Finding dinner is about to get a lot truckin’ easier.

Ok, so a friend i used to play rugby with in high school is part of a trio that kick started a service to help you find food trucks across Australia in real time (wherethetruck.at ). But they need your help to move their service from a desktop orientated site to a native App.

I’ll be honest, i’ve got a sandwich on my desk that looks pretty good, so instead of rewriting all their stuff here is a dump from the pozible site. If you’ve got some cash to spare this is a great project to get behind. Click here to visit the fundraising site.

About the Project

For those of you who know us and don’t feel like reading too much, this is the app you’ve been asking for. It works the same way as our website but as an app on your phone so it’ll be super smooth, super easy to use and super reliable. We need YOU to help us reach our funding target so we can roll the app out first thing 2013 – for those who’d like to know more, read on 🙂

About wherethetruck.at

Food trucks aren’t a new phenomenon. They’ve been cruising the festival and special event scene for years. And some have gained incredible followings at these events and local markets along the way.

But the new breed of food trucks, a trend that almost certainly originated in the US, owe much of their success to the internet and social media. Twitter and Facebook have given the trucks a huge opportunity by essentially offering free advertising to a bunch of people who enjoy the novelty of buying a meal on the side of the road.

But the way trucks are using Twitter and Facebook is really one ginormous hack. Neither of these mediums were designed with posting locations in mind, and as a result, don’t do the best job of it. “We’ll be at Ruckers Hill from 6pm” is all well and good for people who live around Northcote and know instantly where Ruckers Hill is. But what about out-of-towners and southsiders? And what do you do if you’re in Carlton at 9pm and want a delicious Po’Boy? Do you drive all the way to Northcote and risk Gumbo Kitchen having already closed? Or what if you follow a few thousand people on Twitter and always miss the truck updates in the stream of ramblings?

We had all of these problems ourselves, and wanted to try solving them. So we built a website called wherethetruck.at. It’s a labour of love of just three guys: Tom Kinsman, Jack Barker and Xavier Verhoeven. It evolved over time from a place where we manually updated each truck’s location on the map, to its current iteration with an integrated backend for the trucks to ensure timely and accurate information. We’ve been tinkering away at making it the best possible place for our growing community of truck-lovers, and spend hours working on the site every week – but we do it for the love of it. And it really is awesome to see thousands of people using the site to find a feed.

The next step

The current iteration of wherethetruck.at has solved many of the issues of Twitter and Facebook – you can see exactly where Rucker’s Hill is, and it’s a single destination that makes it easy to see all the nearby trucks on any given day.

But it’s far from perfect. Our mobile site is okay, but not up to the level of polish we could get from a an iPhone app. Imagine popping open an app that locates you instantly and then shows you exactly how far you are from your city’s food trucks.

Enter Where The Truck App

We want to build an app that solves all these problems. We want a beautiful mobile experience that makes you want to look up which trucks are nearby. We want to be able to alert you when they’re within a certain range of your place. We want an easy way for trucks out on the road to tell us that they’re done for the night. We want it to be as simple as possible to get your hands on some of Australia’s (and the world’s) best food.

But apps cost money. And despite us trying out a few things with putting ads on wherethetruck.at, it’s still not even covering its hosting costs, let-alone bringing in the big bucks for us to get some great developers on board.

Speaking of great developers, we’ve found the perfect guy. He has incredible design and development skills making his apps both incredibly user-friendly and beautiful to look at. He’s even built an app for just one food truck before so he’s seen all the same problems we’ve been solving for the past ten months.

So now we need your help. We’d love to front up the cash for an app ourselves, but we just don’t have it. A few hundred to cover things like fun promos and hosting our site are expenses we can manage, but add an extra zero or two, and we’re in trouble.

We know our ideas and ongoing plans for the site and app are good enough to get funding from venture capitalists or angel investors. But we don’t want to. This is a hobby that we love. We’re our own bosses on this, and that means we get to do what we and our community – you guys – want. The whole ethos with wherethetruck.at is that we do what we think will be fun, or what will be best for the hungry hordes looking for a feed.

If we got funding, it’d all be about ‘going viral’ and building our ‘user-base’ to a point where we could ‘monetise them’ and cash out by selling to Google. That’s not what we want to do. It’d be great if we could make some money from this, but it’s not our goal.

Our goal is simply to build a beautiful solution to the very unique problem of finding food trucks. So what are you waiting for? Help fund the app and turn that grumbling tummy into a bursting gut of trucking goodness without having to trawl through the noise of the internet to find your feast.

What’s in it for you?

Where The Truck App should be a free app. We don’t want to charge for it because we want as many people as possible to actually use it. Then it’s a win-win for everyone: the people find trucks free and easily, the trucks have more people than ever lining up for their great food.

On the surface, that makes it hard for us to reward those who pledge their support, as you’d get the app for free anyway.

But we’ve come up with a few cool rewards that we hope you like. Especially the launch party. It’s going to be awesome.

So go on – help us make finding dinner a lot truckin’ easier. Again.