Every booking belongs to you, not us.

This company started in a working barbershop in Amsterdam, on an afternoon when the phone would not stop ringing. Both chairs were busy, the clippers were on, and call after call rang out. Nobody was being lazy — everybody was working. That was exactly the problem.

We built that shop its own booking site and its own phone assistant — we called it AutoBarber — and while the chairs stayed busy, the calendar started filling itself. Then we looked at what everyone else in the trade was being offered, and found the arithmetic nobody says out loud: when a new client books through a marketplace, roughly 42% of that first ticket walks out the door once VAT is counted. Five years of five-star reviews can sit locked inside somebody else’s app. The client a shop wins is recorded as the platform’s.

So we decided what we would not do. We don’t charge commission — not on ten bookings a month, not on two hundred. We don’t run a marketplace, so nobody will ever rank above you for your own name on our account. And we don’t hold your data: the website, the client list, the reviews and the calendar are set up in your accounts, under your brand, from day one.

One promise, and you can check it from the outside: if you ever leave, you walk out with the website, the client list, the reviews and the calendar — and we help you export all of it. It’s in our terms, and it’s the point of the whole thing. By now it holds for your numbers too: what the app tracks — revenue, costs, the VAT — you export every month with one button.

The owner of that first barbershop had one reaction when it went live: “wait — this is mine?” We started a company so that every owner in this trade can ask that question and hear the same answer.

Alberto Agüero & Andrés Borrajo Founders of Alan Agency · Amsterdam · autobarber.alan@gmail.com