1. Generally her inventory increases in value over time because it grows. Over time a plant will grow from a smaller pot to a larger pot, plants in large pots sell for more. 2. She wants to track which suppliers provide better quality plants (do the plants die quickly?). She also wants to track how fast different plants grow.
I could pretty easily write a django app that tracks this stuff.
Any recommendations for a platform I could build on top of (airtable? google forms+sheets?). Maybe some type of marketing automation platform.
Custom business apps are tricky. As a programmer it's easy to turn my nose up at excel based solutions, but I totally see how they end up being built.
Both of these are true. And most people do not appreciate how tricky niche apps are. When I started writing PartsBox (for myself initially, later grew it into a business at https://partsbox.io/) several years ago, I thought I'd be done in a weekend. Nearly 4 years and almost 3000 commits later…
Spreadsheets are a pain for anything but the simplest things. And yet they are useful to a point, because making a domain-specific application is surprisingly hard: there are lots of edge cases that you don't think about initially.