MekkanToday we're launching Mekkan — AI business operations for the small businesses that hold up your high street.
Rolling out first: barbershops, hair salons, beauty studios. Coming next: gyms, clinics, dog groomers, restaurants — anywhere one owner is doing the work of three. Mekkan is not another booking calendar; we're building the operating system small studios actually need: a single AI character, Leon, who runs the boring parts of the business so the owner can stay where they belong — with customers, on the floor.
Leon answers the phone when you can't, books appointments, talks to your customers, reads every review, forecasts your week, and tells you what to do about the third “long wait time” complaint before the fourth one shows up. Chat with him, or speak out loud. Same brain.
Why we built this
Mekkan was not designed in a boardroom. It was built behind the chair. I started cutting hair young, spent a decade on the floor in London — Mayfair, Covent Garden, Canary Wharf — and the chair turned out to be a business school. The clients were restaurant owners, clinic owners, traders. Years of cutting their hair meant years of learning how they ran — and quietly mishandled — their businesses.
The pattern was always the same. The people who knew the floor couldn't read the data. The people who read the data had never worked the floor. Mekkan does both.
The first studio Mekkan ships to is my own — Mekkan Beauty Studioin London. If a feature doesn't work for us, it doesn't ship to anyone.
What ships today
Seven capabilities, one voice, your shop's data:
- Receptionist — picks up when you can't, speaks like a person, 24/7
- Talk to Leon — chat or voice, answers from your real numbers
- EOD Report — a daily summary delivered when you close
- Forecast — predicts revenue and no-show risk 7 days out
- Review Insights — sentiment, service, complaint patterns
- Marketplace — new customers find you in the Mekkan app
- Membership — customers prepay, you get cash today
All of it runs on a Postgres + Spring Boot stack we host ourselves in the UK. The review AI and the demand AI are models we trained ourselves on real beauty industry data, not generic foundation-model wrappers.
How we charge
Four tiers — Starter, Pro, Scale, Enterprise — starting at £69 / month. Full pricing here.
The principle behind the model: we're paid when we deliver, not for thin air. Direct bookings — walk-ins, owner or staff entries — stay free on every tier, for life. Online bookings, AI receptionist calls, marketplace acquisitions, and memberships each carry a small, transparent fee tied to the value we actually delivered. No per-seat trickery, no surprise add-ons.
Where we're going
The pilot is rolling out across London (Hornchurch) and Ipswich, in hair and beauty first. Coming next — dog groomers, gyms, clinics, medspas, and restaurants. Every appointment-driven small business where one person is wearing five hats. Same stack, same Leon, scaled sideways.
We don't think of Mekkan as “salon software.” We think of it as a labour multiplier for owners. One AI, one brand, many capabilities — a single character your customers and your staff actually know by name.
If you run a high-street business in the UK and you're tired of stitching together a booking calendar, a phone, a marketing tool, and a spreadsheet, start a 7-day trial. Or email me directly — emre.yildiz@mekkan.ai.
— Emre Yildiz, Founder & CEO, Mekkan