A shift marketplace that lets six people run a staffing company

A company placing spa therapists into hotels and spas had a problem with a deadline attached: the vendor behind their scheduling software shut down, leaving them on unsupported legacy tooling. They decided to replace it with their own platform — an Uber-like system for spa shifts.

I built it with one backend engineer over roughly a year: staff and client web portals, plus mobile apps for both therapists and hotels. I owned the frontend and both mobile apps, and the product design of how shifts actually get filled. Today the entire company runs on it with the owner and five support staff.

The decisions that mattered

Shift distribution is incentive design, not a feature list

The naive version of a shift marketplace — broadcast every open shift to everyone — fails in a specific way: workers learn to wait. Why accept a Tuesday shift now if a better offer might appear tonight?

So the filling logic became the real product:

Hotels first offer shifts to preferred candidates — therapists they've worked with and want back — before anything goes wide.
When broadcasting, hotels choose the acceptance model: require candidates to take an entire block of shifts (protecting continuity for multi-day needs) or leave it free-for-all per shift.
Unfilled shifts are automatically re-pushed on a time schedule as the start time approaches (12 hours out, 6 hours out) — a direct counter to the wait-for-something-better behavior. Therapists who hold out see the same shift return with growing urgency; hotels don't need a human chasing anyone.
Cancellations aren't unilateral: a therapist requests, the client approves. The marketplace stays trustworthy because commitments mean something.

None of this is technically exotic. All of it came from understanding how the two sides would actually behave, including the lazy and strategic behavior nobody puts in a spec.

Built to shrink the back office

Every workflow was designed around the question "does this need a human?" — automated offer waves, push notifications and reminders, availability and certification management in the therapist app, an Intercom-like messaging system connecting therapists, clients, and support, and shift/payment data exported to Xero instead of retyped into accounting.

What changed

The number I'll stand behind because it's headcount, not a metric: the owner plus five support/operator staff run the entire operation. Their job is monitoring what the platform does and providing live support to therapists and hotels — the platform does the scheduling, offering, chasing, and bookkeeping export.

No conversion percentages, because nobody measured a controlled baseline. The company replaced its dead vendor software with an asset it owns, and it still runs on it.

Technical notes

Web portals for staff and clients with role-based permissions; native mobile apps for therapists and clients (React Native).
Push notification infrastructure for offer waves and reminders; scheduled jobs driving the time-based re-push logic.
Xero integration for shift and payment data.
Team: myself (frontend, both mobile apps, product design of the marketplace mechanics) + one backend engineer; ~1 year; built pre-AI-tooling.