I built Maro, a web app for a real furniture studio in Lagos called Maro Atelier. They do bespoke design, fabrication and restoration, and like most studios here, their whole intake lives in WhatsApp threads. A customer sends a voice note and some photos, the studio squints at the messages, asks the same three questions five times, and hopes nothing gets lost. I wanted to fix that.

So the idea is simple. A customer's messy inquiry, photos, budget, vibes and all, becomes a real project. The app reads the message, pulls out what it actually knows, and then asks for what's missing. It never guesses. If the customer didn't say the wall size, the app doesn't invent one, it just asks. That rule is baked into everything: the AI only works with words the customer actually wrote, and the studio's own rules decide what happens next, not the AI.

Once a project has everything it needs, it unlocks booking. Real time slots, Lagos time, real conflict prevention so nobody gets double booked. When a customer books, a booking fee appears on their page with the studio's bank details and their own reference, they pay by transfer, tell the app they've paid, and the owner confirms it from the inbox. Invoices work the same way, any amount the studio chooses.

There are two worlds in the app. Customers get a portal with their own sign in, where they see their projects, appointments, messages, quotes and payments, and it updates live as the studio works. The studio gets a workspace of its own, with an inbox, a calendar, invoices, a team section where each staff member gets their own login and only sees their own calendar and projects, and a client dashboard for sending progress updates and quotes.

I built it because I kept watching good studios lose good customers to scattered messages. Maro turns the chaos into a process the customer can actually see.