Maya Adly built a booking platform for personal services

Last week, ROAR, an all-in-one booking platform for services like hair and nail appointments, partnered with Zonetail, a platform that connects apartment residents with amenities and services through their smartphones. ROAR CEO and founder, Maya Adly, says the partnership will expand the set of services and businesses that Zonetail users will now have access to.

Btchcoin recently had the chance to catch up with Maya Adly, the founder and CEO of ROAR. We had the chance to chat about her company, her entrepreneurial journey and her morning routine — keep reading to learn more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is ROAR?

In short, it’s OpenTable for service-based businesses. Right now, users and customers have so many apps on their phones and so many different online booking methods. In other cases, they use Instagram to message their different service providers, and at the same time, a lot of businesses don’t have a social presence and customers are left with having to call them.

What ROAR does is basically extract the availability from these businesses' calendars to showcase it for our users, to be able to book and find the appointment that they want nearby. So, say you want your nails done tomorrow at 2 pm at a salon that’s within 500 metres of you, ROAR will show you the businesses that have availability during that time and allows you to book and pay directly on their app.

With millennials and Gen Z using apps and online tools to book these services, businesses are under more pressure than ever to offer online bookings.

What led you to start this company?

While I was working with the payment processing company, Clover, I was working long corporate hours, and sometimes even six days a week. As a woman alone, you sometimes have several appointments every month and in my case, it was very hectic trying to squeeze them all in over the weekend when I was off or just finding the time, in general, to call those businesses and make the appointments. I was in charge of the sales division, so my team and I worked a lot with small- and medium-sized businesses. Through that, I got a strong understanding of the back-end operations of their software and integrations—these businesses use an average of eight different software platforms to operate. I would use OpenTable to book team nights and one-on-one dinners with my team. Then, it occurred to me that what I needed was an OpenTable for my personal services.

And that's how it all began: I founded ROAR in 2021 and it currently supports just over 200 small- to medium-sized businesses in the Vancouver and Edmonton markets.

Can you tell us a bit about your business model?

We operate on a structure much like SkipTheDishes. The business owner will pay a monthly subscription for their business to be featured on the platform, and ROAR receives a commission for each appointment that is booked through the platform. But the platform itself is free for users.

What’s one challenge you have faced as an entrepreneur?

I think everybody expects entrepreneurs to know what to do, but the biggest thing about entrepreneurs is they just go and they do it without even having the answers. Working at Clover, I was working in one department and focusing on one skillset, so I knew what I was doing and I knew what I had to do.

With entrepreneurship, you have to wear all hats for every department, at least for the first little while. So, in transitioning to entrepreneurship, the most difficult thing for me was finding the network in Vancouver that will assist me to get to where I needed to go because I was very new when I started my business here.

What kind of career or life advice would you give to your younger self?

Enjoy yourself and take care of your health. I have always been a workaholic and every entrepreneur is the exact same way. Sometimes, I'll find myself at 1 am still at my laptop, and I don't know where the time has gone.

I would tell myself to not stress as much and enjoy my younger years and the personal side of things a bit more.

What is one thing you wish you had known before starting ROAR?

I would've wanted to bootstrap a bit more, so I probably would've dug a tiny bit deeper into grants. There's so much free funding out there. But it's just difficult to get these grants, so I wish I knew about grant underwriters beforehand or services that assist with writing those applications because there are millions and millions of dollars in funding out there. It's just so specific to every business that you do need a professional to kind of pick and narrow down which one you would actually qualify for.

I would tell every entrepreneur and business owner to look into and hire somebody like a grant underwriter as they do work on a commission, but they know what they're doing so it’s time effective and worth it.

Tell us more about the partnership with Zonetail and what’s next for ROAR:

We’re very excited about our partnership with Zonetail. Their mission of connecting hotel guests and condo residents to the amenity services within their building and surrounding community speaks greatly to us and our own mission at ROAR, which is to provide convenience. Our partnership will allow Zonetail users across Canada to access and book top-notch service providers in the community at their fingertips.

Our plan is to expand into Calgary and Toronto over the next few months and then into other key Canadian markets.

Now for the fun part: What are your favourite books and music picks right now?

Books: Relentless by Tim Grover, Situational Leadership & The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard. I think I read Situational Leadership & The One Minute Manager once a month because I know the speed of our company is only going to go as fast as the speed of the growth of our team, which has grown seven times in size in the past 11 months. And I know that the potential of my team ultimately comes down to how I lead and what I teach them.

Music: I often listen to plain frequency music in addition to meditating to help me absorb more information. There’s no singing, but it’s the underlying frequency that creates an effect on the brain. (The frequency of the instruments in a song is the reason why some songs pump us up and some bring our energy a bit down.)

As a founder, you are given so much information from every direction and are learning so much about so many different departments (finance, marketing, sales, operations, etc.) that I find it more beneficial to just have silence. I will just close my eyes and shut off my brain for half an hour while listening to frequency music to get in touch with how I envision every scenario would pan out and that assists me with making decisions.

What’s your morning routine?

I wake up at five in the morning because I love to get my personal items out of the way to feel human and to get in the zone. I usually go for a half-hour walk with my dog, Ava, then I do my 30 minutes of meditation on the balcony, get my workout in, eat breakfast, and then get ready for the day. By around 7:30, I’m prepping for the day ahead and my meetings usually start around 8:30.

What are some of your work-from-home essentials?

Blue screen glasses, music, coffee, mangoes to snack on and Ava by my feet.