Corner Chair: booking and no-show recovery for a barbershop

Marco runs a one-chair barbershop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. He can’t answer DMs mid-cut, so “can I book with you?” turned into nine Instagram messages over two days, and about one in five Saturday clients didn’t show up. Built for the Lovable Challenge on Contra.

Try it: corner-chair-booker.lovable.app · Demo video (1:42): youtu.be/cQPId1hcrB0

The front door. The client writes the request the way they’d DM it (“fade thursday after 5? my son needs one too”). Corner Chair reads the services, the people and the time window, shows only real open slots that fit, with the kid’s cut back to back with the parent’s, and books it in one tap: about 20 seconds instead of nine messages. If the window is full it offers the same window on the next open days, never an earlier time the client said they can’t make.

The follow-through. Saturday bookings get a one-tap confirm request 24 hours ahead. No answer in 12 hours releases the slot to the waitlist, and the first person to accept gets it. Reminders go out two hours before every appointment.

Marco’s view. A day timeline, a plain-English log of everything the assistant did, and counters for DMs he didn’t have to write, time saved, slots refilled and revenue protected. A demo clock lets you watch a Saturday play out.

Every counter moves only on events in the app, never from seeded constants: a booking made, a reminder sent, an unconfirmed slot released and taken from the waitlist. The figures in the video come from a demo run on the simulated clock, not from a live shop, and “no-show prevented” means the chair didn’t sit empty; the app can’t know whether the client who didn’t confirm would have come anyway.