CurbsideDrop

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Portrait of Jimenez Julien

Publication director

Role
Founder and publication director, CurbsideDrop
Company
MLJ, SASU
Focus
Mobile food operations and messaging
Email
jimenezjulien42@gmail.com

The person behind the product

Jimenez Julien

I build small, sharp software for trades that run on their feet. CurbsideDrop is the one I care most about, because a food truck lives or dies on whether the right two thousand people know where it parked this morning.

I did not grow up in food service. I came to it sideways, through a summer spent helping a friend keep the books for a two truck taqueria operation outside Lyon, and then through three seasons of doing the same kind of work for operators in the United States. What struck me was not the cooking. It was the twenty minutes before service, when a person who had been awake since four in the morning had to stop, wipe their hands, and try to write three separate posts on a cracked phone while the fryer came up to temperature. Half the time the post went out late. Sometimes it did not go out at all. And then the owner would stand at a quiet curb for forty minutes wondering what went wrong with the neighborhood, when nothing had gone wrong except that nobody had been told.

I spent most of 2024 riding along. I worked prep windows in Austin and Kansas City, I sat in commissary kitchens at six in the morning listening to operators argue about which lot was worth the permit fee, and I read a lot of group chats. The pattern was always the same. Every truck already had an audience. Every truck was already doing the hard part, which is making food people will cross a city for. The broken piece was the last hundred feet: the moment between knowing where you will be and telling the people who want to come. Social feeds are built for browsing, not for answering a question somebody has right now, at 11:38, with forty minutes for lunch.

So CurbsideDrop does one thing and refuses to grow into ten. You save your corners once. You keep your board in the app. When you know where you are parked, you tap four times and the same message goes out as a text, as a pin on your own public map page, and as a caption you can paste into Instagram and Facebook without rewriting it. Nine seconds, measured, not promised. I threw away a scheduling module, a loyalty punch card and an ordering flow during the first year, because every one of them made the drop screen slower, and the drop screen is the whole product.

How I work with operators has not changed since the first ten accounts. I run the onboarding calls myself for every new truck, which means I hear the same complaints and the same wins in real time instead of through a support queue. I ask for a photo of your menu board and I type it in for you, because asking a working owner to do data entry is how software gets abandoned in week two. Every quarter I spend two service days on a truck, on the window, taking tickets, so that I stay honest about what a busy hour actually feels like and what a button press costs when your hands are full.

What I am accountable for is narrow and specific. I am accountable for messages arriving: if a drop does not deliver, that is my problem at any hour, and my number is on the account screen. I am accountable for the carrier paperwork staying current so your texts are not filtered as spam. I am accountable for your list belonging to you and never being sold, rented or borrowed. I am accountable for the price on the pricing table being the price on your card. And I am accountable for every sentence on this website, including this one, because MLJ, SASU is a company of one and there is nobody else to point at.

Experience and expertise

  • Twelve years building and shipping small business software, the last four of them entirely in food and beverage operations.
  • Three seasons of field work with mobile food operators in Austin, Kansas City, Portland and Phoenix, including two service days each quarter on a live window.
  • Hands on work with United States carrier messaging rules, including 10DLC brand and campaign registration, consent capture and quiet hour handling across time zones.
  • Point of sale integration work with Square and Toast item catalogs, plus daily sales reconciliation for per corner reporting.
  • Publication director for MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes CurbsideDrop and answers for its content.

How this product is built and maintained

CurbsideDrop ships small changes weekly and never on a Friday during the summer season, because a broken drop on a Saturday market day is a real loss of money for a real family. Every claim on this site is tied to a number I can produce from the platform: the nine second median comes from time stamps between the drop screen opening and the first carrier acceptance, and the revenue figures come from operators who connected their point of sale and agreed to be measured. If a number stops being true, the sentence changes here first.

Editorially, we write in the trade's own vocabulary and we do not publish a testimonial we have not confirmed with the person who said it, by phone, with their business name attached. Product decisions follow one rule: if a change adds a tap to the drop screen, it needs an extremely good reason or it does not ship. Support is answered by me and by two contractors who have both worked service windows, seven days a week during the season, because trucks do not work office hours and neither should the people behind their software.

Published articles

Everything below was reported, written and fact checked by Jimenez Julien for Service Window, the magazine CurbsideDrop publishes for mobile food operators.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a question about the product, a correction to something on this site, or a request to come ride along on your truck for a service. I read everything and I answer within one business day. If you want to see the product working before you talk to anyone, the four step drop walkthrough on the home page shows the whole flow, and the pricing table holds no surprises.

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Written and maintained by

Jimenez Julien is the publication director of CurbsideDrop and the person who answers the demo line. Questions about anything on this page go to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. Read about the author.