Build - July 2026
One becomes two
A friend of mine runs a cleaning company here on the Costa del Sol - hotels, apartments, villas, the lot. Over a coffee a few months back I offered to build her something to keep it all straight. That is how most of my side projects start: one real person with a real problem sitting in front of me, not a market I read about.
The brief was small. An internal tool to track the bookings, the staff and their rotas, and the cupboard of products and kit that somehow never has enough of the thing you need. One business, more or less one user, nothing clever. I just wanted her to stop running it out of her head and a group chat.
Then the owners joined in
The people whose properties she cleans kept turning up in the design. It made sense to let them in too - log in, see their buildings, book a clean, block out the busy weeks before they arrive. So the tool grew a second side. The cleaners on one, the owners on the other, the same jobs seen from both ends.
A favour for a friend grew a second set of users while I wasn't looking.
I hadn't planned a platform. It just made sense - if she was cleaning their places, the owners might as well see the same picture she did.
There is an old alchemical line - the Axiom of Maria - that runs one becomes two, two becomes three. I am almost certainly misusing it to describe a booking app for a cleaning firm. But one did become two, and I only noticed after the fact.
It is a work in progress, close to a state I would let real hands touch. The plan is to hand it to a handful of local businesses for nothing, watch them use it, and fix whatever they trip over. A subscription comes later, once it has earned the right to charge - which is a very different thing from deciding on day one that it will.
Build for one person you can actually picture. Solve their problem properly and the software starts telling you what it wants to be next. The trick is listening to that without letting it drag you into building for everyone at once.
All writing - CV