BusinessBuddy

Inspiration

I built BusinessBuddy after seeing friends run service hustles — braiding hair, doing nails, cutting hair — while also being their own scheduler, accountant, and inventory manager. Everything lived in DMs, spreadsheets, or their heads. I wanted to centralize that.

What it does

BusinessBuddy is an operations dashboard for small service-based businesses.

It lets business owners:

• Manage appointments
  
• Track revenue by service
  
• Monitor inventory usage
  
• View booking trends
  
• Generate AI summaries of performance
  

It also provides a simple client-facing view of services.

How I built it

I built BusinessBuddy as a full-stack web app using:

• Next.js (App Router) for the frontend and API routes
  
• TypeScript for type safety
  
• PostgreSQL as the database
  
• Prisma ORM for schema modeling and queries
  
• Anthropic API for AI-generated summaries and analysis
• Vercel for deployment
  

I designed a relational schema connecting businesses, services, bookings, and inventory. API routes handle CRUD operations, analytics queries, and AI summarization. The frontend uses server and client components to balance performance and interactivity.

Challenges I ran into

• Designing a flexible but clean database schema
  
• Structuring data so analytics queries were efficient
  
• Managing environment variables and secure auth correctly
  
• Handling schema migrations during rapid iteration
  

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• A production-ready relational database design
  
• Secure authentication and protected routes
  
• AI-powered insights integrated into real business data
  
• Full deployment working end-to-end
  

What I learned

• How to design secure full-stack apps
  
• How to model real workflows into relational schemas
  
• How important early data structure decisions are
  
• How to ship quickly without breaking everything
  

What's next for BusinessBuddy

• Multi-staff business support
  
• Integrated payment processing
  
• Deeper financial analytics
  
• Automated inventory alerts
  

Built With

• claude
• next
• next.js
• poke
• postgresql
• prisma
• vercel