Finnish startup skyrockets with over 1000% growth in a year

65% of beauty and health salons in Europe don’t use any digital tools. This is the market booksalon is tapping into with exponential growth opportunities, according to the CEO. 

Booksalon, a Finnish payment and booking service provider specializing in hair, beauty, and wellness companies, has announced its growth figures from 2021. Booksalon’s growth in its first year has exceeded all expectations with almost €60,000 in MRR reported in December, which has grown over 20% month-on-month. The company has over 1,300 clients, with new ones added weekly – and no fear of losing any of them, with a churn rate of less than 0.5%, and customer loyalty and happiness NPS (Net Promoter Score) rating of 79.

Developed closely with hair and beauty professionals, booksalon provides entrepreneurs with a full suite of modern tools to run a successful business. Booksalon offers payment terminals and a payment processing service, in addition to its website builder, online booking systems, and cash and accounting reports.

“We started to build our product by having heart-to-heart conversations about the bottlenecks and hurdles of being a beauty and hair entrepreneur. The discussions worked as real eye-openers. The majority are micro-entrepreneurs that spend a lot of time managing the admin side of things, such as getting financial reports correct and answering phone calls for bookings. All these were deemed as an exhausting burden,” says booksalon co-founder and chair of board Jonne Castrèn. 

Currently, most entrepreneurs have deals with multi-billion dollar corporations that handle their payment and financial services. The problem is that many micro-entrepreneurs are binded by really long service contracts, up to 72 months in some cases, that very often have unclear clauses of the cost structure they create.

“Several entrepreneurs told us that they really didn’t understand what they signed up for. Due to misleading sales talks, they end up paying more than what they originally expected,” explains Harri Myllylä, CEO of booksalon.

“Feedback for booksalon has been more than encouraging: the entrepreneurs truly feel that we are there to help. We built our business model so that when our clients are doing well, we are doing well,” Myllylä continues. 

Booksalon offers some of its services for free. If users want to unlock all features, they convert into a PRO client for €29 euros a month. The real business for booksalon lies in transaction fees. 

“The more salons can charge customers, the better for them – and us. We don’t ramp up our prices based on the number of users, or create any other complications for business growth,” says Myllylä.

Based on customer feedback, booksalon’s system saves entrepreneurs over 100 hours of work time annually. On average, one client is worth 67 euros for the salon – thus, entrepreneurs can earn thousands of euros more annually. This can be the turning point if salons can hire more hair and beauty professionals or not. Additionally, thanks to the online booking system, time spent on the phone has dropped over 70% to less than ten minutes a day. 

2022 pipeline includes expansion to Europe and other microentrepreneur industries 

Booksalon will soon be available in the European market. That has raised the interest of international investors, especially when the market is still largely untapped. 

“According to estimates, up to 65% of European beauty and health salons don’t use any digital tools for bookings or payments – we are talking about hundreds of thousands of salons. We don’t have to compete with digital solutions that are already in use – we want to talk straight with entrepreneurs that don’t use any digital tools,” Myllylä explains. 

Like its competitors in the US, booksalon is also looking into expansion possibilities outside its original scope of the hair and beauty industry. 

“Our tools are easily converted to work for other microentrepreneurs, such as plumbers, to name only one example. There are at least as many plumbers as there are beauty and health entrepreneurs. After all, most microentrepreneurs want the same thing: to close the shop on time at the end of the day to spend more quality time with their friends and family or with hobbies, without having to worry about repetitive and dull admin tasks,” Myllylä concludes.

Booksalon is a Finnish payment and booking service provider specializing in hair, beauty, and wellness companies. Booksalon offers its clients, in addition to payment processing, digital and fully integrated solutions for booking, customer management and accounting. Founded in 2016, booksalon has raised a total of €2M in funding and has over 1300 customers in the beauty and health industry.