hen Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant started Squire Technologies in 2015, they paid a graffiti artist a few hundred bucks to scrawl “Download Squire” on the streets of Manhattan. It was a low-cost bit of guerilla marketing for their struggling barbershop booking app. They’d signed up around 50 barbers at eight or nine shops by going store-to-store talking with owners, but with so few customers downloading the app it was largely useless.
Today, New York City-based Squire sells its software and services to more than 2,800 barbershops in the United States, Canada and the U.K. Each pay a monthly subscription , plus additional transaction fees. Squire’s software offers not only basic booking and payment services, but it can help divvy up the receipts among a shop’s many barbers. It can automatically manage the payouts of tips, as well as handle payments for chair rentals.
Squire isn’t the only company to see a big market in the country’s barbershops, of which there are 109,000, according to data from IBISWorld. Competitors include other venture-backed companies, like Los Angeles-based Boulevard and San Francisco-based Booksy, as well as Booker, now owned by Mindbody, the yoga and spa booking platform that was purchased by private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners for $1.9 billion in 2019.
Salvant, meanwhile, grew up in Coney Island and Rockland County in suburban New York. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the State University of New York at Albany, and an M.B.A. at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked for a few years as a private banker at PMorgan and as a sales associate at AXA.
Neither LaRon or Salvant had a coding background, so they brought on a young software engineer, Yas Tabasam, whom they met at a New York tech meetup,
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Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »
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