Waitlist and tour management for home daycares

The idea

A home daycare with one infant opening and a notebook of fifteen names calls down the list and reaches voicemail after voicemail: numbers changed, kids aged out, families found other care months ago. Meanwhile the spot sits empty at $1,200-plus a month of lost revenue. The waitlist is the most valuable asset the business has and it is managed worse than a pizza order.

Brightwheel, Procare, and the rest are built for enrolled children: daily reports, billing, parent messaging. Nobody serves the funnel before enrolment, and for a home provider with 8 to 12 spots, the funnel is where the money is won or lost. The openings forecaster, projecting when each child ages out of each group, is a feature the incumbents structurally do not have and providers currently do in their heads.

Who pays

The provider pays $15/month, against spot revenue that makes the price a rounding error; one week of a filled infant spot covers the year. Buyers are licensed home providers, roughly 90,000 in the US alone, reachable through provider Facebook groups, licensing-agency resource lists, and food-programme sponsor networks. The public waitlist form is the growth loop: every family that joins one sees the product.

MVP scope

• Public waitlist form with per-age-group ranking
• Openings forecaster projecting age-outs and future vacancies on a timeline
• Tour slot definition and family self-booking
• Stripe holding deposit that moves a child from waitlist to incoming
• Auto-expiry of stale waitlist entries with one-click re-confirmation
• Skip for v1: daily reports, parent messaging, tuition billing, staff accounts, and state-specific licensing paperwork

Build SpotList, a waitlist and enrolment pipeline app for home daycare providers. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, auth), Stripe for deposits and subscriptions.

Core flow: the provider configures their programme as age groups with capacity (e.g. infants 0-18 months, capacity 4). Families join via a public waitlist form at /d/[slug] with child name, birthdate, desired start date, and contact details. The provider dashboard ranks the waitlist per age group by join date, and the openings forecaster is the centrepiece: using each enrolled child's birthdate and the group age boundaries, it projects exactly when each child ages out of each group and renders a timeline of future openings, so the provider can tell a family on the phone that an infant spot opens in March.

When a spot is offered, the provider sends the family a tour booking link (provider defines weekly tour slots), and after the tour, a Stripe payment link for a holding deposit that formally reserves the spot. Deposit paid moves the child from waitlist to incoming.

Pages: dashboard with waitlist and forecaster timeline, family detail, tour calendar, public waitlist form, enrolled roster, settings, billing.

Non-obvious details: waitlist entries auto-expire with a confirmation email at 6 months unless the family re-confirms via a one-click link; keep a per-family activity log (contacted, toured, offered, declined) because licensing disputes over waitlist fairness happen.

Pricing: $15/month flat, 30-day trial.