Built from the customer's side of the chair

Dear business owner,

I'm Brian Ongati. Most people call me Bry.

Ongati started because I got tired of texting my barber.

Not because I wanted a different barber. He still cuts my hair, and he has for years.

Every few weeks it went the same way. I would open the thread, ask if he was free Saturday, and wait. Sometimes he answered in a minute. Sometimes he was mid-cut and didn't see it until the evening. Some weeks I forgot to ask at all and the haircut slid another week. He never knew how close he came to losing that appointment. I never knew when he was actually open.

He isn't a bad barber. He's a good barber who had no easy way for me to book him. His prices lived in his head. His hours lived on a story that expired in a day. His waitlist was a group chat.

And the only thing anyone offered him was a listing on a platform that would put three other barbers beside his name and take a cut of the appointment I was always going to make.

That last part still bothers me. I was never going anywhere. Nobody had to find me for him. Yet the software built for people like him is priced as though every booking was a customer it delivered.

He was never short of customers. He was short of a way for the customers he already had to reach him without interrupting his day.

So I built what I wanted as a customer, rather than what software companies sell to businesses. One page. His services. His prices. His hours. A button that books him. A code I can scan once and never hunt for his number again.

I build customer-facing systems for service businesses for a living, through my agency in Virginia Beach. It was the same problem over and over: a website nobody could update, a booking link that went nowhere, a customer list stuck inside someone else's platform. Ongati is that fix, built once instead of rebuilt for a tenth client.

The product carries my family name. My people are from Kenya, where a small business runs on M-Pesa the same way one here runs on cash, Zelle and a card reader. That's why Ongati records every one of those and takes a percentage of none of them. Where you happen to be shouldn't decide whether the software works for you.

If you're reading this, you're probably the barber in my story rather than the customer. You already have people who want to book you, people who are not going anywhere. I'd like your page to be the easiest way for them to do it.