Text-first dispatch board for 5-20 truck home service crews

The buildable idea

SMS-first dispatch board with live technician availability

Core value: Dispatch entirely over text: the board assigns the nearest available tech, the tech replies with a status keyword, and the customer gets an ETA automatically

Who has this pain

5-20 truck residential HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors

• —Dispatch lives on a whiteboard and a group text
• —technicians double-book or get skipped
• —maintenance contract customers get missed
• —field techs refuse to learn another mobile app
• —$400/mo field service suites are priced for 20+ seat operations

What they do today: Whiteboard on the shop wall, an 11-person group chat, and whoever answers the phone fastest

Competitor gap

Incumbent field service suites cost $400+/mo and require app adoption the crew refuses; they sell to dispatchers, not to the owner who is also in a truck

Monetization angle

Per-location SaaS pricing: $79–$299/mo per location. Land the one operator who feels the pain daily, prove the recovered dollars in month one, then expand to seats and locations.

How to validate in a week

1. 01Day 1 — Find 25 targets: 5-20 truck residential HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors. Pull them from public directories, review sites and the original subreddit. Do not filter yet.
2. 02Day 2 — Cold outreach with the pain, not the product. Open with "Dispatch lives on a whiteboard and a group text" and ask how they handle it today. Reply rate target: 8%.
3. 03Day 3 — Run 8 calls. Ask what they currently pay to solve this, what they tried, and what would make them switch mid-contract.
4. 04Day 4 — Deliver Dispatch entirely over text: the board assigns the nearest available tech, the tech replies with a status keyword, and the customer gets an ETA automatically manually for 2 of them. A spreadsheet and your own hands are fine. This is the concierge test.
5. 05Day 5 — Price it. Quote $79–$299/mo per location and ask for a card. A verbal yes is worth nothing; a deposit is worth everything.
6. 06Day 6–7 — Decide. 3+ paid deposits in Field service management means build. Under 3 means the pain is real but the buyer is wrong — go back to Day 1.

Not moving forward? The scoring rubric explains why this idea scored where it did.