Yawn! Welcome me back from hibernation. It’s good to be awake. I’ve not posted for over a year on this site but it’s good to be back. Although, I haven’t really been asleep, but rather extremely busy.
If you don’t remember, I’m with the startup that was working on the GPS Device. The device itself is still having some kinks worked out with the housing, but is coming along nicely. I’ve been actively tracking my business mileage driven with it since Oct. 2010.
The first market I’ll be going after is small business owners who need a pain-free way to track their business miles driven for reimbursement purposes. While other solutions are already out there, my focus will be on making the user experience as pain-free as possible.
Tracking, logging, and reimbursing mileage manually is a painful process. Nearly every person I’ve talked to either keeps a pen/paper logbook, or just use an estimate/guestimate of their mileage. Both of these approaches are problematic. By tracking using GPS and having good tools for generating a reimbursement report, we cut down on the pain and time spent significantly.
MileTrackGPS.com is our solution to this problem. The process starts with your phone or our custom GPS device. You get into your car for a business trip and hit a button to start logging. When you reach your destination, you press a button to stop. At the end of the month, you login to miletrackgps.com and view trip maps, enter trip descriptions (optional), categorize trips (optional), and create a reimbursement report. Below is my trip report for April. Click the image to download the PDF report. All miles were tracked using our prototype custom GPS device.
In the end, this little report is what we’re selling. But it’s much more than that. We’re selling a simple way to get from point A (manual tracking… painful) to point B (this report… pain-free).
Since it may be 6 months or more before we’ve jumped through all of the government’s various regulations for selling consumer electronics, we’re going to add more immediate support for Smartphone GPS tracking. We’re very close to announcing an Android beta version of our tracking application. If you’re interested, head over to the website and fill out the contact form mentioning you’re interested in beta testing.
Our product is going to be featured at the June Verge Indy meetup. This is a special gathering in Indianapolis where tech entrepreneurs get together to hang out, share ideas, and pitch their products to potential investors. We’ll also be at the 3rd annual InnovationShowcase in July.
