Booksy began with a problem that small service businesses know well: when a professional is busy with a customer, they are not answering the phone. Stefan Batory saw that appointment booking should be available around the clock, while service providers needed software that reduced administration rather than adding more of it.
Batory and Konrad Howard founded Booksy in Poland and built the product around both sides of the marketplace. Consumers could find and book appointments, while barbers, salons and other professionals could manage calendars, payments and customer relationships.
The founders chose a fragmented market
Beauty and wellness is a large market, but it is made up of millions of relatively small businesses. That fragmentation is difficult for sales, yet attractive for software because owners often share the same operational problems: scheduling, no-shows, payments, marketing and repeat bookings.
Booksy’s product therefore had to be simple enough for independent professionals while robust enough to support larger businesses. That balance became part of the company’s international opportunity.
Batory and Howard built for global expansion
Booksy’s official company story describes Batory as co-founder and CEO and Howard as co-founder and chief product officer. That combination gave the company clear leadership across commercial growth and product development.
The business expanded beyond Poland into markets including the United States, United Kingdom, Spain and France. A 2021 funding announcement said the company had raised $70 million in a Series C and had 13 million consumers actively using the app at the time.
A Polish success story in vertical software
Booksy fits a wider CEE pattern of founders finding industries that still rely heavily on phone calls, spreadsheets and manual workflows. Those industries may look less glamorous than social media or consumer hardware, but the software can become deeply embedded once it saves the owner time every day.
Poland’s large technical talent base and increasingly mature venture ecosystem have produced several companies with this profile. Booksy is one of the strongest examples because its product serves a clear vertical and its brand is visible to both businesses and consumers.
What Czech and Slovak founders can learn from Booksy
For founders elsewhere in CEE, Booksy is a useful case because the original problem was not unique to Poland. The founders used local talent to solve a problem that existed in every mature service economy.
That is one of the region’s most repeatable advantages. Start in a home market where founders understand the customer closely, then build the product, language support and distribution needed to move abroad.