Run your own deliveries: publish your days, build a customer list, plan the route

There's a kind of food business the delivery apps were never built for. You're not a restaurant handing bags to a stranger on a scooter — you are the delivery. You bake Thursday night and drop off Friday morning. You run meal-prep boxes to the same forty people every Sunday. You take the truck through three neighborhoods on a Saturday because that's where your people are.

And the tooling for it is a mess. Your delivery days live in your head and in an Instagram story that expired yesterday. Your customers live in DMs, a WhatsApp group, and a notes app. Your route lives in Google Maps, rebuilt from scratch every single week, one address pasted at a time.

Deliveries is FasterMenu's answer to that: a public page that says where you deliver and when, a customer list that fills itself from it, and a run planner that turns that list into a route you can work off your phone.

Who it's for

You'll get something out of this if you deliver with your own hands:

• Home bakers and cottage-food makers with a weekly drop-off round.
• Meal-prep and food-box businesses delivering to the same regulars every week.
• Food trucks and market stalls that also run neighborhood deliveries between pitches.
• Coffee roasters, farm boxes, tamale and empanada makers — anyone with a route and a repeat list.

If a courier picks up your orders and you never see the address, this isn't for you. If you are the one in the van, read on.

Part one: a page that says where you deliver, and when

Turn Deliveries on and you get a public page at your-name.fastermenu.com/deliveries, sitting as a tab right next to your menu and your links page — same one link you already put in your bio.

On it, visitors see:

• Your delivery days. A weekly round reads as "Every Tuesday and Thursday"; a one-off shows its date. If you're out today, the page says Delivering today at the top.
• The areas you cover, as pins on a map, so nobody has to guess whether "the north side" includes them.
• A signup form, right underneath.

The page is search-indexable too, so "bakery delivery" plus your town is a search you can actually turn up in — not a post that vanished from a feed twelve hours after you wrote it.

Part two: every signup becomes a customer you own

The signup form asks for a name, an email, a phone number, and — this is the useful part — a real delivery address. People can tap Use my location, or type an address and drag the pin until it's on the right door. Then they pick which of your areas they're in.

Everyone who signs up gets a confirmation email and lands in your Customers list: a plain table with search, a filter by route, and a checkbox next to every row. Assign twenty people to a route in one go. Add the customers you already had before any of this existed. Keep a note on the ones who need it — leave at door, buzz 3B. Each row shows how many deliveries they've had from you and when the last one was.

It's your list, on your side of the fence — no marketplace between you and the person eating your food, and a CSV export button if you ever want to take it elsewhere. That's the whole point: the apps rent you customers, and this hands them to you.

Part three: tell them you're coming

A delivery round only works if people know it's happening. On any route there's an Announce button: one tap emails every customer on it about the next delivery — when you'll be there, which area, a link to see it on a map, and a button to place their order over WhatsApp or text.

It's deliberately a button and not a robot. You decide when the message goes out, and each delivery day can only be announced once, so nobody gets the same email twice.

Part four: plan the day, then run it from your phone

This is the part that eats your Saturday morning, so it's the part we built hardest.

Pick a route and a day and plan a run. Everyone on that route becomes a stop automatically. From there you can add a customer who isn't usually on it, add a brand-new one on the spot, skip whoever's away this week, and drag the rest into whatever order you like.

Then hit Best route. It sorts the stops around wherever you're standing right now and tells you roughly how many kilometers the round is. No more paste-address-into-Maps-and-hope.

When you set off, start the run and the screen turns into something you can actually use one-handed at a van door:

• Your stops as a list or on a map, with the next one called out.
• Navigate opens directions to that address; you can get directions for a single leg too.
• Call, WhatsApp or text the customer without digging for their number — the message comes pre-written with "I'm on my way with your delivery."
• Tick each drop-off as done (or Nobody home), with a running 4/11 delivered at the top. Tapped the wrong one? Undo.

Finish the run and it's kept as a record, so next week you can see who you actually reached.

What it doesn't do

Worth being straight about the edges:

• No payments. There's no checkout and no card processing. Ordering happens the way it already does across FasterMenu — WhatsApp or text, straight from your menu.
• No courier network. You're the driver. This plans your round; it doesn't hire anyone.
• No commission. No percentage of the order, no per-delivery fee, no marketplace listing you have to bid your way up.
• Announcements are email, and you send them yourself when you're ready.

Setting it up

An afternoon, tops:

1. Add a route — a name like "North side", the days you go, and the hours. Weekly or one-off, with an optional pin for the middle of the area.
2. Turn the page on and drop a Deliveries block onto your links page so people find it.
3. Import the customers you already have — or just share the page and let them add themselves, addresses and all.
4. Announce your first round, then plan the run and drive it.

The takeaway

Delivering yourself isn't a worse version of a delivery app — it's a different business. You know the doors, the dogs, the buzzers, the people. What you've been missing is somewhere to keep all of that other than your own memory.

A page that tells people when you're coming. A list of everyone who wants you to. A route that puts itself in order. That's it — and none of it charges you per drop-off.

Deliveries is part of FasterMenu, alongside your storefront, schedule, live menu, WhatsApp orders, loyalty cards and subscribers — one link from $8/month, with a 30-day free trial. See a live demo or start free.