Why I built my own platform

Every enquiry, booking, contract, gallery, invoice and Instagram post in my business now goes through one place. I built it. It's called Shoot Suite, and before I open it to anyone else, I want to tell you why it exists.

I photograph families, newborns, maternity and weddings in Cardiff and across South Wales. I've photographed over a hundred sessions since 2023, and around three quarters of my bookings now come from clients coming back, or from someone they've told about me. I'm proud of that. And I'll let you in on something: the photography was never the hard part.

Everything around the camera

What was hard was everything around it. Enquiries, quotes, contracts, invoices, chasing balances. Building galleries. Sending the reminder the day before so nobody forgets the muslins. And the social media: captions, scheduling, and remembering to promote a mini session before the slots ran out.

I do all of this alongside a full-time job. Sessions happen at weekends and on annual leave, and editing happens at ten at night, usually with two Shiba Inus asleep behind me. When your time comes in small pieces like that, every extra login costs you something.

Six good tools

For a long time my business ran on six subscriptions: my website, my emails, my social scheduling, my bookings, my session bookings and a planning board to keep track of it all. £151 a month between them.

They were good tools, every one of them. The trouble was never any single one. The trouble was that they didn't know about each other. A booking in one place didn't tell my emails. My emails didn't know about my galleries. My Instagram had no idea a mini session was nearly full. So I became the thing that joined them all up, copying names from one place to another, checking three tabs before replying to a message, and keeping the whole picture in my head.

One place where everything knows

So I built one place where everything knows about everything else.

When someone books, their session lands in my diary, their contract and questionnaire go out, their reminders are lined up and their balance is tracked, all from one client file. When I set up a mini session, the slots are worked out for me, and the posts promoting it sit right next to it, so the event and the marketing are one job instead of two. When a gallery is ready, everything I need for it is already there, because it's all been in the same place from the very first enquiry.

Real screens from a real business

None of this is an idea on a whiteboard. Shoot Suite runs my own business today, and these are the screens I open every morning.

Today shows me everything that needs me on one page: the next session, the galleries due and the messages waiting. Minis works out the times for me and keeps track of who has booked which slot. And every client gets their own app with my name on it, so the day before their session they can see the weather, what to have ready and how to find me.

The part I'm proudest of is the marketing. Social posts, emails and the blog all live in the same place as the sessions they're about, so promoting a mini session isn't a separate job I have to remember at ten at night.