Finding a trusted barber in a new town, by app

You move to a new neighbourhood, a new town or a new campus. You need a haircut. People in that position, Yaw Osei Annor says, "have no idea where to find a trusted barber, stylist, or spa," while the shop owners nearby are "hidden away, relying purely on word-of-mouth because they lack the tools to market themselves or manage bookings professionally."

SalonSync is his answer. It is a local discovery and booking platform, and he is building it while studying at the University of Ghana.

“Don't think too much about it, NIKE(just do it)”

Yaw Osei Annor

"Right now, SalonSync is fully functional and running locally," he says. Shop owners get a dark-mode dashboard where they can track revenue, manage their staff, list services by category and pin their exact street location with an interactive map picker. For clients, the discovery engine uses real-time geolocation to work out how many kilometres away a shop is, shown as a clean badge rather than a raw database string.

He says he cares about this because grooming is a large part of identity and confidence. "Local barbershops and salons are the backbones of our communities, yet they are completely underserved by modern tech," he says.

He wants to turn SalonSync into a premium product. "Seeing a shop owner successfully map their business and track their first stream of digital revenue drives me to turn this into a premium product," he says.