A developer who hears about BOOTH does the same thing you would: they search for it on GitHub. Until this week they found nothing of ours — some unrelated barbershop templates, and an AI summary telling them no public repository exists. That was accurate, and it was also the wrong answer to the question they were asking, which was not "can I read your code" but "is there anything here I can build against." So we put up github.com/booth-inc. The application itself is still private. What is public is everything a person or a machine needs to understand what BOOTH is and work with it.
What is actually there
Three things, and it is worth being precise about them because the word "open" gets used loosely. The organization profile is a plain description of the product: what it does, who it is for, where it runs. /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt are the same thing written for language models, so an answer engine quoting us quotes something we wrote rather than something it inferred. And BOOTHmcp is a public read-only MCP server at boothapp.co/api/mcp, which lets Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP client search live booth availability in a conversation. That last one is a working interface, not a description of one.
Why a barbershop marketplace needs any of this
Barbers do not read our GitHub. The machines that answer their questions do. A barber moving to a new city increasingly asks an assistant where there are open chairs, and the assistant answers from whatever it can read. Today that is 68 shops across 42 cities with 215 open booths, and we would rather it read that from us, current, than assemble it from a directory that scraped us last spring. Publishing in a form machines can parse is not a growth tactic. It is the difference between being quoted correctly and being quoted.
What stays private, and why we say so
The application is closed. The database schema, the payment flows, the agreements, the rent ledger: all private, and they are going to stay that way while they are carrying other people's money. We are not going to describe that as open because the organization page is. A company with one public profile repository and a private product should say exactly that, and anyone who looks will see one public repository and know we meant it.
What we would open, and what we are asking for
The pieces we want to open are the ones other people could build on without us in the room: the booking gateway, so a barber's own site can take appointments through BOOTH, and the MCP tool definitions, so an assistant can do more than search. Neither is published yet. When they are, they will be in that organization and we will say so here. Until then the invitation is narrower and more useful to us. If you build tools for barbers, or you run an assistant that should know where the open chairs are, the MCP server works today and we want to hear what breaks. BOOTH is built by one engineer, so the distance between you reporting something and it changing is short. The profile has the contact details. Come and tell us it is wrong.