NOVS

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  Novs Morning Brief - a daily view of appointments, revenue, outstanding payments, and recommended next actions.

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  Voice-first business management - business owners can speak naturally to Novs instead of navigating multiple workflows.

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  Gemini runtime diagnostics - live AI provider, model, request ID, intent, latency and successful request status.

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  Customer management - customer information, activity, appointments and business history in one place.

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  Invoices - manage billing and payment workflows alongside customer and appointment information.

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  Payments - manage billing and payment workflows alongside customer and appointment information.

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  Natural-language appointment management - Novs understands conversational requests and proposes actions for confirmation.

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  Estimates & approvals - Create and manage estimates, track status, and turn approved work into the next step of the customer workflow.

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  What Should I Focus on Today? - Novs turns business activity into next actions, helping owners quickly identify what needs their attention.

Inspiration

As a business owner myself, I've experienced how much time is spent on administrative work instead of focusing on customers, growth, and delivering great service.

Millions of service businesses - from a hair salon, dog groomer, personal trainer, cleaning company, medical spa, or photographer, business owners - spend a significant portion of their day managing appointments, responding to customer enquiries, sending reminders, preparing invoices, following up on payments, and juggling multiple disconnected tools.

I realised that while AI is advancing rapidly, many small business owners either don't have the time to learn complex new technologies or don't consider themselves "AI natives." They need software that is simple, intuitive, and works the way they already do - not another system with a steep learning curve. That inspired me to build Novs. My goal was to create an AI Business Assistant that makes running a business easier by handling repetitive operational tasks, allowing business owners to spend more time serving customers and growing their businesses.

What Novs does

Novs is an AI Business Assistant built for service businesses. It helps business owners manage appointments, customers, estimates, invoices, payments, reminders, and follow-ups from one intelligent, voice-first platform. Rather than forcing users to switch between multiple apps or learn complicated AI tools, Novs is designed to fit naturally into the way service businesses already operate. Business owners can simply tell Novs what they want to do, and Novs helps turn those requeste into practical business actions. The guiding question behind the product is simple: ''Can my 70 year old mom use it ?''-The vision is to make AI practical, approachable, and genuinely useful for everyday businesses - not just large enterprises or technically advanced users.

How I built it

I built Novs as a solo founder using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate product development while remaining responsible for the product vision, user experience, workflow design, architecture, and overall strategy. The application was built with Lovable, React, TypeScript, and Supabase, with Google Gemini powering AI capabilities within the assistant. ChatGPT and Google AI tools were also used throughout the development process for product development, problem-solving, testing, and iteration. One of the most important design decisions was creating a single configurable platform instead of separate applications for different industries. Although salons, tutors, cleaners, photographers, and many other service businesses appear different on the surface, they share remarkably similar operational workflows. By designing around these shared patterns, Novs can support multiple industries through configurable templates while maintaining one scalable platform.

Challenges i ran into

One of the biggest challenges was balancing flexibility with simplicity. I wanted Novs to support many different service businesses without becoming overly complex or requiring industry-specific versions of the product. The solution was to build around common business workflows - appointments, customer management, estimates, invoicing, payments, and follow-ups - while allowing industry-specific templates to customise the experience without changing the underlying platform. Another challenge was ensuring the product remained accessible to business owners who are not particularly technical. Rather than expecting users to learn AI, I wanted the AI to adapt to them. That meant focusing on natural conversations, straightforward workflows, and automation that feels helpful rather than overwhelming. A further challenge was making AI reliable enough for real business workflows. Testing uncovered issues around ambiguous times, conversational context, appointment changes, and interpreting follow-up requests. Iterating on these edge cases reinforced how important it is for an AI business assistant to be not only intelligent, but predictable and trustworthy.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As a solo founder and business owner, I'm proud of turning Novs from an idea into a working AI-powered product using modern AI-assisted development tools. I'm not a software developer, but I was excited by the opportunity AI creates for anyone with a real problem to solve to build meaningful products. I just did it. Instead of creating another scheduling app or CRM, I built Novs as an AI Business Assistant designed to simplify the day-to-day operations of service businesses. I'm especially proud that it's being built for business owners who aren't necessarily technical or AI natives. By focusing on shared business workflows rather than individual industries, I've designed a platform that is simple, scalable, configurable, and accessible.

What I learned

Building Novs reinforced my belief that the biggest opportunity for AI isn't replacing people - it's reducing the administrative burden that prevents small business owners from doing what they do best. I also learned that great AI products aren't defined by the number of features they include. They're defined by how naturally they fit into people's everyday work and how confidently they help users accomplish real tasks. Most importantly, I learned that AI-assisted development doesn't remove the need for product thinking. Someone still has to understand the problem, make decisions about the user experience, test the edge cases, challenge assumptions, and decide what should - and shouldn't - be built.

What's next for NOVS

My immediate focus is on completing beta testing, refining the user experience based on feedback, and preparing Novs for commercial launch. Looking ahead, I plan to expand the library of industry templates, strengthen AI-powered workflow recommendations, and continue building Novs into the AI Business Assistant that helps service businesses around the world operate more efficiently, serve customers better, and grow with confidence.

Built With

• googleaistudio
• googlegeminiapi
• lovable
• react
• supabase
• typescript