Blue Goat Bikes · Raleigh, NC · A bikefit studio and repair shop Book in seconds. Save time. Ride more. → https://bluegoat-booker.lovable.app

The one-line problem

Blue Goat Bikes is Dana's one-woman shop — she fits riders in the back studio, runs the bench up front, and has exactly one employee, Marcus, who handles repairs — and every "can I book with you?" used to turn into a week of missed texts, double-booked mornings and no-shows. Now customers book, change and get reminded on their own, and Dana works from one calendar that fills itself.

Overview

Blue Goat Bikes is a real-feeling booking app for a solo-owner bikefit studio and repair shop in Raleigh — Dana owns the place, and Marcus is her one mechanic on repairs. Customers land on the site, see Dana's actual open times (not a form that promises "we'll get back to you"), pick one, and it's instantly theirs — confirmed on screen, by email, and by text. Plans change? They move or cancel the appointment themselves in seconds, with no phone tag.

If they'd rather just ask, Crank the Goat — the shop's AI assistant, available on every page — answers questions about services and prices, offers real open times, and books the appointment right in the chat after confirming the details.

Behind the scenes, everything runs itself: confirmations, a 48-hour reminder and a day-before nudge go out automatically; deposit services require an explicit acknowledgment of the 24-hour cancellation policy; unfilled slots go to a wait list; and unanswered requests resurface as follow-up tasks so no lead is quietly dropped. Dana's Owner tools and a public view-only Admin page show the live calendar, cancellations, no-shows, the wait list and a dashboard of how customers heard about the shop.

The quirks (and what they cost)

Blue Goat Bikes isn't a generic scheduling page — it's built around the specific, messy reality of a solo owner (plus one repair mechanic) who can't stop the bench to answer the phone:

Fittings take 2–3 hours, and Dana is the only fitter. One fitting eats a whole morning and double-bookings happened. → Server-side availability that knows each service's real duration and adds buffer time — only genuinely open, Dana-only fitting slots are ever offered.

Saturday 10am–2pm is a walk-in wall. Nobody could pick up the phone. → Online booking and Crank the Goat answer for her; Saturday walk-in hours are blocked off on the calendar.

About 1 in 5 fittings no-shows or gets rescheduled by text. Lost $250 sessions, repeatedly. → Auto-confirmation, a 48-hour reminder and a day-before nudge by email; deposits on fittings and custom builds, with a required click-to-confirm that cancelling within 24 hours forfeits the deposit.

Requests arrived by Instagram DM, phone and "I'll swing by." Nothing landed in one list. → One requests inbox where Dana can log phone, DM and walk-in bookings; unanswered requests come back as follow-up tasks.

Changes arrived by text and got missed. Manual rescheduling, dropped changes. → Every message carries a self-serve link — customers move or cancel themselves and the calendar updates instantly.

Spring (Mar–May) was triple-booked. Customers turned away, slots lost. → A wait list that captures demand when the calendar is full.

No idea where customers came from. Marketing spend was a guess. → A "How did you hear about us?" question on every booking, rolled up into a referral dashboard.

What makes it feel real

Real pricing and services modeled on a working fit studio: comprehensive fittings ($250, 2–3h), tune-ups, custom build labor, box assembly, chain waxing, brake and drivetrain work.

Believable constraints: closed Sunday and Monday, lead time before slots, buffers between jobs, blackout days.

A solo-owner story told through the product: the homepage, the chatbot's personality, the email signatures and the admin calendar all reinforce that Dana runs the shop and Marcus is her one repair mechanic — which is exactly why the automation matters. https://youtu.be/8DWNu-XzsRM