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Barbería Costanera — a one-chair barbershop in Encarnación, Paraguay, where "Can I book with you?" becomes "You're booked" in under a minute, while the owner keeps cutting.
It started with a real barber.
Before writing a single prompt, I interviewed a barber in my city. His day: cutting hair with one hand and answering WhatsApp with the other. Clients asking "do you have time tomorrow?", no-shows he can't refill, time spent on messages instead of work. Barbería Costanera and its owner, Ramón, are fictional, but every rule in the app comes from that conversation.
Built for this city, not for any city
→ Midday siesta closure: the app never offers those hours.
→ Clients cross the bridge from Posadas, Argentina, and traffic is unpredictable: one tap tells the barber "I'm 10 minutes late".
→ Prices in guaraníes. Every screen and every message in English and Spanish.
→ Friday afternoons and Saturdays fill up; weekday mornings don't. The app knows it.
For the client: ask like on WhatsApp
Type "Can I book for tomorrow?" in the chat on the home page and the app answers instantly with real free times you can tap. Pick one, add your name and WhatsApp, and you're booked. No account, no password. Then: add it to Google or Apple Calendar with reminders, reconfirm, reschedule, cancel, or warn you're running late, all from one private link.
For the owner: he only handles the exceptions
→ His whole day on one screen, live: who's next, who confirmed, who's late.
→ A cancellation is offered automatically to the waitlist, with a 30-minute hold that passes to the next person if unclaimed.
→ Reminders 24 h before, reconfirmation 3 h before, a thank-you after the cut and a rebook nudge 3 weeks later, all generated on their own, in each client's language.
→ Clients with 2+ no-shows (and Saturday bookings) leave a small deposit. Free cancellation up to 3 hours before.
→ Walk-ins in two taps, blocked hours, client history, and an impact card showing time and bookings saved, with every assumption visible.
Judges: try both sides in 60 seconds
Book from the chat on the home page.
Open the Owner Desk and tap "Enter as Ramón" (no password).
Use the demo time machine (+24 h) to watch the reminders write themselves.
Security note: the Owner Desk is intentionally open in this public demo so judges can test it, and all data resets nightly. In production, owner access sits behind a real login with role checks; client and booking data are already protected with row-level security, rate limits and no personal data in public responses.
Under the hood
Lovable + Supabase. Real-time availability with a final server-side check (no double bookings, enforced in the database). When the day strip took 8 seconds to load, I rebuilt it into a single query: 1.4 seconds.
The craft of cutting hair can't be automated. Everything around it can.
If you run a small business, what's the message you answer 20 times a day?
#lovablechallenge
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Congratulations
Day 3 of working on my project for the Lovable Challenge.
And somehow, almost one full day of those three went into the intro you see when the page first opens.
Not because it was necessary — mostly because I’ve wanted to try something like this for a long time.
Web design and development are far from my main field, so I kept putting this idea off. This challenge finally gave me a reason to test it properly — and seeing it actually work is ridiculously satisfying.
The video was converted into an image sequence and tied directly to scrolling on desktop and swiping on mobile, so the animation is controlled by the user as they move through the page.
Right now the project is already at Build 4.2.3.
The backend is working properly, the main mechanics are in place, but visually… there’s still a lot to redo. The current plan is to rebuild almost the entire visual layer before the final version.
I also found out today that Lovable reduced the number of prize spots quite significantly — apparently, there will only be 3 finalists.
That definitely makes the odds a little more painful 😅
But either way, I’m already getting a new portfolio case out of this project, and I’m finally experimenting with things I’ve wanted to build for a long time.
How’s everyone else doing?
Still working on your project, or have you already submitted it?
Or did you decide not to participate at all? If so, I’m curious — what made you skip it?
What I Built
I built Glow & Grace, a self-service booking website for a solo, home-based nail studio in DHA Phase 5, Karachi. Clients can view services and prices, pick an open time slot, and get instantly confirmed — no messages exchanged with the owner. The owner has a simple dashboard where every booking appears automatically, along with deposit status, so there's no manual confirming or texting required.
Why I Built It
Solo, appointment-based businesses like small nail studios, salons, and home-based service providers often run entirely on WhatsApp. The owner is doing the client's nails with one hand and replying to booking messages with the other — checking availability, confirming times, and texting reminders, all manually. This doesn't scale, wastes hours every week, and leads to double-bookings or missed messages. I wanted to solve the actual bottleneck: turning "can I book with you?" into "you're booked" without the owner lifting a finger, while also addressing the no-show problem with a small deposit built into the booking flow.
Soical Post Link: https://lnkd.in/p/dbXGPbzt
I love the color style