Picture a barber who just moved cities. License in hand, clippers in a bag, and no way to know which shops have an open chair. The way to find out has always been to walk in and ask, or to know somebody who knows somebody. That works. It has built plenty of careers and it is not going anywhere. It is also slow, and it only reaches as far as your circle already does. BOOTH launches on Product Hunt on October 1 at 12:01 AM Pacific. What goes up is what is built today, not a preview of what we hope to build later.
What is on BOOTH today
Sixty four barbershops across thirty seven cities, with 185 open booths between them. 111 barbers and 112 shop owners, 223 accounts in all. Chicago is the deepest market so far: sixteen shops and fifty four open chairs. We have been in open beta since December 28, 2025, and those numbers are current as of September 30, 2026. You can browse every open chair at boothapp.co/booth-rental without making an account, because a barber working out whether a city is worth the move should not have to sign up to find out.
Three jobs
Find a barber chair. Fill an open booth. Collect rent. A barber searches shops by city and sees what a chair costs before asking anyone. An owner lists what is open, posts a role when they are hiring, and signs the agreement on a phone. Rent goes on a card instead of into a drawer, which means it is recorded, it is on time, and it becomes something the owner can show a bank later. That is the product right now, and it is deliberately narrow.
What BOOTH is not
It is not a booking app. Square, Booksy and Fresha fill a barber's calendar with clients, and they do that well. BOOTH is about the chair itself: finding one, agreeing the terms, paying the rent. Most barbers who use BOOTH keep the booking app they already have, and we expect that to stay true. The comparison is written out at boothapp.co/compare rather than left for you to work out where one ends and the other starts.
What launch day is for
Launch day is not a milestone so much as a room full of people we have not met. What we want from it is the part that is hardest to come by: barbers and shop owners who rent chairs for a living telling us where this is wrong. Which city is empty. Which part of the agreement does not match how their shop actually works. What they came looking for and did not find. I am the only engineer on this, so that goes more or less straight into the product.
Where this goes
We think the chair is the right unit to build around, and that a barber should be able to carry their work between shops the way they carry their clippers. Some of that exists now: a guest pass for a barber passing through, a shop floor you can actually see, rent history an owner can hand to a lender. Much of it does not exist yet, and we would rather say so than describe it as though it does. Come and see what is there, and tell us what is missing.