Seatbooker

I'm John. I run SRE teams by day, currently at a major SAAS business, and before that I worked in banking and telecoms. Fourteen-odd years of keeping other people's systems up. Marketing is not my background, this is very much a "scratch my own itch" project. I love haircuts and favour a pomp myself.

I built a commission free booking platform for barbers, other salons and other professionals.

Small business pain: I was booking a haircut and noticed the platform takes a commission on top of what the salon already pays for the software. That struck me as unfair and would annoy me if I was the barber. Small business owners always end up paying too much for basic services.

So I built Seatbooker which is a booking platform for UK salons and barbershops. I'm making it free for the first 12 months, just to get some real users. After that, it will be a free trial but all plans are quite low. There is no card required for the free tier, and no commission on bookings. My plan is that no commission will not just be for the trial period.

I'm running an early adopter program ( Founders Club) to get the first real salons using it and let their feedback shape what gets built next. They will get some cool swag and I will promote them, to in turn promote seatbooker.

I'm genuinely curious to hear from anyone who's run a small service business and dealt with booking software: what made you switch platforms in the past, or what's stopped you? https://seatbooker.co.uk if you want to see how it hangs together.