Show HN: Blackbell – Create booking websites and marketplaces, without code (blackbell.com)

Hey HN!

Blackbell is a business software for local services SMBs, think service providers near you who offer services by appointment, mostly in person: personal trainers, doctors, cleaning companies, dog walkers, home services etc.

E-commerce SaaS to sell physical products are very mature (Shopify…), but there is still a big gap in serving this niche specific needs in the market. The reality is, most service SMBs use nothing (pen/paper is our biggest competitor) or try to mix various no-code products together (not so easy to maintain).

We’re trying to fix it. We combine in one no-code product (SchedulePro) a number of essential tools: website builder, booking forms, scheduling, payment, CRM, orders management, email marketing, a business mobile app and more. ( Stripe was a big inspiration, in providing a suite of interconnected core tools ) It took a lot of work and time to make our products simple to use and bring a coherent product to life. We are small but kinda battle-tested with 600,000 online bookings, 96% client satisfaction, with one of our top clients achieving over $10 million in sales.

We're launching a product (AgencyLink) for freelancers and agencies who work with service providers in our niche and need to develop booking platforms. Originally, we made it for ourselves, to help an agency we acquired sell hyper-local service marketplaces (ServicesHub) in the UK. That small team of four generated $3,000,000 in revenue, mainly because these tools helped them create platforms (without code) very quickly for the clients, do fast account support, and handle billing efficiently. So today we make most of these tools available.. We offer partners who onboard clients 20% referral recurring revenues.

Our tech stack: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Ember.js, Vue.js, and React Native (via Expo). We use Stripe and Wise for payments. A cool tool we built is Powerblocks: one-click import for HTML/CSS into our visual editor, inspired by Canva. We have Webhooks APIs and more to automate some flows, and a Sandbox env.

Looking forward to your feedback and ideas, especially how to kickstart working with freelancers / web agencies, looks like a big new world where lots of products compete for attention!