There are easier ways to start a company than signing up for one of the hardest foot races on Earth. But easy has never seemed to be Stefan Batory’s thing.
Long before he built Booksy into the largest booking platform in beauty, wellness, and health, powering hundreds of millions of appointments each year with a team of more than 1,000 people, Batory was simply trying to lose weight. Running, at first, was punishment. Then it became obsession. Then it became something else entirely: the spark for a business idea that would reshape how millions book everything from haircuts to massages.
His origin story starts, oddly enough, in the Sahara.
After taking up running, Batory’s discipline caught the attention of a colleague, who pushed him to sign up for Marathon des Sables, a brutal multi-day ultramarathon across the desert that asks runners to carry their own food and supplies through scorching heat and punishing terrain.
Training for that race came with aches, pains, and regular visits to a physiotherapist. But getting an appointment was a mess. The therapist was always busy working with clients. Calls were missed. Messages crossed. Scheduling dragged on for days.
And then came the simple thought that changed everything.
“I realized that people who work with their hands, from massage therapists to hairstylists and nail techs, can’t exactly stop mid-service to answer a call,” Batory told Refresh Miami.
That was the lightbulb moment. It was not just one busy therapist. It was millions of service professionals trapped in the same problem, and hundreds of millions of customers stuck playing phone tag with them.
Booksy was born from that friction.
The company launched in the U.S. first, notably ahead of Batory’s native Poland. That was no accident. Having already built and scaled software businesses, then launched a taxi app in Poland that taught him the mechanics of marketplaces, Batory knew that if Booksy wanted to be a category leader, it had to win in America.
That bet paid off.
Today, Booksy sits at the center of a huge shift in consumer behavior, helping salons, barbershops, spas, and wellness businesses move client relationships from calls and texts into a digital booking flow that feels second nature.
But Batory’s own life was changing, too. In 2018, he moved from Poland to Palo Alto. But working with European teams from California meant brutal hours, often starting at 4 a.m. Then came Covid, followed by an autoimmune condition that forced him to rethink how he lived.
He came to Miami for a short stint in the sun and quickly realized something important: he felt better here.
“Being in Miami helped me big time,” he said. “So then I decided to move here.”
That move, meant purely for personal well-being, turned into a professional gift too. “I did not expect this level or magnitude of talent in Miami, as well as all the amazing networking opportunities and people I met here,” he said. “Now I look at that as serendipity. It’s one of the best things that happened to me in my professional life.”
Booksy’s future, unsurprisingly, looks increasingly powered by AI. Batory imagines a world where booking a stylist becomes less guesswork and more smart matching. Upload a hairstyle photo, add your own image, and Booksy could assess whether the look suits your face shape, whether your hair texture can support it, and which stylist nearby is best equipped to deliver it.
Batory’s goal, in no uncertain terms: changing how people choose services altogether.
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