Ponca Hills Pumpkins

Ponca Hills Pumpkins started with a simple idea: grow pumpkins and deliver them directly to people's homes. After an early online ad attracted strong demand, my business partner and I turned that idea into a business. We were running it alongside our day jobs, so we needed a practical way to manage orders, plan deliveries, and understand our customers.

I built a custom online store where customers could choose pumpkins, place an order, and pay through Stripe. That gave people a convenient way to buy from us without visiting a pumpkin patch, and gave us a central system for managing the orders we needed to fulfill.

Delivery was a major operational challenge. Orders could come from different parts of Omaha, and an inefficient route could quickly consume time and gas. I built a system that captured each order's geographic coordinates using Google Maps services, then applied my own routing algorithm to organize delivery stops. Grouping nearby orders and automatically generating a stop sequence helped us use our limited delivery time efficiently and reduce unnecessary driving.

The location data also helped us understand which areas of town were buying from us and where to focus our marketing. We could connect customer demand with the neighborhoods we served and make more informed decisions about growing the business.

I also built driver roles and individual dispatch assignments into the system, giving us a way to add delivery help as demand grew. Together, these tools supported the whole business, from a customer choosing pumpkins to getting their order onto a delivery route.

Watch my interview on Project 402.