This is a guest post by Josh Amaku, co-founder and CTO at Trucke.

About Trucke

Trucke is a startup reinventing the moving experience. We are disrupting the industry by applying the core principles from the on-demand economy. The company was founded in 2016 out of Texas and currently services multiple cities in the area.

How Trucke Works

In typical on-demand fashion, Trucke customers put in job requests that are fulfilled by individuals who have signed up to work on the Trucke platform. When a job has been completed, the customer is charged and the worker receives a portion of the revenue.

A critical part of our business model is being able to offer our customers a simple and transparent pricing structure. Many moving experiences involve hidden fees and/or arbitrary charges based on how many floors the movers are going up, what types of items are being moved, etc. When customers use Trucke, they are charged based on 3 factors: the number of workers on the job, the amount of time the job took and the distance the workers travelled during the job.

Before HyperTrack

When Trucke began offering service we were using online scheduling software to book our jobs. The process for completing a job involved workers keeping track of how long they worked as well as recording their odometer before they started a job and after they completed the same job. That information was submitted to an individual who would calculate the total price of the job as well as the amount to be transferred to the workers all by hand. It was a tedious process and it would not be feasible if we were to scale properly.

Our Solution

After nearly a year of business, we decided we needed to quickly develop our own custom software solution. As the co-founder who was responsible for technology development, it was my job to choose the tools that would make this solution a possibility.

For our software to support our pricing structure in an automated way, we needed to be able to track our workers via a mobile app. This mobile tracking tool would be a very critical part of our business process so it was important that I chose the right service to back it up.

Why we chose HyperTrack

At first it seemed like using geolocation tracking in our mobile app would be a complicated and expensive feature. But then we found HyperTrack and realized how it would solve many of our problems:

1. Modularity – HyperTrack’s building blocks approach to development makes it easy to build virtually any solution that involves people going places. Trucke has a unique process. Most tracking software doesn’t account for this but with HyperTrack entities, we are able to build exactly what we need.

2. Development Support – HyperTrack has amazing tutorials and documentation that covers every aspect of their service. Beyond that, their engineers are available to answer any questions you have via Slack.

3. Variety of Tools – HyperTrack accommodates many languages and frameworks in their tech stack. Our server application was built in Node.JS, we used the React Native framework for our mobile application, and our web app was built with HTML, CSS and Javascript. HyperTrack has tools to accommodate everything we need.

4. Accurate & Efficient – Trucke workers are being tracked for the duration of the job. Mobile tracking is traditionally a very battery-intensive operation, but with HyperTrack’s two-way communication between device and server, this energy cost is greatly mitigated. Also, it is important that the distance travelled for each worker is accurately recorded since distance is used to calculate the customer's charge. With HyperTrack, this accuracy is guaranteed.

5. Real-time – With HyperTrack, we can give our customers real-time updates of what’s happening during their job. Customers can see where the workers are located as well as the current estimated price.

Trucke + HyperTrack

HyperTrack has become a great asset to Trucke and we can’t wait to see how we can further use this amazing technology to enhance our user experience in the future.