Picture a barber who opened a shop in the last few years. Not a chain, a shop. Six chairs, maybe eight, and a lease they signed themselves. They already run the rest of the business from a phone. Supplies go on a card because the card earns points. Clients book through an app. The bank is an app. When they travel for a show or a week off, the shop keeps running because nothing about it lives in a drawer. Then they took on barbers to rent chairs, and rent went straight back to cash, a transfer app, and a note on the phone. It was the one line in the business they couldn't put on a card, couldn't earn anything on, and couldn't see clearly at the end of the month. Not because that way is wrong. Plenty of good shops run on cash and a notebook and always will. It's that a generation of owners now expects to operate differently, and nothing had been built for them. That's who we're building BOOTH for.
Options, not a problem to fix
Most software in this category sells relief from a problem. We'd rather describe what an owner can now choose to do, because that's how this group already thinks about the tools they pick. An owner on BOOTH can choose to put booth rent on a card and earn on it, the way they earn on everything else. They can choose to set a rental plan on each chair and let autopay collect it on the day they picked, or keep charging manually if that's how they like to run it. They can choose to sign an agreement with a new barber on a phone, in the shop, and both keep the same document. They can choose to read the floor from wherever they are: which chairs are rented, what each one brought in, what cleared and what didn't. And they can choose to be away for a week and know the shop's rent is still coming in. None of those are things they were failing at before. They're things that weren't on the menu.
What exists today
This is what BOOTH does right now, not a roadmap. Cards on file and autopay on recurring booth rentals. Points earned on rent, redeemable for Wahl, Andis, Gamma, Cocco, BabylissPRO, and TPOD. Floor Plan, which shows occupancy, per booth earnings, and collection rate for the shop. Booth agreements signed on a phone. A public listing that barbers can search by city and price. A job board for open chairs. The whole thing in English and Spanish. It's free for an owner to list, permanently. BOOTH takes 5% on booth rent that moves through the platform, and payments run on Stripe. That's the whole model.
The owner we have in mind
Barbershop, studio, and suite owners, generally newer, who already run their life this way. They put business expenses on a card for the points. They book through an app and expect their barbers' clients to. They travel and expect the business to keep going without them in the building. They want the shop's numbers on their phone, not in a folder, and they're comfortable letting software hold the record. This isn't about age. An owner who's been cutting for thirty years and runs the shop from an iPhone is exactly who we mean. It's about how someone expects to operate. If you've built a shop where rent is a handshake and it works, BOOTH is an option you don't need yet, and you'd be welcome the day you want it. We're just not going to pretend the notebook is the problem. The absence of the option was.
Where we are
BOOTH has been in open beta since December 28, 2025. As of this week there are 103 barbers, 94 shop owners, and 43 listed shops on the platform, 197 users across 8 countries, with the densest cluster in Chicagoland at 11 of the 43. I'm the only engineer, which is why the list above is short and specific: it's what's built, and everything else is what we think should come next. The gap we're most focused on is the one between owners who signed up and owners who've listed a shop. Ninety four owners and forty three shops means most of the people who were interested enough to make an account haven't put their chairs on the floor plan yet. Some of that is us. Listing should take five minutes, and for some owners it still takes longer. Some of it is that an owner needs to see a barber searching their city before listing feels worth it. Both are things we can work on.
Why start here
A shop that opened recently has fewer chairs than one that's been open twenty years, and fewer chairs means less rent moving through at 5%. We know. The reason to start with this owner anyway is that they're the ones who'll use the whole thing. They'll put rent on autopay the first week because that's how they pay for everything. They'll sign the agreement on their phone because they've never printed one. They'll check the floor plan because they check every other dashboard they have. A product used completely by a small shop teaches us more than one used partially by a big one. The owner who already runs their life from a phone should be able to run their shop's rent from it too. That's the whole idea, and it's who this is for.