Barba Studio is Live
1 March 2026
There's a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from shipping something you built for people you know. Not enterprise clients. Not anonymous end users. People who work with their hands, run their own place, and have been managing appointments in a WhatsApp group or a paper notebook for years.
Barba Studio is live. It's a booking management system built specifically for Italian barbershops — and today is the day it goes out into the world.
What it is
Barba Studio is simple by design. A barber opens the app, sets up their services and availability, and starts accepting bookings. Clients book through a clean, fast interface. No unnecessary features. No steep learning curve. No subscription that costs more than a haircut.
The goal was always to build something a barber would actually use — not something impressive in a demo that gets abandoned after a week.
Why barbershops
The barbershop industry in Italy is enormous and almost entirely offline. Most barbers manage their schedule through phone calls, WhatsApp messages, or at best a generic booking tool designed for spas or salons — none of which fit the rhythms of a barbershop.
The problem isn't awareness. Barbers know they could be more organised. The problem is friction. Every existing solution asks too much: too many settings, too much time to set up, too much money for what you get.
Barba Studio removes that friction.
The stack
The app is built on the same stack I've used for every product I've shipped over the past twelve years: Node.js on the backend, React on the web dashboard, and React Native with Expo for the mobile apps on iOS and Android.
There's nothing exotic here — and that's deliberate. The stack I know deeply is the stack I can ship fast on, debug confidently on, and maintain without burning out. When you're building a product solo or in a small team, familiarity isn't a weakness. It's the thing that lets you move.
Building in the margins
Like most of my independent projects, Barba Studio was built in the hours that exist around everything else — early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Alongside full-time work at Elemental Machines, client projects through Honeyside, and a master's degree I'm finishing up.
It's not glamorous. But it's the reality of how independent software gets built, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
What's next
The first version covers the core loop: shop setup, service configuration, scheduling, and client bookings. From here, the roadmap follows real usage — what barbers actually ask for, what slows them down, what would make their day meaningfully better.
If you run a barbershop, or know someone who does, barba.studio is live and free to try.