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Appointment booking software isn’t a new concept. In fact, it’s widely adopted in many industries. But when it comes to salons and spas in South Af...
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Cool story, good luck with your business 👍🏼
As it’s a dev platform and the main audience is the developer community, it’d be interesting to know the technical part — what have you built it with, what tools and infrastructure did you use? I guess you heavily employ embeddable widgets?
You know I keep hearing about emdeddable widgets but I didn’t quite use it.
I used NextJ, Typescript for the Frontend, Express JS and Node + Typescript for the backend .
Also went for mongodb for database.
Will write a post on the comprehensive stack
Good luck!
Amazing stuff right here. I love how you've built a user centered product.
The interface for search can have more status indicators (loaders etc) though....When searching for spas near me I really didn't know what was going on until the google maps search integration just popped up seconds later
You could potentially look at the market here in Kenya as well
It’s actually our plan to launch in Kenya and Ghana as well.
That’s why we chose paystack to allow global payment
Thanks for the feedback
I’ll definitely fix that
Great success story 👏 would love to know what you built the tech side on, like did you use a framework like Baseline github.com/Baseline-JS/core to accelerate your time to market?
Interested in how well your solution is scaling now, any hurdles?
Why didn't you just use Stripe in the first place or at all?
Thanks Thomas
We couldn’t use Stripe because it’s not available in Africa, so we had to incorporate in the UK first before being able to use stripe.
I used NextJs and Typescript for Frontend and Express, Node and Typescript for the backend as well.
This is such an inspiring journey! I love how you identified a real pain point during a personal experience and turned it into an opportunity to create value for others. It’s especially impressive how quickly you pivoted when the payment feature caused issues—that kind of responsiveness is crucial for early-stage startups.
Congrats on SwiftBooked!
Thanks Daniele.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah it was quite tough early on, cause we didn’t have cashflow so we couldn’t sustain the pay per booking model, had to switch to subscription.
Congrats on the launch and good luck! I've built something similar for the US market over at neverwaitapp.com
Is it profitable?
I had a few questions that came to mind while reading:
Nice and motivating story. I myself have also tried in a similar fashion attempt to built something hovering around in Angola but with CompVis in place. The framework would entail the saloon video cameras would provide streaming videos and an AI trained network would evaluate the crowd inside of the saloon and all of the clients registered with the app or simply with WhatsApp would receive push off notifications on the crowd inside the saloon when is it at high/low peak or when a chair is empty ready to receive a client.