Inspec – Specification scheduling software for interior designers

Hacker News

Share card

Inspec – Specification scheduling software for interior designers

Hi HN, I'm Nick and I built Inspec with my partner Caitlin (she's the interior designer, I'm the developer). Inspec lets interior designers create and manage FF&E schedules - basically spec sheets listing everything that goes in a room before the furniture: flooring, paint, countertops, lighting, fixtures, etc. This process is currently exclusively done using Excel, and while this works to some degree, it comes with a lot of manual work and clunkiness. When Caitlin started working remotely, I watched her deal with these issues daily. So I spent the past 9 months building a better solution. Key Features: - Realtime collaboration - Revision control (versioning) - Professional PDF exports - QR codes to print out on-site for contractors, builders etc. to always have the latest version - Completely customisable fields and a familiar workflow to Excel to keep learning curve small When we first started building this we thought it was completely unique, but turns out there are 2 competitors. I think our positioning is quite different though as we seek to only replace this document creation, rather than overhaul the entire project management and try to be a complete solution. So that’s helped to guide our focus, but also validated that interior designers are looking to modernise their software. Tech stack: I used my SaaS boilerplate which is just a modified T3 stack template with everything set up just how I like it. So Next.js with the pages router, TS, Trpc, Prisma + PostgreSQL, and TailwindCSS. I’ve also got Pusher for realtime collaboration, Redis and BullMQ for keeping a seperate background worker for PDF and web scraping jobs. I can’t imagine many interior designers are on HN, but figured I would share this for anyone who wants to take a look :) feedback always welcome! The landing page is at https://inspec.design