Hi there!
My name is Ádám Marjai, and I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Minup booking system. We founded Minup in 2021 with my business partner, Áron Dudás and we’re proud to support over 2000 businesses with their appointment scheduling needs. It’s time for us to introduce ourselves and give you a little insight behind the scenes of Minup.
How did it all start?
I came up with the idea of Minup in early 2021 during Covid after a running into some troubles with online booking. My wife and I were moving house and were looking for bathroom tiles online. I was very happy when we found a tile shop where we could book an appointment online for a bathroom design because I had already made enough phone calls during the move. I thought it was going to be a smooth ride, but I was wrong.
We didn’t get a confirmation email of the booking, but we went to the location anyway, after all, the website said “appointment successfully booked.” Unfortunately when we arrived we were greeted by closed gates. It turned out that there was a stocktaking that day, but the website still showed available time slots. After I pointed this out, they informed me that their online booking system was not working very well, so nex time I should call them instead. Needless to say, we didn’t end up buying the tiles from them, but at least I got an idea. I decided to design an easy to use and reliable appointment booking system.
I contacted my former colleague, Áron, who is a very talented developer and a really cool guy, which is an important aspect when you want to start a company with someone.
When we started Minup, we wanted to build a super easy appointment booking system for small businesses. I’m proud to say that we have achieved this goal, but of course our work has not stopped here.
Minup users are a diverse group of entrepreneurs, ranging from beauty professionals to masseurs, coaches, consultants, private tutors and many others who want to develop their business with digital solutions. Our goal for the future is to build a comprehensive system that allows our clients to not only book appointments, but also pay and register their guests.
What makes Minup different from other appointment booking systems?
Before we started the project, I looked around the market and found that the existing appointment booking systems focused mainly on larger companies and not so much on the needs of small businesses. On the contrary, small businesses are the ones that need digitalization and automation of their processes the most because they don’t have the resources to hire an assistant to manage appointments and they don’t have the time to respond to customer calls and messages all the time.
I’ve also noticed that the solutions on the market are quite complicated to set up. It can take several hours of consultation before someone can start using them. So we wanted to build an appointment booking app that anyone could set up in a few minutes without any help and that was flexible enough to cover the needs of different service providers.
My original profession is User Experience (UX) designer. As a designer founder, I always put the user first and that’s the mindset I try to pass on to the team.
In practice, it means that we talk to our users on a daily basis, ask for their opinions, even show them half-finished prototypes to gather feedback and then build features that are really useful and don’t cause headaches. We don’t think we know what a professional needs any better than the professional themselves, so we ask and listen to what they say and design the software based on that.
Where does the name “Minup” come from?
We often get the question where the name “Minup” come from. I could say that it popped out of my head in the shower, but the fact is that the naming, like so much else at Minup, is the result of a well-planned process.
To choose a name, we used the Igor Naming Guide by Igor Naming Agency, which guided us step-by-step to find the right name.
At the end of the process, we showed the top 10 names and slogans to our friends and families and asked for their feedback and vote on the one they liked best. The three names that received the most votes were lemontime, peakend and minup.
Finally, the name “minup” won. We found it to be a playful and friendly name, and abstract enough to fit our future ideas. The name is essentially a pun on the English words “minute” and “up”, which can be interpreted in quite a few different ways. There’s also a little Hungarian wordplay behind the name, because when you pronounce the name, you hear the Hungarian word “minap”, which means “just yesterday” in Hungarian.
What is the Minup blog about?
We’ve launched the Minup blog to share our knowledge and best practices with our customers. We wanted to write about topics that we know about and where we feel we can bring new and valuable ideas. As a software company, we cannot deny that digital transformation is the area which we’re are most passionate about. So this blog will focus on digital solutions that can help you run your business more efficiently and save you time and energy.
You can learn how to use Minup successfully, automate your processes and improve your customer experience. We would like to present tips & tricks and case studies on how similar businesses are successfully using our online appointment booking system.
But we don’t just want to write about Minup. Our goal is not just marketing, but to give you the knowledge and insights to make your business easier and give you a competitive advantage in your market.
Who is this blog for?
The blog is primarily aimed at professionals in the service sector who are committed to developing their business:
- Coaches
- Consultants
- Beauty professionals: beauty salons, barbers, nail artists, lash artists, tattoo artists, pedicurists
- Massage therapists
- Marketing professionals
- Psychologists
- Natural healers
- Private tutors
- Personal trainers
- Doctors, health professionals
- Professionals in the automotive sector
The list could go on because Minup users are a very diverse group of entrepreneurs, but we won’t because we think the point comes across. If you are a small business owner and provide some kind of service, I think you will find some interesting content on the Minup blog.