Keith C

Solo founder of BookSharp, a booking and web presence platform for Irish salons and appointment-based businesses. It runs on one principle: a small business should own its clients, not rent them back from a marketplace that charges commission on every new one.

Before this

Fifteen years in B2B sales and service, starting in my father's print and promotion business.

I was service manager for all Mazak CNC machines in Ireland, and sole account manager for Johnson & Johnson, running multimillion euro machine sales and installation projects. I also led the transition of Amazon UK's affiliate marketing customer service teams from Germany into Cork.

That background is the reason I build for small operators the way I do. I have sat on both sides of enterprise procurement, and I know what it costs a business to depend on a vendor that owns the relationship.

What I've built

• BookSharp — multi-tenant SaaS in Next.js, TypeScript and Supabase. Booking, website, domain, email and social for a salon, built to run on the salon's own domain. Pre-launch, with a working demo tenant.

• MarketBase — selected as one of 50 finalists from 856 submissions to Base Batches 002 on Devfolio.

I'm the Base and Coinbase developer relations ambassador for Ireland, and a prize-winning finalist in two of their developer competitions.

What drives me

The gap between what small operators are sold and what they actually get. Most are paying every month for software that quietly treats their client list as the vendor's asset.

Agentic commerce is where that fight happens next. Once agents start booking on people's behalf, whoever sits between the business and the agent will look to charge rent on the introduction. I'd rather build the layer that makes that unnecessary.