Truckily draws you a map to find your lunch
- Truckily
- Kean (left) and Berkland keep on trucking.
Derek Kean and Matthew Berkland were hungry. With a few spare hours to fill after a tech conference in San Francisco, the pair set out to explore one of the nation’s leading food-truck scenes. The only problem was that they couldn’t find any trucks.
“We weren’t from there. We didn’t know where we were going,” Kean says. “And we found that apps weren’t very reliable. They said the trucks were in one place, but they weren’t there. Walking around and reading 3,000 tweets and trying not to get lost is harder than it sounds. Eventually, we just gave up.”
But they didn’t stop wondering how many other eaters out there were being foiled on city streets every day, just waiting for an app that could direct them. The solution came while the two were volunteering at Startup Weekend Kansas City in April. (The next startup weekend kicks off Friday, November 16.) While developing a mapping program for another startup hopeful, they realized that a location-based app could help eaters pinpoint food trucks (and assist chefs who may not have learned to tweet and drive). Truckily was born that weekend.
