BookHero

Context

Walk into almost any salon and you'll see the same thing: a phone that won't stop buzzing, a paper diary, an owner juggling customers and rescheduling at the same time. Almost 1 in 4 appointments ends in a no-show, and a solo professional loses roughly €340 a month to them. The tools on the market charge commission per booking, are built for the customer rather than the owner, and cost too much for a business that just wants to fill its schedule.

Product & technical

I built and launched BookHero solo: an all-in-one booking platform for small service businesses, on TypeScript, React, Next.js, Supabase (PostgreSQL) and the Meta WhatsApp Cloud API. Design, architecture, code, deployment and support were all mine.

On the customer side there's an online booking page: each business gets its own link (bookhero.app/their-name), styled with its own logo, banner, colors and services, where clients book in under a minute without creating an account. Real availability only, group bookings, mobile-first, no app to install.

Behind that sits a multi-professional calendar with day, week, month and agenda views, time blocked for lunch breaks and days off, live sync across devices, and sensible defaults like auto-assigning a booking when no professional is preferred.

A messaging layer keeps clients showing up: confirmation the moment they book, a WhatsApp reminder on a dynamic schedule (you set the window), native reschedule and cancel buttons, and a review request after the service. Every client gets a profile with visit history, notes, no-shows, and the tax data needed to invoice them.

The checkout closes the sale: add services, addons and products to a cart, apply a discount and a tip, take cash or card, and generate a PDF receipt that lands in the client's history automatically. The reporting dashboard then shows what's working: revenue, bookings, no-show rate, top services, performance per professional. No SQL required.

Sales

I did the sales myself with high-volume cold calling and in-person meetings with salons, barbershops and nail studios, people who would never find or buy this online.

Once a business signed up I onboarded them by hand: set up their page, services and team, walked them through the first bookings and stayed close as they built a daily routine on it. It turned a product into relationships.

Outcome

BookHero is live, built on a simple promise: no commission, no lock-in, reminders that cut no-shows, and data the owner can export anytime. It talks to small businesses where they already are (WhatsApp), and it proved you can sell software to people who would never sign up for it online.