Good Fold Shop

Good Fold Shop was the order-taking and operations system for the whole business. We ran it at roughly fifteen pop-ups and a dozen farmers markets, and at one festival it handled around ninety orders in a day. Most of those we entered ourselves at the counter, with a smaller number coming in from customers online, but either way the money ran through it. Square was built right into the iOS app, so we charged cards on Square hardware without ever opening the Square app separately. That integration is the whole reason I built an iOS app in the first place. Good Heat, later, was the one I built just for fun.

The kitchen side started as ticket management: every open order in the app instead of on handwritten slips, marked ready, which fired a text to the customer, then marked picked up. Then one day our cook was out and I was the one at the skillet, and I found out how hard the real job is. Five open orders is twenty-five or thirty dumplings down at once, and from the outside every dumpling looks the same. You cook them in rows of five, pull them off one end and start the next batch at the other, and keeping straight whose is whose is genuinely hard in the middle of a rush.

So I built the pan into the software. The screen mirrored the skillet, showed which dumpling belonged to which order, ran a timer, and tracked which flavor was which, since we let people mix and match. I built that feature because I needed it, standing there, that day.

Beyond that, it did the things a running operation needs. The web side carried our public schedule and a menu people could order from, including ordering ahead for market pickup or shipping frozen dumplings, with Shippo handling the rates and labels. It tracked on-hand inventory and flipped items to sold out on its own. It gave us a sales dashboard by item and by time of day, so we could see what sold and when. And it had small AI touches where they saved real time: I could type "add Shavano Park Market every Sunday in June" and it would create the whole run of dates instead of me entering them one by one.

On the customer side, someone could pull up their order by number even if we'd entered it for them, and choose a push notification instead of a text for when it was ready. And since a fresh order takes about fifteen minutes, I built a dumpling-themed Tetris for people to play while they waited.

We're winding Good Fold down, still running it at the markets until we're fully done. The one thing I'd change is timing. The pan tool came from finally getting behind the skillet myself, and I didn't do that until late in the process. If I'd taken the cook's spot earlier, I'd have found the problems worth solving sooner.