Genbook Puts Daily Deals on the Calendar

Office workers who want to make appointments at their desk and daily deal merchants are taking advantage of Genbook's services.

Image: Shutterstock

Genbook, an online appointment startup, has benefited from the fast rise of daily deals—to say nothing of the desire of female cubicle dwellers to make their bikini wax appointments quietly.

Founded in 2007 by entrepreneur Rody Moore, Genbook serves businesses that range from salons and wellness centers to therapists, offering solo operators its online appointment booking software for $19.95 a month, and small businesses unlimited services for $39.95 a month.

The company has benefited from three cultural and business trends:

1. More and more of us prefer to text or send an email versus placing a phone call.
2. People in ever-smaller corporate spaces want to make their bikini wax and therapist appointments without being overheard by the coworker in the next cubicle.
3. Daily deals, which are expected to create $2 billion in revenues this year, are creating a deluge of appointment-making requirements for small businesses that are Genbook's potential clients.

But Genbook kind of stumbled into that third trend unwittingly, after Groupon and LivingSocial launched a few years ago. Small merchants who signed up for daily deals and were panic-stricken about handling a deluge of appointment requests apparently called Genbook to sign up for their online appointment service.

“We said 'Groupon? What the hell is Groupon?'” recalled Marc Woodward, vice president of marketing and business development with experience in venture capital and technology. Since then, the San Francisco-based company has “absolutely seen a lot of interest in our platform as a result of daily deals,” he added.

“A successful daily deal could yield 100, 200, 1,000 or 2,000 appointments,” Woodward said. “You hear a lot about dissatisfied merchants, but sometimes there are also dissatisfied customers who don’t want to call 20 times to schedule an appointment.”

Genbook-using merchants can add the "Book Now" buttons to their Facebook pages, email newsletters, and more. The company has raised just over $5 million, including $2.2 million in Series A from Neo Technology Ventures, money from its founders and angel investors back when it was founded.

For merchants who use the online booking service, Genbook is able to provide customer information such as emails that help them stay in touch post-deal, and the platform also helps them track the Groupon voucher numbers so that users can’t try to use the same Groupon twice.

With various daily deal companies, including Groupon, now trying to make themselves more merchant friendly, those features—provided by a completely separate type of business—are worth thinking about.