Booking and Follow-Up Dashboard for a Solo Handyman BusinessBooking and Follow-Up Dashboard for a Solo Handyman Business
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
Rama's avatar
Rama Gonzalez
• 1d
What I built
Dunbar Home Works — a booking site for a one-man handyman business in Portland, Maine, Marcus Dunbar. It has two sides:
1. Customer side (the public site)
A visitor lands on the homepage, sees Marcus's services and prices, and books a real open time slot in four steps: service → time → details → done.
The slots aren't fake — they're calculated from his actual working hours (7:30–4 weekdays, Fridays end at 2, Saturday mornings are estimate-only visits), drive-time buffers between jobs, and days off. Storm callouts can even be booked same-day.
Right after booking, the customer gets their own private link where they can confirm, reschedule, or cancel — no phone call needed.
Not ready to book? A simple form captures their name and number as a lead, and the system queues a friendly follow-up text automatically.
2. Owner side (Marcus's dashboard, sign-in required)
One screen shows today's route, upcoming jobs, an outbox of every text queued or sent, and all leads.
A "check before you drive" panel flags risky bookings — like the customer with two prior no-shows who hasn't confirmed — before Marcus loads the truck. One tap sends a nudge with a confirm link.
Confirmations, 24-hour and 2-hour reminders, and post-job follow-ups are queued automatically the instant a booking is created. Rescheduling a job slides all its reminders onto the new date by itself.
Marking someone a no-show bumps their strike count and queues a friendly re-booking text; cancelling a job kills its queued reminders.
Why
The brief was to turn "can I book with you?" into "you're booked" with as little owner effort as possible — so I attacked both places a solo tradesman loses work:
The front door: most competitors make customers call and leave a voicemail. Here, customers self-book into real openings, which kills the phone tag entirely.
The follow-through: no-shows and silent leads are lost money. The system confirms, reminds, flags repeat no-shows before he drives, and chases leads on its own — so Marcus's daily effort is a 60-second glance and a couple of taps.
Everything runs on Lovable Cloud (database + auth), and the quirky details — the no-show strikes, Saturday estimate-only mornings, drive-time gaps — are there to make it feel like a real client's business, not a template.
lovablechallenge
Back to feed
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started