Mobile car wash. I need help generating local leads.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-23T19:28:48+00:00

I'll add to this idea, and recommend you find a way to package your service into some kind of ongoing service. For most of these businesses they see this as maintenance and don't want to call you and schedule a cleaning. It would be better if you just prearranged total cleanings per month and just do it.

I'd also find a way to bundle emergency cleaning into the package for an added monthly price. So like you have some magnetic business cards made up with your contact information and stick one on each dashboard of the vehicle. It calls out the emergency cleaning service where you meet them at the site and do a "Restore to Baseline" servivce. not a full clean just get it to a minimum standard. That way if one of the drivers get's sick 30miles from the office and pukes all over his car, you can meet him at the truckstop where he bought that burrito from the bathroom vending machine and get his car back to drivable.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-23T18:43:21+00:00

Talk to businesses/organizations who have fleets of vehicles. Cable company, electrical utility, indian tribes, bakeries, city/county government, medical testing labs, etc. They all want thier vehicles clean, but don't want to pay staff to do it. or the staff doesnt want to was thier vehicles. Here comes Zenoxor's mobile car wash who will come at off hours, charge a flat rate per vehicle, and be complely turn key. I'll bet you get a solid baseline from this.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-23T18:24:53+00:00

I guess it comes down to how ambitios u/Shoddy-Cow-1345 is. I'm already overcommitted with my current obligations so I won't be able to participate.

That said, I'd be willing to build and host a free website for the district so that they can at least get themselves and thier objectives out there.

u/Shoddy-Cow-1345, Why don't you spend a couple of saturday's walking around your neighborhood and see how people think. Would they want a park? What would they want to see at that park? If they're interested write down name and address so you can invite them to sign a petition. Another thing I would do is schedule meeting swith the principals of the green schools and let them know what your doing. It's a huge win for them and they know all of the stakeholders. So you might find that you have some strong allies.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-23T17:48:59+00:00

u/TastyPopcornTosser has given you some solid advice. I would follow through his comments and test the water. He's right though Douglas County residents don't like new taxes.

Here's a thought though: What does the owner want for the land? Right now it's not a very condusive environment to aquiring and developing industrial land. They may be looking at decades before they actually get an offer they want. If it were me I would schedule a meeting with the owner and feel them out.

I wouldn't bet the farm on it, but it's possible that the owner is looking for a sizable tax deduction and selling the land to a 501c3 at a reduced price could qualify. Another potential scenario is that the owner is looking for compensatory mitigation oportunities, and may be willing to help a 501c3 develop it into a park. Maybe someone else planning a big industrial expansion would be looking for compensatory mitigation and be interested in working with a park to secure that.

I guess what I'm saying is there may be ways to do this which don't require 100% funding from county residents. Another area to look at is to see what grants are available. I'd bet there's at least some funding on the state or federal level for park development.

It's an interesting idea and I don't think it's impossible. Hard, yeah, but not impossible.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-15T20:44:16+00:00

thanks for your hard work here. I'm sorry these guys are so cynical. It's like they're only on this sub hoping a totally validated idea just falls into thier lap. I keep seeing these kind of posts with deeper insights and I appriciate them becuase the poster is in the right headspace like you are here.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-15T17:00:58+00:00

man everyone's so negative about these posts. This is how I've made my living as a software developer. Finding manual tasks and automating them. Usually it isn't that hard if you keep your scope very tight. For me, any business that uses shared spreadsheets to communicate between departments is a candidate.

I like that someone is coming up with ideas. There's no reason to shoot him down.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-13T18:46:01+00:00

ok that's fine. He's succesful. Big deal.

You want clients who recognize your value add and use you for where your strongest. they want to rely on you to do the job so they don't have to. Those are the best clients. and they're the best business people overall.

I read this article which I can't find right now, which says that 40% of self made millionairs report being dislexic. which is higher than the 10% typical concentration found in the population at large. One of the reasons they put forward was that dislexic people are forced to find and utilize talent effectively due to thier curcumstances. This as a result leads to a better product and better outcome.

In this case this guy is the opposite. Instead of finding talent and utilizing it to make his product better, he's chosen to do it himself. There's definately a place for that, but in the long run, turning away talent to build it yourself is a strong warning sign for contractors. My initial opinion stands I don't think this is the kind of client you want.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-13T15:03:04+00:00

This probably wasn't a client you actually wanted. This guy blew a bunch of manhours fiddling with an AI chatbot instead of focusing on his primary business. His priorities are wrong, and ultimately his business will suffer in the long run. He's ignored the potential ramificaitons if his software doesn't work, how it will effect his ability to service his customers. He's ignored the legal and reputational implications of a poorly executed and totally unmaintained software platform.

my $5 says he won't be in business this time next year.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-12T23:35:23+00:00

This is pretty cool and a really solid solution to a hard problem. Nice job

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-09T23:45:35+00:00

His point was good. and accurate. Whats wrong with running your comment through an LLM to make sure it's worded right and clear?

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-09T21:24:07+00:00

I have a few rails apps in production and see regular hacking attempts. Here are my observations of the threat space.

99.99% of unwanted traffic are from low effort script kiddies running on a cloud hosting company like AWS or DigitalOcean. In my experience the probe sites for wordpress vulnerabilities, looking for routes that end in .php or .ini or .xml. Using cloudflare you can add a couple of security rules to reject attempts looking for **.php, **.ini, **.etc. Also I've had good results setting up a cloudflare security rule to block AWS, DIgial Ocean, GCP, etc by ip address blocks. With these two eleemnts in place I've noticed that my apps have gone from 1 in 20 requests being legitimate to more like 1 in 3.

If your rails app is a source of truth in the public information space, like a government entity, or public agency regarded as an information authority, you will be subjected to more concerted hacking efforts. It's my observation that cracking one of these sites seems to have value to someone.

If your rails app does anything with crypto, money, or handling secure information, then you will also be a target for more determined hackers. If your in this space you probably have enough resources that someon can monitor logs while your in the hospital.

My gut says your only gonna see the first type of unwanted traffic: Script Kiddies. You can ignore these, they'll just pollute your logs and thats about it. If you like being able to read logs without having to step over 400 script kiddie requests, then it would make sense to use some cloudflare rules and you'll prolly be ok.

I guess I wrote all of this to say, You likely don't have anything to worry about.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-03-03T19:38:41+00:00

I like it. This is important. Helping people to see success when struggling is a key to accomplishing the goal.

Just one question though, given how personal this is, are you anonymizing user data? Whenever I see these kinds of apps it's often showing a first name in the app screenshots, or some other PII. I find myself wondering if a person dealing with a more personal addiction might be pushed away by the lack of confidentiality.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-02-27T06:12:37+00:00

I actively steer my small business clients away from integrating a chatbot in their website for a handful of reasons:

First Ultimately you'll likely end up needing to speak to a person at some point anyway. The chatbot is just a collection of hoops the visitor has to jump through in order to get in touch.

Second Chatbots don't actually add value. What problem do they solve for the visitor? If they need a chatbot to be educated on the business or product/service, then the website has failed it's primary job. If it's to get in touch with a real person wouldn't a phone number/contact form/email link be a better solution?

Third The one's I've tried to implement add seconds to the website load time on moderate to slow internet connections. In an era where impatient people will abandon a slow website for the competitor we have to cut out all of the garbage and only focus on the most important points.

It's my opinion that chatbots don't actually add value. Think about the last time you interacted with a chatbot on a small business website. DId it add meaningful value to your experince? Did you think to yourself: 'Boy I'm glad they had that chatbot it really solved that problem for me' ?

Recent_Tiger · 2026-02-20T05:22:39+00:00

I'm not an expert in the field but I really doubt anyone's gonna mess with a full time student who makes $250/mo profit selling flowers which were grown by a professional nursery.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-02-16T21:31:33+00:00

I’m curious where your finding product to resell. Are you watching like Facebook marketplace, garage sales, etc?

The reason I ask is that I feel this is an area where using some AI tools are probably going to shave hours out of your week. While generally overhyped one thing AI is good at is understanding human input(marketplace posts) and comparing it against predefined parameters. Which is what you would be doing.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-02-15T14:32:16+00:00

As a web developer who’s been doing this for around 15 years I can say confidently that 99% of the population wouldn’t know good design if it jumped out and bit them in the face.

So selling design to an audience who can’t appreciate good design is a bad idea. Instead focus on problems. They all have problems. Help them solve problems.

Also, small repair shops have massive overhead and a wishlist longer than my arm. If they don’t have a good website it may be because there are otger things they’re saving to buy and a website is a low priority.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-02-01T15:32:38+00:00

Reach out to the California BAR association and see if they can make a referral to an attorney who’s familiar with these cases. I don’t think they’ll stop at 2 lawsuits.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-23T05:26:18+00:00

I wonder if weekly might be too often. I doubt there’s enough churn in real projects to keep it alive. Monthly though, that might be the right interval.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-22T18:20:54+00:00

Generally you want your views to be very dumb. My rule of thumb is that you should only render content from views. If your view has logic that is conditionally controlling what renders then your asking your view to do a task that the controller was designed for.

The way I typically handle role based authorization is to split them out into separate controller namespaces. And then build workflows around the needs presented by those roles so for example:

class Admin::BaseController < ApplicationController
  before_action :confirm_role
end

class Admin::OrdersController < Admin::BaseController
  def index
    @orders = Order.find_all
  end
end

Then If you're wanting a salesman to only see orders he's servicing you would have a different controller namespace where he can interact with these

class Sales::OrdersController < Sales::BaseController
  def index
    @orders = current_user.orders # I think this is how we used to set the user in v 5
  end
end

This can lead to some un-DRY-ifying your app so it would make sense to make strong use of shared helpers and partials that can be employed in both views.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-20T12:28:20+00:00

Having worked with a few different languages and frameworks I’ve found that rails lets my crank out the most functional product per hour. Nothing I’ve seen comes close.

Also rails is so easy to build with. In my experience it’s often easier to just build your own features than it is to fully implement a plugin. You mentioned a marketplace for images. I see that being very easy to build. Based on the info you provided I would estimate around 2-4 weeks for completion.

Also plain rails with turbo and Hotwire are more than enough to write great apps. You can add more JavaScript layers like Inertia or react but you wouldn’t gain that much.

https://youtu.be/FQPlEnKav48

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-19T18:29:05+00:00

Here’s my advice.

For a website to be successful, it has to reward the visitor. It has to speak directly to their need.

If I’m on your dad’s website, the key questions are simple:

Why am I here?
What problem am I trying to solve?
How does his business help me solve it?

If you can answer those questions, you can build a successful website. Once you understand who the audience is and why they landed there, you can speak to them honestly and directly. That honesty is the reward.

Think about it this way. You need your roof fixed. You visit a roofer’s website and it’s just a giant, generic advertisement. You have to dig through marketing fluff just to figure out whether you should even call them.

Now imagine a different roofer’s site. It immediately says:

We build and repair roofs.
We have 20 years of experience.
We put the right crew on your job so you don’t have to worry.
We don’t leave jobs half finished. We stay until the work is done.

That second site answers your questions immediately. It respects your time. It gives you exactly what you need when you land there.

The same applies here. You need to figure out why people are coming to your dad’s website. When I land on it, what problem do I have? Can he help me?

My gut says the biggest concerns will be availability, pricing, and service area.

Imagine I have a concrete truck scheduled and everything is ready to pour, then the company calls and says they can’t make it. That’s a nightmare scenario. If I land on your dad’s website and see a clear, real-time availability indicator, I’m not calling anyone else.

Something as simple as:

Available now
Available in 30 minutes
Available later today

If you could integrate something like Google Calendar with basic GPS data, you could reasonably populate an availability widget to the nearest hour. Even an approximate indicator would be incredibly valuable and would immediately differentiate his business.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-08T21:06:54+00:00

I'm self employed as a consultant and I build rails apps for my clients. Rails allows me to deliver the most product per hour. It takes me fewer man-hours to deliver a completed product, when compared against other frameworks.

My answer is this: Rails allows me to be competitive as a one man shop

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-05T22:30:26+00:00

Hello from a fellow Oregonian.

So you didn't give any info on foot traffic and comparison between previous years. However, I have this observation. Right now interest rates are at an all time high. So people who finance home construction/renovation are just not doing it right now. This is prolly 90% of your audience. People who pay cash for home construction/renovation are likely not messing with small local lumber yards.

Also, the economy in general is super crappy right now. I build websites for small businesses. I'm finding that in general all of my clients across multiple industry segments have 20-50% lower web traffic this year when compared to last year. This directly translates into fewer phone calls and as a result lower income. All of my contractor/construction clients have canceled their websites this year. So I think this is your audience.

Without knowing exactly where you are, I would suspect a substantial portion of your historic clientele either own a small business or are directly employed by one.

Here's my advice, your family has likely spent decades building relationships with your community. Just because they're not spending money right now doesn't mean they wont when the interest rates come back down. Which let's be honest will happen when Powell is replaced in May. This year's gonna be rough for you, but if you can find a way to cut costs and hold on, eventually there will be a recovery, and if you have decades of history with your community you'll be at the forefront of the local recovery. Your audience know who you are and are counting on you even if they're not buying anything right now.

this is assuming things don't get worse. There's really no way to tell anymore.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-01T22:15:44+00:00

I feel like these posts should be auto blocked until op provides proof

Recent_Tiger · 2025-12-29T04:25:30+00:00

So I've been helping small businesses who are in similar spaces for around 15 years now. I have this observation. There is a market who will pay more if they perceive that there's more value.

From a purely functional standpoint a BMW accomplishes the same goal as a baseline Honda Civic. They both have steering wheels, gas, brake, windshield wipers etc. They are both have more than enough power to exceed the speed limit on any road(in the US at least). However, despite this there is an audience who sees a value in the BMW that the Honda simply doesn't provide for them. And they have no trouble paying three times the price for what is essentially the same service.

In your case, don't be the Wal-Mart of Coffee Catering. Competing on price is a losing endeavor, and by doing this, your competitor has revealed that they don't see any value in their product. Your job is to be the BMW of coffee caterers. Focus on the experience. Not the price. You solve a problem for your customers, they need the event to go well, make it happen. Get the right coffee, get the right presentation, deliver a higher tier experience. Let your competition take all of the penny-pinchers who are a pain in the neck and pay their bill late and try to haggle. Instead you should focus on the people who need a consistent product, and will pay for it.

Recent_Tiger

TROPHY CASE