The one step no document can do for you is build the list. This is that step, done: 50 researched locations in your city, plus the product pack, a 14-day action plan, and 90 days of VendBuddy.
“What location should I target with 0 experience?” · “I just ordered my first vending machine. I need a location.”
Both of those are verbatim from our coach log, and the second one is the more urgent problem it sounds like. Somebody has already spent three or four thousand dollars. The machine is coming, or it is already sitting in a garage. And the list of places to put it is a blank page.
The first question came up twelve times in ninety days, which is the more common version of the same gap: the scripts exist, the checklist exists, the entity is formed, and the actual bottleneck is that nobody has assembled the twenty or fifty specific buildings worth walking into.
It is not hard. It is just long, and it is the least interesting work in the whole business. You open a map, you draw a radius, and you start listing every office park, gym, apartment complex, warehouse, salon and clinic in it. Then, for each one, you work out roughly how many people are inside on a weekday, whether there is already a machine, whether there is a plausible spot for one, who manages the building, and whether there is a name and a phone number attached to that.
Do it properly and it runs twenty to thirty hours across three or four weekends. Do it improperly and you end up with a list of addresses that is really just a list of buildings you have driven past, ranked by nothing, which is how people spend a Saturday pitching four venues that never had the headcount to support a machine.
Mostly it costs momentum, and momentum is the scarce resource here. The people who stall out do not usually stall on rejection — they stall in the gap between deciding to do this and having something concrete to do on Saturday morning. Three weekends of spreadsheet work is exactly long enough for the thing that made you excited to stop feeling urgent.
And if the machine is already bought, it costs carrying time. A machine in a garage is not a slow business, it is a stalled one, and every week it sits there is a week of a decision you have already paid for producing nothing.
Fifty locations in your city, researched and ranked by placement potential, delivered as a list you work rather than a list you build. With it: the product pack covering what to stock and at what margin, a 14-day action plan saying who to contact in what order with what opener, and 90 days of the VendBuddy Starter plan on your account so the list-building keeps going after these fifty.
It is built by hand after you buy, so allow a few business days. It is not an instant download and we would rather say that above the buy button than in an email afterwards.
What does arrive instantly is a START-HERE welcome PDF and three documents from the operator library — the Cold Walk-In Pitch Script, the What to Bring to a Pitch checklist, and the Complete Getting Started Guide — so the wait is spent rehearsing the conversation rather than refreshing your inbox. Call that what it is: a bonus that fills the gap, not the thing you bought.
The ranking is the part that does the work, and it is worth being specific about what it is and is not. It is an assessment of whether a venue plausibly supports a machine — the category it belongs to, the on-site headcount a site of that size and type usually carries, and whether there is a realistic reason for someone inside it to buy something from a machine during the working day. It is not a promise that the manager is friendly, that the hallway has a socket, or that nobody got there first. Those three you still find out by walking in, which is why the fourteen-day plan is a plan for visits and not a plan for emails.
What it does not do is close anything. Fifty ranked locations still take the same fifteen to twenty pop-ins per placement that twenty unranked ones do. Ranking changes which doors you walk through first and how few of them are wasted; it does not change the arithmetic, and anybody telling you otherwise is guessing.
Built by hand after purchase and delivered by email. Not an instant download.
Real venues in your metro, not a radius export. Each is researched for the things that decide whether a machine performs — plausible on-site headcount, venue category, and whether it is the kind of site that supports a placement at all — and then ranked, so the first ten you walk into are the ten most worth the drive. You get the list; you decide the route.
What to put in the machine and what it should cost you, so the first fill is not a guess made in a club store aisle. Vend price against cost of goods is the arithmetic the whole business runs on, and getting the opening rotation roughly right saves you a quarter of stale product on the second visit.
Who to contact, in what order, with what opener — sequenced across two weeks so the fifty locations become fourteen days of specific work rather than a spreadsheet you are avoiding. This is the part that turns a list into Saturday morning having something to do.
Ninety days of the VendBuddy Starter plan on top of the deliverables, so when you have worked through the fifty you can build the next fifty yourself rather than buying another list. Use the same email at checkout as on your VendBuddy account and it activates automatically; otherwise redeem your licence key at vendbuddy.io/redeem.
The one part of this that is instant. The welcome PDF tells you what happens next, when to expect the list, and what to do in the meantime. With it come three of the documents we sell separately — the Cold Walk-In Pitch Script, the What to Bring to a Pitch checklist, and the Complete Getting Started Guide — so the days between buying and your list arriving are days you can spend rehearsing rather than waiting. They are a bonus, not the deliverable: the fifty ranked locations are what you are paying for.
| The other way | What it costs | What you are left with |
|---|---|---|
| Building the list yourself | $0 and 20–30 hours | The same list, three or four weekends later, ranked by whatever you were able to work out from a map. |
| A locator service | $400–$1,500 per placement | One machine placed and no list at all. You own nothing afterwards and machine two costs the same again. |
| A virtual assistant | $150–$400 | Fifty addresses, usually unranked, from someone who does not know which venue types support a placement. |
| This kit | $297, once | Fifty ranked locations, the stocking guidance, a 14-day plan, and 90 days of the software that builds the next fifty. |
If $297 is a meaningful share of what you have set aside for the machine, buy the machine. That is a real reason not to do this and we would rather lose the sale than have you underfunded on the asset that actually earns.
And if what you want is the method rather than the list, the Location Playbook is $47 and you keep it forever.
This is a done-for-you research deliverable, not an instant download. It is built by hand after you buy, so allow a few business days — the welcome PDF and the three bonus documents arrive immediately, but they are the thing that fills the wait, not the thing you are buying. If you want the method rather than the list, the Location Playbook is $47 and you keep it forever.
Email [email protected] inside 30 days and we refund the whole thing. We will not ask you why and we will not make you prove you tried. We would rather have your goodwill than your $297.
Cheapest first. Everything here is a one-time purchase — nothing on this page renews.
the VendBuddy app is the separate monthly thing that does the list-building continuously, if you ever want that part automated.
Payment, licensing and refunds for this product are handled by Gumroad; the checkout opens right here on this page. VendBuddy sells documents and software. We make no representation about the income, profit, or number of placements any operator will achieve — results depend on your market, your effort, and factors outside anyone’s control. Nothing here is legal advice; have a local attorney review any agreement before you rely on it.