Creating a resource planning app for small businesses

Introduction

As a small business, if you've ever tried to do resource planning with a team of freelance consultants or associates using spreadsheets, you know it's a nightmare. I’ve worked on both sides of the fence - as a freelancer, and as someone trying to resource projects. The back-and-forth emails, uncompleted, out of date spreadsheets, and constant juggling around availability waste so much time (for everyone).

That’s the problem I wanted to solve. So I built an app to test the hypothesis – if it was easy for freelance consultants to add and update their availability, they would happily do so regularly.

The problem with resource planning for small businesses

Small businesses and consultancies that use freelance consultants to deliver projects face a common pain - knowing who's available, and when. It sounds simple, but unlike employees, the availability of freelancers varies greatly from week to week. They could be available one minute, and the next they’ve signed up to work with someone else for the next three months.

Trying to keep on top of it, when you’re trying to plan for future projects, is time consuming and painful when you have to rely on spreadsheets.

From the freelancer's side, being asked to constantly fill out spreadsheets with their availability is tedious and often ignored. I'm guilty of it myself.

As an ops manager I spent a long time trying to work out a way to create the one spreadsheet to rule them all that would magically be up to date and usable. I failed miserably and ended up with multiple places where I tried to keep track of people and when they were available.

With the result that I would end up spending far too much time emailing, calling, pencilling people in, only to have to remove them, rather than getting on with other important stuff. My research with other consultancy businesses echoed the same frustration.

I searched high and low for a solution. There were a couple I found that might work, that integrate with people’s calendars. But they came with an enterprise level price tag and a per user licence fee. When you might have a bench of 50 associates but may only be using a fraction of them on projects at any one time, it is prohibitively expensive.

The idea

What if there was a simple, intuitive way for freelancers to update their availability in seconds - and a way for ops/resource managers to filter that data quickly by role, availability and date?

That’s the vision I had.

How I built it

I had been quoted £6.5k for it to be built by developers, but whilst it was a reasonable figure, I needed a much more cost effective solution to test the hypothesis, because if freelance consultants won't use it, then the whole premise fails.

Having looked at various vibe coding apps as an alternative and more affordable solution, I settled on Replit to build the proof of concept.

My background in operations, IT implementation, and working with software testing consultancies came in handy here: I understood the business process/flow (ops), understood the importance of clear requirements and realism (IT) and the importance of testing and iteration (software testing).

The process for building it looked like this:

• Planning: I started by mapping out the workflow - what the app needed to do and who it needed to serve (both from the freelancer and resource manager’s perspective). This step is vital and worth spending time on.

• Prototyping: I deliberately kept it simple. I wanted to prove the concept – that if it’s easy to do, freelancers will happily update their availability on the fly and regularly if reminded and sent the link.

• Prompting Replit: I fed it a high-level project description so it could help generate the first iteration of the app. It was important to give context as well as the description of the app I wanted. It delivered a remarkable first pass.

• Iterating: The real work began when I needed to refine it. I tested, tweaked, and gradually refined both the freelancer-facing and admin dashboards.

• Enhancing usability: I added small but meaningful touches to improve the user experience.

• More testing: Each time a change was made, I tested again. Eventually I had a working prototype I felt confident putting in front of people.

Did it take time? Absolutely. There were frustrating moments, and many hours spent figuring things out. But with tools like Co-Pilot and a clear plan, I pushed through the table biting and after around 100 hours of effort over several weeks, I had a usable version. Incredibly, it only cost me around £50 to get a working prototype.

The image below shows a calendar view of associates and their availability in a clear dashboard.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, though

One thing that tripped me up was thinking I had separate databases for my development site and live sites. I didn’t, and when the Replit Agent tried to rectify it, it ended up overwriting all the data in the client app! I then spent a sweaty few days wrangling with Replit and their support team, until I got it sorted. On the plus side, it gave me the time to make some further user enhancements.

Proof of concept

The app is being trialled by a client. But I need more feedback to see if the concept truly works, in particular: will freelancers reliably update their availability if it’s made easy? And is it a useful first step for resource managers to help plan projects more effectively?

If the answer is a resounding yes, then I can invest in developing a more robust version (yes, devs, I promise I’ll stop hacking it together myself at that point!).

Call for testers

If you're a small business that works with a bench of freelancers or associates and you’re tired of the headache of managing availability, I'd love for you to try it.

Drop me a message and I can send you a link to a demo video, or we can set up a call.

Let’s make resourcing smarter, together.