44)
Right. And Marcus's insight was that each one of those trucks has the same three problems.
Customers can't find them, customers don't know what's available, and the truck itself is constantly guessing how much to prep. He solved all three with one product. He charges $79 a month per truck. After three years, he's got 300 paying trucks on the platform. That's about 285,000 in annual recurring revenue.

**Luna** (2:12)
And he's solo? No co-founder, no employees?

**Lucas** (2:17)
Solo. He outsourced the initial development to a contractor in Eastern Europe, which cost him about $12,000.
Money he saved from his previous job as a project manager at a construction firm. He did the sales and support himself for the first two years. Only recently did he hire a part-time customer support person. So his margins are very, very good.

**Luna** (2:41)
Okay, but how did he get those first customers? You can't cold call food trucks during lunch rush.

**Lucas** (2:47)
He didn't. He found them on Instagram. Food trucks live and die by their Instagram presence.
They post their location for the day, their specials, photos of the food. Marcus started following every food truck in the top 20 US metro areas. When a truck would post a photo of a long line, he'd comment something like, looks like you could use a better way to manage that line. Then he DM the owner and offer a free month.

**Luna** (3:15)
That's actually brilliant.
It's not spam because he's engaging authentically with their content first. And the free month gives them no reason to say no.

**Lucas** (3:26)
Exactly.
He got his first 10 customers in about 6 weeks that way. The second wave came from food truck meetups. There are associations in most big cities where truck owners gather to share tips. Marcus went to one in Austin, bought a round of tacos for everyone, and did a live demo on his phone.
Five owners signed up on the spot.

**Luna** (3:49)
So the customer acquisition cost was basically the price of a taco dinner. That's the dream.

**Lucas** (3:55)
His lifetime value per customer is now about $3,000, because the average truck stays on the platform for about 38 months. So even if he spent a hundred bucks to get a customer, which he didn't, it would be a 30 to 1 return. The math works beautifully.

**Luna** (4:12)
And the product itself, what features made it sticky? Because if I'm a food truck owner, I could just use Instagram and Venmo.
Why pay $79 bucks a month?

**Lucas** (4:23)
That's the question he had to answer to get retention. The sticky features are the inventory sync and the prep forecasting. The dashboard learns over time how many of each item you sell at a given location on a given day of the week.
So before the truck even opens, the system tells the owner, you're parked at the office park on a Tuesday, you should prep 48 brisket tacos and 23 avocado fries. That reduces waste, which is huge for food trucks where margins are already thin.