Bookcessful

How a Sunday Dog School Turned into a Role-Oriented Waitlist Engine When the idea of building a booking system first came up, it wasn’t about spotting a “market gap”. There was no roadmap, no pitch deck, and no big SaaS dream either. What there was, however, was a very down-to-earth problem. One I had already seen too many times in different forms: someone tries to be fair, and the system does not help them do that. This story starts here. With a single character: Juli. Juli, the dog trainer – and the paper note Juli is a dog trainer. She runs her dog school alone. No assistant, no admin, no “someone else will sort it out”. She holds classes on Sundays. With a fixed capacity: 7 dogs. Never more. This is not a comfort decision, but professional responsibility. With more dogs, quality drops, attention breaks, the session falls apart. The application process had also settled into a routine: Until Friday 6 PM people can sign up. On Saturday Juli finalizes the schedule. On Sunday she holds the classes. The online booking tool she used at the time – let’s call it OIF – worked in a technical sense. In a business sense, it did not. The OIF could not assign a waitlist to an event. At first glance this seems like a minor detail. In practice, it broke everything. The workaround that reveals everything So Juli came up with a workaround. For every Sunday she created two events for the same time slot: The “class” – with a capacity of 7 Another event called “waitlist” – practically unlimited She sent everyone both the public URL of the class and the waitlist, and everyone booked wherever they felt was right. Juli even explicitly asked: “If you’re not 100% sure, please book the waitlist.” So I wanted to meke Juli's life easier, therefore I created a booking system that activates the waitlist, keeps offers fair, and fills freed spots automatically.