In the online reservation space, you probably know about OpenTable. The restaurant reservation service’s IPO in a time of drought for IPOs, made big headlines. Now imagine OpenTable for just about everything besides restaurants. That’s BookFresh.
Who might need such a service? A lot more services and individuals than you may realize. While most services have some sort of scheduling system, many aren’t optimized, and can’t adapt on the fly to openings/changes. Massage therapists, dentists, doctors are all perfect examples of who could use such a system, founder Ryan Donahue tells us. He notes that health and beauty has been a particularly hot area.
He knows that because the service has actually been around for a little while, but it was formerly know as HourTown. But BookFresh is a much better name for the service because, “appointments are much like produce items in a grocery store, it’s a perishable thing,” Donahue says.
And a name change isn’t all that in-store for users. BookFresh wants to be the main platform for all online appointment booking on the web. As such, they’ve created APIs to let developers of sites take advantage of their tools. But you don’t have to be a developer to implement the service, anyone can do it with a simple line of code added to their site. This is important because a lot of people BookFresh is targeting are one-person or small operations, that probably don’t have a web development team.
Donahue likens the idea of BookFresh as an appointment platform to PayPal as a payment platform. (And he should know, he used to work at PayPal — incidentally with Jeffrey Jordan, the CEO of OpenTable.) He notes that just like a lot of sites out there don’t want to go through the hassle of building their own payment system, they also don’t want to have to make an online booking system. Sure, it’s not as complex, but it’s still a hassle — and might as well be impossible for little shops/services.
And BookFresh offers some nice things with its platform. One is the ability for businesses that use it to get calls when a customer is requesting an appointment time. From your phone, you can opt to accept or decline the request. That’s perfect for someone like a plumber, who may be always on the go and not able to get to a computer to confirm appointments. And the offers easy integration with Google Calendar and iCal to place appointments in your own personal calendars automatically when you accept them.
Alongside the name change, BookFresh is announcing a partnership with Webs.com, one of the largest sites for building free websites out there. A lot of small business owners are already using it, and now they’ll have one click access to install BookFresh if they choose to.
In terms of monetization, the service is free for the end user, but businesses/individuals who wish to use it will pay a month fee that starts at $19.95. If larger sites choose to sign-on, there are other deals such as revenue sharing that can take place.
In terms of competition, there is Appointment-plus, but their service forces you back to their servers to handle everything. BookFresh’s platform allows users to stay on the page they are already on to set everything up, Donahue says.
One service that BookFresh won’t be competing with is OpenTable. They have no interest in getting into the restaurant space, Donahue says.
I hardly care about grammatical errors on a tech site, but I’m pretty sure you meant “Massage therapists.”
Also… I was a bit taken aback, given the popular website named “FreshBooks”
yep. thanks. and yes, it does bring FreshBooks to mind.
I also thought of Freshbooks.
But it sounds interesting. I like reading about new technologies that can be of such obvious use to the average small business – especially ones that aren’t so technical that the average small business will never use ‘em.
If that makes sense.
I also like the logo font.
I like the logo a lot too. Could be my natural attraction to citrus though.
Do you REALLY want one more hackable database with private details concerning for example your health issues (i.e. medical appointments)?
I certainly DON’T.
The logo slays
How it is being constructed is quite innovative, but I’m unsure if it will be as popular or successful as OpenTable. I think it needs to target one or two key niches before it chases the everything else market.
FreshBooks also came to mind for me too but I think this service will get some serious traction with the little guys.
They should also have a chat to the guys at teachstreet.com in Seattle who have been getting good traction over the last year.
Not to be confused with FreshBooks. Another name change might be in order.
If they have considered and dealt with all the subtleties of different booking requirements for different businesses, I will be impressed.
Ronnie
Finally some starter which appeals to my business (wellness center with massages, cosmetic…)
I sign up for trial. Not bad, it gives some functions which Im searching for long time like online appointment calendar which is synced with calendar on my reception computer. Thats killer feature for me.
But still not ready for my business which is situated in Germany and many options are strictly for USA.
Hope they are going to fix it soon and start to look over the hedge little bit
Hi Johny,
We do offer localization, but we’re not all that popular in Germany (yet). I’ll push out German localization for you later today, once the dust settles.
Thanks!
Matt
Thx Matt,
I will give your service serious try. I might see the biggest problem could be quite limited sync with iCal, gcal… For clients is fine to book treatment here and there over the web but for me who has to use it every day it makes more sense to have proper desktop application with full features from the web.
OpenTable and BookFresh are basically pay-per-action businesses. Eventually local businesses will pay for confirmed bookings. I think that BookFresh’s main alternative product will be paper and pen and any other forms of methods that the local business owners have devised to keep track of appointments. I tend to think that their success would be closely linked with their ability to drive customers to their business network.
Given the connection between the founder and Opentable, you have to assume they’ll be quickly bought up for Opentable shares. Too bad he didn’t get bought before the IPO.
What’s the connection between the founder and Opentable?
Certainly, it is a pay-per-business. The concept sound good, will be interesting to see how they do in next 6 months to one year.
We’re working with someone on a service specifically focused at personal trainers. It has all of these features but a whole lot more.
Contact me if you’d like an invite when it’s launched in the next few weeks.
I would say to check out supersaas.com (I know, dumb name). Same idea, but really great product.
I set up a scheduling & billing site a month ago for a non-profit using supersaas. it is flexible, easy for anyone to setup, has billing integration, etc. Support questions get answered quickly too.
They need a new graphic designer, but the software rocks.
I have no investment in supersaas, I just like it.
When I try to sell people ideas like this, they just say “Well, I have google calendar, and I can embed that on my site.”
A shopping cart for appointments… it’s never been done for some odd reason. Or, it’s never been done in a big way.
It’s hard to do because it has to work with your front-office.
It’s hard because the business that would actually pay for it function in so many unique ways. The result is that such a system must be extremely complex “inside” but be presented intuitively to the businesses that use it.
Try Escapeer.com. Escapeer offers a ton of flexibility for real businesses in all sorts of niches.
Chances are BookFresh is only good for one person businesses just like HourTown was. It’s not good for businesses that maybe have 8 tennis courts, 20 rackets to rent, and 4 trainers that are booked in either increments of 30 minutes or 60 minutes whenever the customer can find an opening, with group lessons being on Tuesday and Thursday from 3-5pm. Hour Town only does the more fixed “lessons” with simple staffing scenarios.
This space is wide open, but it might be best off for scheduling services tackling one niche at at time, since needs from niche to niche are so different.
I’m glad to see more tools for the SMB market. Merchants need all the help they can get! I recently signed up for a location-based shopping service from Spreezio that I think is game changing.
As their demo says, they are “Priceline on steroids” and they do restaurant reservations…and maybe more. They are in private beta so Techcrunch probably hasn’t heard of them.
I use Schedulicity for my private Yoga lesson appointments. Schedulicity comes with an email marketing platform I use for monthly announcements, promotions and newsletters, and a detailed client database that I keep track of payments and the balance of their appointments. It’s pretty rad online software that I manage from my iPhone while standing on my head.
http://www.sche...licity.com/info
One size fits all is over simplification of the problem
We’ve been providing lesson/appointment booking services for a few years now. Its good to see its still a fresh market.
http://bookalesson.com
Best of luck to you guys!
Looks like a great service … too bad they limit the number of pages you can view on their site. I always get the following message after a few clicks. “You have exceeded the allowed page load frequency.” If I clear my cookies I can view more. Why would anyone implement that? FAIL.
this won’t work for everything. let’s say a salon wanted to use this, you’d have to customize for everything including what kind of hair you have… what color your hair is and the length. a human coming in or calling and speaking to another human is faster.
Not necessarily.
I am sure they have a generic notes field which would suffice for these types of situations. As a side note I have never had to specify my type of hair before booking an appointment but I see your point.
it was a bad example, but the point is that for this sort of software must be extremely feature packed to get a large market share, or businesses simply can’t use it.
I set up AcuityScheduling for a friend’s website. It’s free for a single user (you pay if you need multiple users). You can just IFRAME their page on your page, so integration is painless. AcuityScheduling seems to have all of BookFresh’s features?
… and this is big news… how?
Hourtown has been around for at least a couple of years, with apparently not much traction.
Will just a name change with no new features make a big difference? Like Hourtown, other web services in this space, featured on Techcrunch more than a year ago (Genbook and Libersy for instance, which is still in private beta after… forever) do not seem to have had developments in a long time, and already smell of deadpool or oxygen therapy.
There must be something in this market not working as expected (or hoped for). Good luck!
This is a tough sell for all but the most simple of scheduled services. Scheduling is not that easy and very specific to different business. The marketplace is littered with examples of attempts and failures. Exhibit A: Microsoft withdrew its Appointment Manager under the old bCentral brand. Massage is a great example. Not every massage can be booked on any open time. A couples massage requires a double room and two therapists. A hair color (as opposed to a cut) requires “gap time” for color to set. Open Table took 10 years and millions of dollars to get traction. They first had to build a proprietary table management system to make sure they got the inventory right. We have been working on our own booking system for spas for quite a while to make sure it really handles the unique challenges of our particular market. I agree with the comment above that picking a distinct market makes better sense.
Seth makes a good point.
When we embarked on our project (http://www.clickbook.net) several years ago we were extremely bright-eyed (and nieve) about this emerging market, expecting a facebook-esque boom. Not so! We’re getting some traction now that the product is becoming feature rich, and also attracting savvy investors (wink).
There are a couple of key hurdles for any startup in this space:
1. Get over the idea that scheduling is anything close to simple. You’re building an application not a website.
2. The target market is not 15 year old cybernauts. Traditional marketing avenues are key.
3. Classified
4. Classified