From Waiting in Line to a Feature

Some features start with a roadmap. This one started with a cup of coffee. ☕

A vendor, a queue, and a coincidence

Last weekend we were at the finals of the Fitness Bundesliga in Hildesheim, there with a stand to meet the community in person. At some point I stepped away to grab a coffee, and like everywhere that weekend, there was a line.

I got talking to the person next to me. We chatted about the event, the weather, the food, the coffee, the usual small talk you make while you wait. And then it turned out to be one of those small-world moments: she's a coach at a gym that already uses Boxbase 🤩.

We talked a bit about how things were going. She told me it was great to finally see us in person, and that we'd been really helpful back when they first started with Boxbase. The kind of thing that makes the whole weekend worth it.

Before we went our separate ways, I did what I always try to do: I told her that if anything came to mind over the weekend, any feedback at all, she should just come find me.

"Oh, I actually have a topic..."

She got her coffee, and was just about to leave, when she paused.

"Oh, I actually have a topic I could ask you about."

That was great. I get to get some feedback just there and then. So we stepped aside and she showed me something on her phone.

Her gym has one special membership. Members on that plan need to do something a little different when they check in. To make sure those members would actually see the instruction, the team had written it into the daily programming as its own block, so it would show up for everyone looking at the class.

It worked. The information was visible. But it was clearly a workaround, and not what programming is meant for:

• It wasn't relevant to most members, only the ones on that specific plan.
• It wasn't tied to a single class, it applied no matter which class those members booked.
• It wasn't really a programming detail at all.

So everyone else was seeing a note that didn't apply to them, and the team was copy-pasting it day after day to keep it visible. They'd done exactly the right thing: they used what they had to solve a real problem. But the tool wasn't giving them a proper home for it.

Note: we reconstructed the message

Finding the real problem

That two-minute conversation gave us something a roadmap never could: a real person, with a real gym, showing us a real friction point.

When we got back, we sat down and looked at it properly. Not "how do we let people put notes in programming," but the actual need underneath:

Make members on a specific membership aware of a check-in instruction, no matter which classes they book, without turning it into noise for everyone else.

In her case, the membership came from an external provider, one of those general subscriptions (think Wellpass, Urban Sports Club, Hansefit) that let people join classes across many different gyms. Because there's no technical integration with those providers (yet on our side), those members have to check in on-site as well, scan a QR code, show it to a coach or at reception. That's the instruction the team was trying to surface.

Once we framed it that way, the solution split cleanly into two parts.

What we built

1. Registration instructions on plans

Admins can now add registration instructions directly to a plan. Whatever you write there is shown to the members who hold that membership, in the places where it actually matters, so the right people see it at the right moment, and nobody else has the unnecessary noise.

No more daily endless copy-pasting the same instructions over and over again. The instruction lives where it belongs: on the plan itself.

2. Marking a plan as an external provider

The second part goes a step further. Admins can now mark a plan as coming from an external provider. This does more than display a note, it gives the membership a proper label inside Boxbase.

That structured signal opens up things free text can't: surfacing helpful context to coaches and admins where it's needed, and being able to analyse and report on these memberships later on. It's the groundwork for understanding this kind of membership properly, rather than treating it as a free-text afterthought.

The little things matter most

Here's what we love about this story: nobody planned it. It came from a coach being generous enough to share a small annoyance while waiting for coffee, and from a habit of always asking for feedback, even when you're off the clock.

That one observation now helps every gym that runs an external-provider membership, or simply needs to get the right note in front of the right members. The team that flagged it saves time and stops sending noise to people it was never meant for. And everyone else gets a feature they didn't even know they needed.

We're genuinely grateful for feedback like this. It's not always the big, obvious things that move a product forward. Sometimes a small-looking thing, spotted in a coffee queue, turns out to have a real impact.

So if you ever bump into us at an event, or just have a thought while using Boxbase, please tell us. You never know what it might become.

Thanks to the coach who gave us the direct feedback, we appreciate it very much! 🖤

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Got something on your mind, big or small? Reach out to us at hi@boxbase.app. We'd love to hear it.