The weekends fill up. Nobody is chasing them.
A two-person food truck in a mid-size US city. The owner cooks, his partner runs the window. Weekend markets and events are most of their revenue, and every one of those weekends starts with an application somebody has to find, send and follow up on. The truck runs that on a SureThing AI assistant.
This is a real SureThing workflow. We set it up with the owner and wrote it down here. Names and visuals are recreated; the steps, the screenshots and the numbers are theirs.
- Business
- Food truck, weekend markets
- Team
- 2
- Tools connected
- GmailGoogle CalendarFacebookInstagram
- Running since
Sunday nights on Facebook groups.
Before SureThing, the owner spent Sunday nights scrolling event pages and Facebook groups, copying dates into his phone notes. Applications went out when he remembered. Follow-ups mostly didn't. Twice last spring a booked weekend fell through because an organizer's reply sat unread for a week.
Three routines. He touches each one once.
Find weekend events
Every Monday at 7am the routine scans six event sites, the county calendar and the Facebook groups he already follows for markets, festivals and fairs within 60 miles, four to eight weeks out. It drops the list into a note with dates, distance and the vendor deadline. He marks the ones worth the drive, usually four.
Track applications
For each event he marks, the agent fills the vendor application from the truck's profile and files it in a tracker: applied, waiting, booked. When an organizer replies in Gmail, the row updates on its own, and a booked weekend gets an Instagram post drafted with the date and the spot. He reads the replies and posts the post; he doesn't hunt for either.
Send follow-ups
Thursday morning, anything waiting more than five days gets a follow-up draft, written from the original thread. It sits in his inbox until he says yes. Nothing goes out without him.
Hi Dana, following up on the application we sent on the 11th for a food truck spot on Oct 4. We're still very interested and can confirm within a day if a space is open. Happy to send our health permit and menu again if that helps.
What one week actually looked like.
Nine events came in. Two were over 90 miles out; he dropped them in one tap. Four applications went out by 9am, two of them to markets he'd never heard of.
Lakeside hadn't replied in ten days. The follow-up draft was waiting in his inbox, already knowing which event it was about and what he'd sent the first time. He read it, changed one word, sent it. The organizer replied that afternoon.
He tried.
ChatGPT writes a good application email. It doesn't know which events are new this week, which ones he already applied to, or that the organizer replied on Tuesday. The routine does, because it sits in his inbox and his calendar.
The point isn't the writing. It's the memory, and the fact that it still waits for his yes.
What still needs a human.
The week one event site changed its layout, the Monday list came up short. He noticed, and added the site's newsletter as a second source. An organizer once replied from a different address, and the tracker missed it until he pasted the email in. And the agent never decides which events are worth the drive. That stays his.
The truck has been running this for 10 weeks. 4 tools. 3 routines. 87 events found. 38 applications, 23 weekends booked. Every one of them sent after the owner said yes.
Questions
Yes. The workflow, the screenshots and the numbers come from a real SureThing customer. The name, the photos and a few details are recreated to protect the owner's privacy.
