Overview
Organisations that host formal events (charities, associations, institutions) still manage guest lists the hard way: printed cards, phone calls, and spreadsheets that are outdated the moment a guest replies. RSVP replaces that entire workflow. An organisation imports its contact list, picks a message template, and the platform delivers personally-addressed invitations over WhatsApp, greeting each guest with their full formal title in correctly formatted Arabic, with a one-tap link to confirm, decline, or send a representative. It's built Arabic-first with full right-to-left design, for a market where the etiquette of an invitation genuinely matters. It was built in collaboration with VTEC for Irshad & Islah.
The Challenge
A formal event is a logistics problem hiding behind a social one: hundreds of invitations that must feel personal, replies that need to be tracked the instant they arrive, and a seating plan that has to be right on the night, all while multiple staff work on it at once.
- Sending thousands of personalized messages reliably (with scheduling, reminders, retries and bulk operations) without them looking like spam.
- Capturing RSVPs the moment a guest taps a WhatsApp button and reflecting them live on a dashboard.
- Letting a team design an actual hall (tables, chairs, stage) and seat guests, with several people editing the same floor plan simultaneously.
- Wrapping all of it in a real SaaS: plans, roles, permissions, billing, and support, in two languages.
How I Solved It
RSVP is a desktop app (Electron + React) backed by a NestJS / PostgreSQL / Redis API, with a companion web app and public guest pages built in Next.js. Real-time updates flow over a multiplexed event stream, so a guest's reply appears on the organiser's dashboard within seconds and collaborators see each other's cursors live on the seating canvas. The heavy work (sending thousands of messages) runs through background job queues with scheduling, reminders and retries, so nothing is lost and nothing hammers the WhatsApp channel. Two WhatsApp paths are supported: the official Meta business API, or a free QR-linked connection.
A platform operator manages organisations, payments and support; organisation owners run their events; and staff get fine-grained, permission-gated access, with plans scaling up to an enterprise tier handling 5,000 guests and 50 staff accounts per organisation. The 2D hall-seating architecture lets staff draw the real room on a floor plan, auto-fill seats by guest priority, and work in a draft mode before publishing, the piece that turns "who's coming?" into "and here's exactly where they sit."
Key Features
- WhatsApp invitation automation: personalized WhatsApp + email sends with scheduling, automatic reminders, retries and bulk operations across thousands of guests; official Meta API or a free QR-linked WhatsApp.
- Real-time reservation tracking: RSVP replies land on the dashboard within seconds, with confirmations, declines and delivery stats on live charts.
- 2D hall-seating architecture: draw the real hall (tables, chairs, stage) on a drag-and-drop 2D floor plan, auto-fill seats by guest priority, work in draft mode, and collaborate live with other staff, seeing each other's cursors.
- Roles & access: three roles (platform operator, organisation owner, staff) with a granular permission system and multiple plans.
- Bilingual (Arabic/English) with full RTL, live preview, an interactive guided tour, in-app documentation and support chat.
Results & Impact
RSVP turns a stressful, paper-and-phone-calls process into a single system that any staff member can run, and it's built to real production scale. It spans three applications (desktop, web, public guest pages), a full set of screens across its feature modules, an extensive API over a relational database, role-based access with a granular permission system, two fully-translated languages, and a thorough automated test suite, performance-tuned to stay fast and smooth with thousands of guests per organisation. For an organiser, it collapses "who's coming and where do they sit?" from a week of anxiety into a live dashboard.