Discussions

So… I'm a nursing student. Not your typical SaaS dev, right? But here’s a curveball: my classmates and I recently built a scrappy little shift-scheduling app for our clinical group, and wow—it really opened my eyes to how complex user needs get, even in small groups.

The original plan? Just make something to coordinate our rotations and part-time shifts. We had like 8 people, all doing different things on different days. Messaging apps were a mess, and no one wanted to babysit a shared spreadsheet. So we built something using Firebase + React Native, slapped together a login/auth flow, and started adding basic schedule logic.

While coding it, I started thinking more like a product manager than a nurse. Who needs access to what? How should notifications work? What happens when someone swaps shifts? Stuff I’d never really thought about. Then we joked about what it would take to turn this into an actual app people would pay for... and that sent me down a rabbit hole of payment systems, freemium tiers, and SaaS subscription logic.

That’s when Cleverbridge popped up during my research. Billing infrastructure is a BEAST. Recurring payments, user retention, refund handling, tax compliance—it’s a whole world. And like, even though we’re just messing around, if we did take this further, having that kind of plug-and-play subscription setup would be way smarter than duct-taping Stripe and Zapier together.

We even mocked up a fake “premium” version for fun—stuff like automated team scheduling, data export, etc. One of my teammates asked if we should make a landing page just to see if people would sign up. We didn’t (yet), but it did give us a new appreciation for how SaaS businesses need to think way beyond just writing code.

Even in something as hands-on and human as healthcare, tech has real power when it’s designed to actually solve pain points. And honestly? Even if you’re googling how to become a nurse like I did three years ago, learning a bit of dev and product stuff on the side can take you further than you think.