Hustlebox
Co-founder & engineering lead. A real-time vehicle tracking platform for mileage calculation and trip history — with SMS-based user interaction.
The Product
Hustlebox was a real-time vehicle tracking solution that calculated mileage and recorded trip history. An OBD2 device plugged into the vehicle transmitted GPS coordinates to a third-party service, which relayed the data to our platform for processing, storage, and visualization.
Users could interact with the system via SMS — receiving trip summaries and responding to messages to control tracking behavior — making it accessible without needing to install an app.
How It Works
What I Built
As co-founder and engineering lead, I handled full-stack development — backend services and the user-facing UI. The backend ingested real-time coordinate streams, calculated mileage, and assembled trip histories.
I integrated Google Maps and Mapbox for trip visualization, and Nexmo (now Vonage) for two-way SMS — users could receive trip reports and respond via text message to interact with the platform.
Technology
Backend
PHP — real-time coordinate ingestion, mileage calculation, trip assembly
Database
PostgreSQL on AWS — optimized for time-series GPS data and trip queries
Mapping
Google Maps & Mapbox — trip visualization and route rendering
Telephony
Nexmo (Vonage) — two-way SMS for user interaction and trip reports
Hustlebox logged over one million miles before the company wound down — the unit economics of the OBD2 hardware made the product too expensive to scale without additional funding. The platform itself performed exactly as designed.