Twelve seats, one database

Tafel Twaalf has twelve chairs. When you sell exactly twelve of something a night, every empty chair is an eight percent hole in the evening, and software stops being an admin tool and becomes the margin.

Small numbers, hard problems

A cancellation at 16:00 is worthless unless someone fills the seat by 19:00. So the waiting list is not a list, it is a queue with a clock: the next person gets a text with a hold that expires in twenty minutes, then it moves on.

Big systems solve this with dashboards and staff. A twelve-seat restaurant has neither. The software has to make the decision itself and be right, which is a much better design constraint than a feature list.

The lesson

We now ask every client the Tafel Twaalf question: what is your empty chair? The thing that, if the software fails quietly, costs you real money by the end of the evening. Build for that first. Everything else is a nice-to-have.