I should be studying. Instead, I built a hair salon that doesn't exist.

Med school gives you two kinds of hours: the ones you spend studying, and the ones you feel guilty about spending on anything else. I found a loophole. I started building websites and told myself it counted as relaxing.

It began with WordPress sites for anyone who asked. Then Shopify stores. Then SaaS ideas, sketched in the margins of lecture notes somewhere between the brachial plexus and a doodle of a dashboard. (Both are complicated networks. I stand by the comparison.)

I loved it. I was also slow, and my free time is roughly the size of a tea break.

Then Lovable arrived, and I did what any broke student does: I used the free plan. Five credits a day. That's it. I spent them like pocket money at a night market, one careful prompt at a time.

It turned out to be a wonderful teacher. When every prompt costs something, you learn to say exactly what you mean. You stop typing "make it nice" and start describing the rules.

Nothing sharpens your writing like a daily budget of five.

When I could finally afford Pro, I upgraded, and I've now been on it for about three months. It's the first tool that made the thing in my head and the thing on the screen feel like the same size.

Because booking looks easy and isn't. Two people want the same slot. Someone doesn't show up. A deposit needs to be taken, or not. A cancellation should refill itself instead of leaving an empty chair.

Every one of those is a small rule, and small rules are where booking sites quietly fall apart. So I picked a business that has all of them, invented a colourist called Mara, gave her a studio in Sarasota, and set out to build it properly: no phone tag, no double-booking, and times that actually fit the service.

1. 01Put the rules in the database, not just on the screen. A button can be tricked. A constraint can't.
2. 02Write the rules in plain English first. If I can't explain a cancellation policy to a client in two sentences, the code won't be clear either.
3. 03The tiny details are the product. A calendar file in the confirmation email. A hold that releases itself. A page that tells you which sign-in method you used. Nobody praises these, everybody feels them.

I build under the name Senally. Picture a workshop where the lights are still on at 2am and someone is muttering about a Shopify theme. The salon is pretend. The bugs I chased at 2am were very real.

Lovable and Contra ran a challenge for appointment-based businesses, going from inquiry to confirmed booking. I looked at my calendar, found no free time whatsoever, and entered anyway. If I win, the first thing I'm buying is sleep. The second is a better desk chair.

Marlowe & Ash and Mara Ellison are fictional. The reviews on the site are AI-generated samples and are labelled as such. Payments run in Stripe test mode, so no real money moves. Everything else, the booking rules, the holds, the waitlist, the emails and the owner alerts, really works. Please try to break it.