I built this for my own studio first.
Hi, I'm Rick. I run Claya, a clay studio in the RiNo district of Denver. We opened in August 2026. BookClay exists because running the studio was going badly in a very specific and very boring way.
Here is what my studio ran on. A booking tool that took class payments and knew nothing else. A spreadsheet with the members in it, which I updated on Sundays and which was wrong by Wednesday. A whiteboard by the kiln with names and shelf numbers on it. And my personal phone, which was the front desk, at all hours, including the hours I was teaching.
None of those four things knew about the other three. If a member cancelled a class, the booking tool knew, the spreadsheet did not, and I found out when they did not turn up. If a piece came out of the glaze fire, the whiteboard knew and the member did not, so they texted me to ask. Every gap between those systems was a question that arrived on my phone, and I was the integration layer.
I looked at the software built for studios like mine. Some of it was fine. Most of it wanted a percentage of my class revenue, which is a strange thing to charge for a database, or priced per member so that growing cost me more, or was really gym software with the word "class" swapped in and no idea that a pot has to go through two firings before anyone can take it home.
So I wrote what I needed. Not as a startup idea. As a Tuesday night thing, because the alternative was another Sunday with the spreadsheet.
Every feature in BookClay started as something that went wrong at Claya. That is not a marketing line, it is just the order things happened in.
What went wrong, and what got built
Waitlists that promote themselves
I lost a seat in a sold-out class because someone cancelled on a Tuesday and I did not see the email until Thursday.
Automatic pickup texts
I answered "is my mug ready" eleven times in one week. Every one of those people was being perfectly reasonable.
A kiln board instead of a whiteboard
Someone wiped the whiteboard. I am still not sure who.
Retention flags
A member stopped coming in March. I found out in June, when her card finally failed.
The AI front desk
I was answering texts from the wheel, mid-class, with wet hands. That is not a workflow, it is a hostage situation.
Where things stand
BookClay is early, and I would rather you hear that from me
It runs one studio in production today. Mine. Every day, for real money, with real members who complain to me directly when something is broken. That is a small number, and it is also the hardest kind of testing there is.
I am looking for the next handful of studios. Not the next thousand. A handful, close enough that I can learn how you run classes and fix the parts that do not fit. If you sign up now you will get a founder who answers his own email and a product that bends toward your studio, and you will also get some rough edges, because that is the same trade in both directions.
You will notice there are no customer logos on this site and no testimonials. That is not modesty. There is nothing yet to put there, and inventing some would be a bad way to start a relationship with someone whose member list I am about to hold.
What you get for being early
- Direct line to the person who writes the code.
- Your missing feature goes near the top of the list.
- Help moving your data in, done by me, not by you.
What you are signing up for
- A young product with edges I have not sanded yet.
- No SOC 2 report, and I say so on the security page.
- A small company, with the risk that carries.
What we believe
Four things that decide most of the arguments
When a product decision is close, these are what break the tie.
One price, and you can see all of it
Flat monthly pricing, no per-member creep, no cut of your revenue, no tier where the useful feature lives. You should be able to work out what BookClay costs you next year without calling anyone.
You own your data
Your members, your bookings, your payment history. Export it any time, including on your way out the door. Software that holds your records hostage is not earning its keep, it is just hard to leave.
Software should reduce the number of things you have to remember
Not add a dashboard where you can go look at them. If a feature means one more tab to check on a Thursday, it has failed. The waitlist should promote itself. The pickup text should send itself.
The studio owner is not a "user"
You are a person who wanted to teach people to make pots and ended up running payroll. Everything here is built for that person, on the assumption that their time is the scarcest thing in the building.
Come see whether it fits your studio.
Fourteen days, no card, no sales call. Or just write to me and tell me how your studio runs. I read all of it.
Prefer to poke around first? Open a demo studio