SalonPilot

A dependable web front desk that lets salon clients find the right live slot, secure it with a deposit, and manage a fair cancellation while the owner keeps working.

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Business Viability

Independent salon and barber owners earn while serving clients. Calls, messages, deposit questions, cancellations, and reminders arrive while their hands are occupied. A missed enquiry or an empty chair is visible money, yet broad salon-management suites can be expensive and operationally heavy for a single-chair business. SalonPilot is the smallest reliable front desk: real services, live availability, deposit state, cancellation rules, reminders, and an owner diary that can be understood between clients.

The initial buyer is a UK single-chair salon or barber with clear service durations and no receptionist. At £29 per month, the product is positioned as an operating tool rather than a marketplace taking ownership of the customer relationship. The acquisition plan begins with geo-targeted short demonstrations, local salon and barber communities, search around deposits and no-shows, and direct outreach to businesses whose current booking friction is visible. Activation is not account creation; it is a published service plus a valid booking. Retention is repeat bookings, diary usage, reminders processed, and deposits reconciled.

We started SalonPilot on 1 August 2026, very late in the competition. The short build window led us to concentrate on a complete production booking journey and an inspectable Gemini decision boundary. It also means there has not been time to establish commercial traction: revenue is £0 and paying customers are 0.

The production app already supports owner signup, a private empty workspace, service creation, UK-time booking, persistent diary state, cancellation/refund state, and live Stripe Checkout creation. The current evidence pack contains no verified independent revenue or paying customers, and this entry states that plainly. The next proof is a small group of independent owners who publish real booking links and receive client-created bookings, followed by attributable conversion and retention evidence.

The official cash-basis P&L records $0 revenue and $0 product-specific cash expenses. Founder time and shared Yensi hosting, subscriptions, and product-factory resources predated this entry; they are disclosed rather than allocated as if SalonPilot had paid them independently.

AI-Native Operations

SalonPilot uses Gemini where a language model adds judgment without taking authority: ranking real appointment options against a client’s stated preferences. On the public booking page, a client can write “I prefer a quieter morning appointment.” The backend builds the candidate set from current service duration, opening hours, closures, staff diary, and conflicts, then sends only those live slots through an HMAC-signed Google Cloud Run adapter. Gemini 3.5 Flash selects one to three options and explains the match. The UI shows the model, Cloud Run execution, latency, and request identifier, and preselects the first suggestion.

The safety boundary is structural. Gemini cannot invent a bookable time because returned indexes are validated against the original live-slot array. It cannot confirm a booking, collect a deposit, calculate a refund, or move diary state. SalonPilot revalidates availability and owns every state transition. If the adapter is missing, unavailable, or selects no valid live slot, the AI path fails closed while ordinary manual slot selection remains available.

This integration closes a gap found during the submission audit: the Cloud Run adapter existed, but the production interface did not call it. The final competition revision adds the signed client, rate-limited public endpoint, evidence ledger, runtime health declaration, visible client experience, and regression tests. The wider suite reports 258 passing checks, one optional local-auth skip, and the accessibility issue found in the first run was corrected. The frontend build passes.

Category Impact

SalonPilot’s impact is giving a tiny service business the operational consistency of a front desk without requiring the owner to stop serving. The theory of change is straightforward: trustworthy live availability reduces back-and-forth; preference-aware ranking helps a client choose without fabricating inventory; deposits make commitment explicit; deterministic cancellation and refund rules reduce disputes; reminders reduce forgotten appointments; and the owner diary keeps service and money state together.

Impact will be measured through published booking links, booking completion, time from page open to reserved slot, suggestion acceptance, deposit completion, cancellation timing, reminder delivery, no-show rate, and owner retention. The product does not yet claim a reduction in no-shows or an increase in revenue. Those claims require baseline and cohort evidence from real salons.

Shared Yensi product-factory contracts and runtime rails predate the competition. SalonPilot’s product workflow, interface, booking engine, persistence, Stripe path, Gemini scheduling decision, and audit evidence were created during the eligible window and are disclosed separately.

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