SMS shift confirmations for staffing agencies

B2BWeb1 weekNext.jsTwilioSupabase

The idea

In light-industrial staffing, a worker who silently no-shows a 6 a.m. warehouse shift can cost the agency the whole client - an account worth thousands per week - because the client’s line ran short and the agency found out at 6:15. Coordinators currently spend evenings phoning down a list, and silence tells them nothing.

Bullhorn and the big staffing platforms sell this workflow inside enterprise contracts. The wedge is a standalone tool a 5-person agency can run by Friday: upload placements, let the machine text everyone, and stare at one board where every unconfirmed shift glows red early enough to backfill it. The first-to-reply backfill blast turns a 40-minute phone scramble into two minutes.

Who pays

The buyer is the owner or branch manager of a small light-industrial or hospitality staffing agency, at 99 USD/month plus SMS usage - priced against a single saved client account. Distribution: staffing industry groups (ASA chapters), staffing-owner communities on Facebook and LinkedIn, and cold outreach referencing the no-show problem every one of them has.

MVP scope

  • CSV upload and manual entry of weekly placements
  • Automated T-12h confirmation texts with YES/NO parsing and one nudge
  • Live board of confirmed / silent / declined with danger-window alerts
  • One-click backup-pool blast with first-to-reply assignment
  • Per-worker message log
  • Skip for v1: ATS integrations, worker mobile app, payroll/timekeeping, client-facing reporting
// Build prompt — paste into Cursor / Claude Code / Lovable / Bolt
Build ShowUp, a web app that confirms staffing agency placements by SMS
before every shift. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Twilio for two-way SMS via
a messaging service with a webhook handler, Supabase for Postgres and auth.
Magic-link auth for agency staff.

Core flow: a coordinator uploads the week's placements as a CSV (worker
name, mobile, client site, shift date, start time) or enters them manually.
Twelve hours before each shift start (configurable), the system texts the
worker: shift details plus reply YES to confirm or NO if you cannot make
it. Replies are parsed by the webhook - handle YES/Y/yes and NO/N variants,
and store anything else as an unparsed reply for human review. Two hours
after the first text, silent workers get one nudge.

The dashboard is the product: a live board for tonight's and tomorrow's
shifts, each placement colour-coded confirmed / silent / declined, sorted
so problems float to the top. A declined or still-silent placement inside a
configurable danger window (default 6 hours before start) triggers an
email/SMS alert to the coordinator.

Backfill: the agency maintains a backup pool per role and site. From any
red placement, one click blasts an SMS to the pool: first to reply YES gets
the shift, everyone else is auto-texted that it is filled. Record fill
times.

Pages: live board, placements upload, backup pools, message log per worker,
settings, billing. Pricing: 99 USD/month plus Twilio SMS usage passed
through at cost, via Stripe. Multi-tenant from day one.

// More B2B ideas