VESS Studio

People train at VESS for a carefully crafted experience. To book a class, though, students opened a dated app with another vendor’s "powered by" on it.

For the owners, the numbers didn’t work either. The software fee grew with every new student, and the studio’s data stayed with the vendor. They wanted predictable costs and their data in their own hands.

Before any screen, I mapped the business with the owners: 92 requirements and the journey of each of the five roles, from student to owner.

In the first sprint, I prototyped every MVP screen and validated it with them. Changing a rule in a prototype is cheap. Changing it once the system is built is expensive.

Alignment meetings became routine and carried on through the project, up to migrating the student base from the old system.

The website, the app and the admin read the same data. A class booked on a phone shows up on the front desk’s schedule, and billing runs off the same record.

The whole team uses one admin, and each role sees what it needs. The owners follow both studios together. A student at one studio never sees the other’s data, and that rule lives in the database itself, out of reach of any interface bug.

Students pay by PIX, boleto or recurring card. The system handles subscriptions, class packages, drop-ins and events, and issues the tax invoice automatically.

When the payment provider sends the same notice twice, the charge does not repeat. Card data is never stored in the system, and the audit trail cannot be erased. Student privacy follows Brazil’s LGPD, with data export and deletion that actually work.

A student books a class and picks her spot in the room right away. If the class is full, she joins the waitlist. At the studio, she checks in through the app. Her plan and payments are one tap away, with biometric login.

Web and app move together. No feature is done until it works on both.

I also owned the store release, from the icon to the reply to Apple’s review, through to approval.

The system runs both studios with bookings, recurring billing, tax invoices and notifications. Costs no longer grow with the number of students, and the data now belongs to the studio.

The platform keeps evolving in production, with new modules such as contracts with digital acceptance and management reports. The roadmap stays with me, from design to deploy.

From the commercial proposal to the store, every product decision went through me. I used AI agents to speed up the build, with the discipline of an engineering team: requirements written before code, and critical rules tested automatically before every deploy.

AI brought the speed, and the judgement stayed with me. That is how a whole system, with an app approved on the App Store, got off the ground in twelve weeks.