Scheduling and progress for driving schools

The idea

A driving school selling 400 to 800 USD lesson packages coordinates every lesson by phone: which instructor, which teenager, picked up at which high school at what time, dropped where. The dispatcher is usually the owner’s spouse with a paper diary, and the failure modes are all direct revenue loss: a no-show teenager, an instructor idling forty minutes because two pickups were booked across town, a parent who churns after the third phone-tag round.

Generic booking tools (Calendly, Acuity, Square) fundamentally cannot express “pick up at Lincoln High, drop at home, two hours” or the drive-time buffer between one student’s dropoff and the next one’s pickup. Modelling lessons as location-to-location events with computed buffers is the wedge; SMS reminders and a parent-visible skills checklist close the loop on no-shows and churn.

Who pays

The school owner pays 99 USD/month. A five-instructor school runs 150-plus lessons a month; eliminating a handful of no-shows and the dead windshield time between poorly sequenced pickups is worth thousands, and self-serve package purchase plus booking removes the phone job entirely. Distribution: driving schools are enumerable from state licensing lists, making direct outreach practical, and owner groups on Facebook are small enough that two happy schools per state seed the rest.

MVP scope

• Package sales via Stripe with lesson-credit tracking
• Instructor calendars with pickup/dropoff addresses and Mapbox drive-time buffers enforced at booking
• Parent portal for booking, rescheduling, and credit balance
• Twilio reminders for parents and morning run sheets for instructors
• Skills checklist with per-student road-test readiness view
• Skip for v1: classroom/theory course management, state paperwork filing, vehicle maintenance logs, payroll, route replay/telematics

Build DriveSlot, a web app for driving schools with 2 to 10 instructors. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, Auth, RLS), Stripe for package sales, Twilio for SMS. Roles: owner, instructor, parent/student. Magic-link auth.

Data model: Packages (e.g. 6 x 2hr lessons, 599 USD), Students (permit number and issue date, home and school addresses, parent contact), Lessons (instructor, start, duration, pickup address, dropoff address), SkillChecklist items, Availability blocks per instructor.

Scheduling, the hard part generic tools cannot do: every lesson has a pickup and dropoff location chosen from the student's saved addresses (home, school, other). When booking, compute a drive-time buffer between consecutive lessons using the Mapbox Directions API: previous dropoff to next pickup. The booking UI only offers slots where the instructor's buffer fits; never allow back-to-back lessons across town.

Booking flow: parent buys a package via Stripe Checkout, then books lessons against remaining credits from the instructor's open slots. Reschedule allowed to 24h before, else the credit burns (configurable).

SMS via Twilio: parent reminder 24h and 1h before pickup with instructor name and car description; instructors get a morning run sheet text. No-show marks burn the credit and free the slot.

Progress: instructors tick a skills checklist (mirrors, parallel parking, highway merge, etc.) after each lesson from their phone; a readiness bar shows parents how close the student is to road-test ready.

Pages: owner dashboard, instructor day view with run sheet, parent portal, package store, student profile with skills, settings.

Pricing: 99 USD/month per school.