Yes, Cutters Lounge (yes, a weird name for native english speakers :) is an appointment booking software.
In the beginning we focused on hair dressers, but as we've learned from them in the past years we are about to expand to other industries as well.
This is a fantastic example of how to build a service that doesn't target the usual tech-savvy crowd, but regular brick and mortar businesses, where pen and paper is still the default toolset. These are often overlooked.
I see it everyday: I work at a company that manufactures running shoes in Germany and the retailers we sell to are mostly small, very competent running stores for enthusiasts - not your average national chain like Runner's Point. However these stores barely have any digital inventory/order/customer management solution, use way overpriced point of sale systems and often resort to fax machines when submitting an order. Well, what I'm trying to say is that there are potential customers for useful niche services left and right. It's just not always very obvious.
First of all, thank you for your feedback :)
We are very proud, that we bootstrapped Cutters Lounge, other than our competitors which are well funded.
This allows us to grow slowly but steady while offering the service for free (we only charge for reminders and invitations).
Germany is horrible at e-commerce. There are still so many opportunities to "disrupt" this sector.
FWIW, this is one of those cases where two services might appear competitive unless you're in one of them. There exist other US-focused companies which do "booking." This is a customer-facing function, and they have to compete on ease-of-use, conversion rates, embeddable widgets, and the like. AR does not do booking and will never do booking.
Why not? Well, you have to have very standardized services which the customer understands to adopt a booking solution. For example, if you're a customer and can say "I want a 45 minute shoulder massage from Cindy", then Cindy's shop can use a booking platform. Most AR customers can't, because the client can't predict how long a dental appointment last, doesn't know that Joe can't come out to his house unless Frank gets the van back in time, etc etc. This is disproportionately the case for upmarket services businesses, which is where AR is moving. (e.g. We want customers with a $100+ value per appointment -- more "professional services" like accountants/medical/HVAC than "personal services" like hair care/massage therapy/etc.)
(I should mention that, even in the hypothetical case that a HNer were in direct competition with AR, I'd be more than happy to see other options available.)
My company is somewhat involved in booking and we've found it to be very specific to the vertical. We looked at building something that integrated with Quickbooks, but found that it's nearly impossible to come up with something that works for enough customers to make it profitable. From what I can tell, people on the Quickbooks team tried it too and decided against it. The long tail just has too many differing needs.
The problem you've listed (not knowing how long a dental appointment will last) isn't really a problem for a booking system...a dental office with a receptionist scheduling patients will run into the exact same issue and the same rules that the receptionist uses can be programed into a booking engine. The bigger problem for a dental office is that the calendar is locked in a management system that's probably running on a Windows computer somewhere in the office. Maintaining two calendars is almost never going to work and the one in the cloud will never be the calendar of record. Short of going the ZocDoc route and having practices reserve certain spots for appointments booked online (businesses hate doing this), you're always going to run into problems with conflicting appointments. The interesting thing is that most dental practices won't care about conflicting appointments since the only patients that will book online will be new patients and patients that have fallen out of the typical schedule. Everyone else will schedule their appointments with the receptionist at the end of their previous appointment. So most dental practices will happily juggle appointments to fit those specific types of patients into their schedule.
But that's the dental industry and almost every other industry has just as many quirks as the dental industry does, if not more. And that's why the market will most likely be filled with smaller, specialized vendors that target either one or possibly a handful of verticals. I'm betting the winners will be the companies that make the management systems used by the businesses, but that's not happening quickly since most of them are small ISVs that only understand Windows development and think cloud computing is something that meteorologists do.
I wouldn't say we are competing. Our service has some features similar to patio11's, but we mostly focus on the appointment planing it self (the calendar).
Hairdressers have to manage customer appointments, accounts, payroll, CRM, inventory etc. Some of that is done online. Source: my wife owns a hairdressing shop in Paris.
