A kettle corn business with no website, and an agent that now finds its next booking
Adam Baker has been popping kettle corn and pouring fresh-squeezed lemonade in Yuba-Sutter since 2015. Two kettles, two booths, county fairs to high school football games and out to Reno. What he did not have was a website. What he has now is a site, a live map of where the booth actually is, and an agent that spends every week finding the events worth applying to next season.
bakerskettlecorn.com. Built on the same stack we use for our own site, hosted the same way, and measured with the same audit we sell.
Findable in person, invisible everywhere else
A booth business is not short of customers standing in front of it. The problem starts the moment somebody is not standing there.
Before
- No website of any kind
- Two Facebook pages and a TikTok, all under an older name, Baker's Choice
- No published schedule, so "where are you this weekend" was answered one message at a time
- Nothing an assistant could read, and nothing for a search result to point at
- Next season's bookings found by hand, one organizer's website at a time
Now
- bakerskettlecorn.com, with the flavors, the story, the FAQ and the allergen answers in plain text
- One name everywhere, matching the LLC
- A published booth calendar, plus a "where we are popping today" banner that appears by itself
- A live map of the booth, on and off by GPS
- An agent that researches events worth applying to and hands back the application details
The name is the part that matters most to an assistant and is the easiest to overlook. A business known to Facebook as Baker's Choice and to its own customers as Baker's Kettle Corn & Lemon Shakers gives a machine two half-answers instead of one whole one. Fixing that is unglamorous and it is the foundation everything else sits on.
The schedule is the product
People do not search for a kettle corn brand. They search for what is happening this weekend, and then they want to know whether the booth will be there. So the calendar is not a page on the site, it is the spine of it.
One file holds every day the booth is out. It feeds the month grid on Find Us and the banner that appears on the homepage only on a day the kettle is actually working. Adam edits it, and nothing else may. The agents that write for this site are explicitly forbidden from touching it, because a schedule an agent can edit is a schedule that can send a family to a park nobody is at.
Two of the heaviest things our own audit looks for are opening hours and a street address, and a travelling booth has neither. That is not a gap to be fixed, it is the shape of the business, and it is the reason the calendar and the live map exist at all. They are how a business with no fixed hours and no storefront answers "when" and "where" anyway. Publishing a street address here would mean publishing Adam's house, which is the one thing the map is built to prevent.
So here is the number, with the arithmetic rather than without it. Measured on , the site scores 72 out of 100. The audit awards 18 points for opening hours and 15 for a street address, so 33 of the 117 points were never available to this business. Baker's scores a full 84/84 points!
GPS on the trailers, and a map that refuses to say too much
Both kettles carry a tracker. The site shows where the booth is, and the whole design of it is about what it will not show.
A pin only inside a named event
The map draws a pin only when a tracker is inside one of the event areas on an approved list. Anywhere else, including the zone drawn over Adam's own house, can never appear on the site.
The real position is never published
When the pin does appear it snaps to the centre of the event area. The raw GPS fix stays on the server. What a visitor gets is "the booth is at this fair", which is the only thing they wanted.
It fails closed, every time
No tracker signal, no server, no configuration, no recent fix: the map says the booth is between events. There is no failure mode in which it guesses, and no stale pin left behind after the booth packs up.
It costs nothing when it is off
The mapping library is only fetched when there is a location to draw. Between events, which is most of the week, the page carries no map weight at all.
This is the same rule that governs everything we build. A live map that occasionally broadcasts a family's home address is not a feature with a bug, it is a liability with a map on top. Open it now and you will most likely see the honest answer, which is that the kettles are not out today.
Every week, a fresh list of events worth applying to
Every other agent in this build works on the website. This one works on the income. Baker's makes money by standing at events, so the list of events worth applying to sits earlier in the funnel than any page, any keyword, or any post.
What it goes and finds
Fairs, festivals, farmers markets, holiday and craft markets, art shows, car shows and community events across Northern California, in the next twelve months. For each one it brings back the organizer, the application or information link, the vendor fee, the deadline, how the application actually works, and how likely a booth like this one is to get in.
It re-checks the rows already on the list first, before hunting for new ones. A row that said "apply by August 30" and now says applications are closed is worth more than an event nobody has vetted.
What it is not allowed to do
It never applies to anything, never contacts an organizer, and never submits a form. It cannot touch the booth calendar or the website. And it may never write to the columns where Adam and Gary record what they applied to, won, or passed on.
That last one is the rule worth naming. Anything the agent writes can be researched again next Friday. A human's own record of their own work cannot be regenerated, so nothing automated is allowed near it.
It also knows what a bad suggestion costs. An event over the hill in Nevada earns a row only if it is a genuinely massive draw, because the cost of a marginal California suggestion is one row on a spreadsheet, and the cost of a marginal Nevada suggestion is a whole day of Adam's driving. That rule is not a setting. It is a sentence in the agent's instructions, written down with its reason, because a year from now the reason is the part that will be missing.
"Gary is great to work with! He's fast, efficient and an AI marketing guru!"
Adam Baker, owner, Baker's Kettle Corn & Lemon Shakers
Next on the list is the part Adam has been building toward since the first meeting: an online store on his own site, so the corn can ship anywhere in the country instead of only into the hands of whoever walks past the tent. Until it opens, the site says exactly that and nothing more.
Adam at the booth. Photograph from the family's own site.
Want to know where you stand first?
Baker's started with a measurement, not a design. Run the same one on your own site for five dollars and see what the assistants can actually read.
Or call 916-999-5460