GrubTrucks is a product of Magpie Studios — a one-person studio building software for the messy parts of regular life. Here's the story behind it.
I was born in Michoacán, Mexico, and came to the United States with my family when I was five years old. We didn't have much — "dirt poor" is the honest term, and being candid: that hasn't fully changed yet. What changed is what I've learned to build.
Growing up between two languages and two cultures teaches you a specific kind of resourcefulness. You learn to figure things out from scratch because nobody around you knows the answer either. You learn that most expensive solutions have a cheaper, more careful alternative if you're willing to read the documentation. You learn that being underestimated has occasional uses.
I'm now an Arizona resident, a US citizen, and an LLC owner. None of that was inevitable. All of it was earned.
Before software became the day job, the day job was numbers. I have 19 years of experience as a Registered Tax Preparer, with hands-on work on every entity-level form a US small business owner is likely to file: Schedule C, Form 1065, Form 1120-S, and Form 1120.
The path here ran through both of the industry's giants — TaxWise (Wolters Kluwer) and Intuit — plus a stretch at City National Bank's Treasury Management department running the Datafaction (Legacy) and AgilLink contact centers (both, and then single-handedly running Datafaction). That's the platform family offices and treasury departments use to manage commercial banking and fund accounting at institutional scale.
That career is the unfair advantage behind GrubTrucks. The app isn't built by someone who thought food trucks looked fun — it's built by someone who knows how the business side of running a small business actually works. See the For Operators page for the full operator suite and the personal services on offer.
Food trucks are the most democratic part of the food economy. They're affordable to start, mobile by nature, and rooted in immigrant traditions of cooking for strangers and turning that into a livelihood. Some of the best meals I've eaten came out of a window I had to go find.
The problem: finding them is genuinely hard. They move. Their hours change weekly. Their websites — if they have one — are usually a stale Facebook page. Standing on a street corner trying to remember which lot is open today, and ending up at a chain restaurant by default, is a tax I have paid too many times.
So I built the app I wanted to use. Trucks first. Mobile-first. Real-time first. No tables, no waitlists, no chains. Just the trucks.
Short-term: ship the iOS app, onboard the first hundred trucks in Phoenix and a second city, and prove that a one-person studio can build software that real people pay for and trust. Get the Android port out of the parallel work-in-progress and into the App Store equivalent.
Long-term: build a portfolio of utilities under Magpie Studios that handle the chores nobody else wants to automate, and reach the point where the company can support the people I love — including a house for my mother in Arizona. The honest version of that ambition is the one worth chasing.
A few honest allegiances, all in good sportsmanship: Las Águilas del América in Liga MX, the Dodgers in MLB, the Lakers in the NBA, and the 49ers in the NFL. Not to start a rivalry — just owning where my loyalties land. If you root for the other side, no offense taken on this end either.
Support / questions: hello@grubtruck.app
Truck operators: List your truck — free, no commission.
Launch list: Email me with "GrubTrucks waitlist" in the subject and I'll let you know when iOS ships.
I'm a one-person operation in Arizona. Responses typically arrive within 48 hours on business days.
