Rezano started with a specific frustration, not a market thesis.

Small businesses running shift teams - cafes, retail shops, small warehouses - managed their workforce through WhatsApp messages, paper rotas, and personal favors. Schedule changes got lost in chat threads. Overtime accumulated invisibly. End-of-month payroll meant a manager sitting down with a notebook, reconstructing 30 days of attendance from memory and scattered screenshots.

This wasn't an edge case. It was the default state for most businesses with under 20 staff.

The first version

Version 1 was minimal. A check-in function and a shift list. No reports, no analytics, no complex features. The goal was to answer one question: does digital check-in and basic scheduling make the manager's week easier?

It did. But early users told us we'd built the wrong thing first.

What early users taught us

The most-requested feature in month one wasn't reports. It wasn't payroll export. Managers kept asking the same question: "Can I see who is at work right now?"

The live dashboard - a real-time view of which staff had checked in, which were expected but hadn't arrived, and which shifts were coming up in the next two hours - became the feature that retained users. It turned Rezano from a record-keeping tool into something a manager opened during the day.

We'd assumed reports were the value. Users showed us the value was the present moment, not the past.

Stack decisions

Rezano runs on Next.js (frontend), FastAPI (backend), PostgreSQL, and Docker. We chose this stack for speed of iteration and operational simplicity. A single developer can deploy, debug, and extend the full system.

The stack is not novel. That was a deliberate choice. Novel stacks create hiring problems, debugging delays, and fragile dependencies. Boring technology shipped fast beats interesting technology that slows you down.

One decision we'd change

Mobile-first design was an afterthought in the first three months. We built for desktop and adapted for mobile later. Most check-ins and schedule views happen on a phone, so this was the wrong order. The current mobile experience is solid. It should have been the starting point.

When you're building for people who spend their workday on a floor, not at a desk, design for the device in their pocket first.

The core belief

Workforce tools should take 10 minutes to set up, not 10 days. The businesses that need this software most are the ones with the least IT capacity. A tool that requires a two-week onboarding process serves the wrong customer.

Setup time is a feature, not a footnote. If a manager can't get value from the tool before the next Friday schedule needs to go out, the tool has already failed.

Rezano is live at rezano.lv. If you run a shift team and you're still on WhatsApp and paper, the setup takes 10 minutes.