Joy is a blockchain based Uber for beauty services, that’s what your elevator pitch might say. What are the benefits and why the blockchain?
The Joy will help its users to save their time by providing a convenient platform for booking beauty and wellness treatments with a few clicks. Users will be able to choose treatments, salons or practitioners they want without having to call anyone or spending time searching for a suitable salon or practitioner on the Internet. They have both options: to book an appointment at a salon or to make an order at home, work or any other preferable place. Moreover, every user receives rewards for different activities within the platform.
As for the service providers, they will be able to gain more clients and therefore additional revenues via The Joy marketplace and reduce their marketing expenses. On top of that, service providers receive a full business management system that allows them to keep track of their bookings, finance, logistics and time.
The blockchain creates a possibility to tokenize the reward system of the platform and bring additional benefits to the customers. Additionally the blockchain helps us create a rating storage that will make the ratings unchangeable and secure.
How did The Joy idea come to you? What were you inspired with?
To be honest, I just saw that there is no such a platform that could allow to book appointments and beauty services and get them where you want. Nowadays we sometimes do not have time to go to a salon, but with The Joy a salon can be wherever the client is. So, that was the initial idea, and then I thought it’d be great to add salons to the system as well, and we did that too.
On the WP you mentioned you had several other businesses prior to The Joy. What were they?
Since 2015, I have been operating a business with quests in 5 locations in 3 cities, building the direction of virtual reality in collaboration with playvr. This year we are going to launch 10–15 locations with quests and halls with virtual reality. From 2013 to 2014, I was engaged in sales of cable products. From 2014 to 2017, I traded in non-ferrous and rare metals and made transactions worth more than $10 million. Since March 2018, I have been managing assets in the crypto for $1+ million.
Why did you decide to open your head office and start operating in Germany?
Germany is a familiar, well-studied market for us, as we come from here and all the initial researches, surveys, studies, field trials has been done here. Germany itself is the 4th biggest country in the world and the first in Europe in terms of GDP. People in Germany are ready to spend money on beauty. Thus, we decided to launch The Joy in Berlin, the most innovative city in Germany that is opened to everything new.
Do you plan to add some more use cases for the blockchain on the platform?
We do not want to add any blockchain use cases made out of thin air. Blockchain is a tool used for solving particular business problems but not the magic cure that can solve all of them. If we discover the possibility to add use cases for the blockchain where it will be superior to all other options — we surely will consider that.
Looking further into the future, any ambitious plans for the next three years?
We have a pretty ambitious expansion plans. In the next three years we plan to cover the countries of Western Europe, North America, Eastern Asia and Middle East. In addition, we plan to expand the platform functionality and eventually expand the range of services The Joy will provide.
What are your main challenges? Can you think of any competitors?
I would say, the main challenges are to design the platform the way both clients and service providers will like it, considering that the booking of a beauty treatment usually needs more inputs than food delivery in Foodora or booking a ride with Uber. The service providers in beauty and wellness industry would like to have all the functionalities The Joy provides to them to be easy to use.
There are a few competitors in the U.S. and Europe like Treatwell, Vagaro, Styleseat that are also marketplaces and booking systems for salons. When it comes to beauty on-demand, there are a few successful on-demand massage services, but no real competitors that provide full range of beauty treatments for customers or for business management system and logistic module for freelance practitioners as we do. The main point is that when you think of getting a ride you think of Uber, when you want to book hotels you think of booking.com, when you are willing to rent an apartment while visiting Prague you think of Airbnb but there is no global application you could think of when you are up to get a haircut or a manicure.
How will technology change the beauty market in your opinion? What are the technologies that will have most influence?
In my opinion, in the future we will be able to check how you will look with different makeup products on, or generate a before-after prediction of how your face will look before going to the cosmetologist. I think development of photo recognition and real time video and image processing will be very important for this sphere.
More info about The Joy: https://thejoy.io
The Joy Beta App: https://thejoy.io/beta/
