Built by groomers, in Cardiff

Bookd started in a grooming salon, not an office. My wife Michelle is a dog groomer. She's incredible at it — clients drive 30 miles to see her, dogs that won't let anyone else near them sit calmly in her chair. She built a £2,000-a-month business from a room in our house.

But every night, after grooming dogs all day, she'd sit at the kitchen table and start her second job. Scrolling through WhatsApp to find who wanted Thursday. Texting reminders one by one. Checking her bank app to see who'd paid. Chasing the ones who hadn't. Four apps open. Paper diary. And she'd look up and say: “I love the dogs. I hate the business.”

I'm a developer. So I searched for something better — and everything was either built for chains with 50 locations and priced accordingly, or free, basic, and designed in 2012. The message was clear: if you're one person, you get the leftovers.

But Michelle isn't a small business. She manages 200 clients, 30 appointments a week, payments, deposits, cancellations, marketing — she's a CEO with a pair of clippers. She doesn't need simpler tools. She needs the same tools as everyone else — they just need to work without a team to run them.

So I built Bookd. The back office she never had. Clients book online. Deposits are taken automatically. Reminders go out without her touching anything. And now, when she finishes grooming for the day, she's actually finished. It's still shaped by the founding groomers — the people who actually hold the clippers — and it still gets built within earshot of a dryer.

Get more clients. Get more time. Get Bookd.