Preorder & Waitlist Manager

The problem this kills

Launch day is supposed to be your best day. Instead it's a fire drill.

The hot item finally lands, and now you're staring at a pile of preorder emails, a waitlist spreadsheet someone half-maintained, sticky notes from three salespeople, and a quantity that doesn't come close to covering demand. Who signed up first? Who left a deposit? Who gets allocated, and who gets bumped to the next batch? You make the calls under pressure, in a hurry, and a week later a customer forwards you the email proving they were ahead of someone who got the unit.

The painful part isn't the shortage — it's that there's no fair, defensible, recorded way to decide. Preorders live in too many places, signup order gets lost, and the conversion from "interested" to "real order" happens in someone's head.

This tool puts every preorder in one queue, keeps the signup order honest, and turns launch-day allocation into a calm, reviewable decision instead of a scramble.

What you'll build

A small internal web app — just for your team — that:

• Captures preorders and waitlist signups for items that aren't available yet, from a form or an imported Sheet/CSV.
• Queues them by date and priority, honoring the order people signed up in and flagging any deposits paid.
• Watches for the launch: when an item is ready and you enter the expected launch quantity, the tool proposes an allocation down the queue — who gets a unit, who's waitlisted for the next batch.
• Waits for a manager to approve that allocation before anything becomes real.
• Converts approved preorders into live orders and sends each customer the right notice — "your preorder is confirmed" or "you're next in line."
• Remembers everything: who did what, when, and why — a full audit trail.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A discovery interview that runs first. Before it writes a single line, the plan has the AI agent interview you about your business — your products, how people preorder today, what counts as priority, whether you take deposits, and your messiest edge cases. It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up. You get a tool shaped around how you actually work, not a generic template.
• A clear data model for preorders, items, launch batches, and allocations — adapted to your SKUs and naming.
• The allocation engine: signup-order-first, with priority and deposit rules layered in the way you described.
• A manager approval screen that shows the proposed allocation, lets the manager adjust, and only then commits.
• Customer notices through Resend, with the wording you choose.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so you can build the whole thing this weekend: import signups from a Google Sheet or CSV and export clean, correctly-columned order files for whatever system you use today.
• Copy-paste prompts for every step — you paste, the agent builds.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. Governance is baked in from the first step, because allocating scarce inventory is exactly where "who decided this?" matters:

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's preorders and orders.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the AI proposes the launch-day allocation; a manager reviews, adjusts, and approves — and only then do preorders become live orders. Nothing is committed automatically.
• A complete audit trail: every signup, every priority change, every allocation, every approval — stamped with who and when.
• Duplicate guards so the same customer can't be queued twice for the same item (dedupe on customer + SKU) and a preorder can't be converted twice.

Who it's for

Sales reps capturing interest, demand planners deciding how to split a short first shipment, and CSRs fielding "where am I in line?" — anyone who has ever survived a launch day on spreadsheets and adrenaline.

You've got this. Open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let the agent interview you.