Fejiro Otovwe

Founder, Yeroku · Peterborough, UK

Yeroku turns the work small businesses already do into the marketing and reviews they don't have time to make. We start with hair salons.

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Fejiro Otovwe, founder of Yeroku

Yeroku started because I wanted an app that didn't exist. I get busy, and the idea of walking around looking for a salon with a free chair felt like work I shouldn't have to do. I wanted to see which places near me were quiet right now, and in a new city, see the stylists, the portfolios, and the prices before picking one. So I started building it. Pretty quickly I hit a wall: none of the data I needed existed anywhere. So I built the salon side to capture it. By the time that was nearly finished, I realised something that's obvious in hindsight: the right way into all of this wasn't the consumer or the salon. It was the stylist. The three sides now sit inside one system. The stylist side is where everything starts.

Around the same time, I was watching my mum run her salon. Slow weeks weren't her hard weeks. The hard ones were when a stylist left and she had to find a replacement from a network of people she'd already exhausted. The thing I was building solved my consumer problem and her operator problem at the same time, which is when I started taking it seriously.

Underneath all of this, my background is in AI search, local search, and the technical marketing layer that sits between them. I'd been waiting a long time for an industry where that work could compound for a decade, and salons turned out to be exactly that. But salons are the start, not the destination.

What we're building

The insight

Every independent local business produces its best marketing material as a byproduct of doing its work. The haircut on the client. The plate of food. The tattoo. The garden after the gardener leaves. The dog before and after the groom. The car before and after the mechanic. These moments are happening every day, in every salon and shop on every high street, and almost none of them ever become anything online.

The reason isn't laziness or lack of effort. It's that the gap between the moment the work is finished and a structured, legally compliant, distributable, indexable, AI-search-visible piece of content is enormous. That gap sits across six different job functions:

  • Photographer, to capture the moment
  • Data controller, to get the legal consent to use it
  • Content creator, to turn it into a social post, an email, a profile update
  • Reviews manager, to route the satisfied customer to where their review counts
  • Local SEO operator, to feed the right signals into Google and AI search
  • Brand strategist, to do all of the above consistently, in voice, over time

A salon chain has a team for this. An independent salon owner has thirty minutes between clients. The thing being asked of independent businesses, increasingly, is impossible. And the cost of failing at it is rising every year, because the platforms that decide who gets discovered are getting more demanding, not less.

The bigger picture

Hair salons are the wedge because they're a near-perfect fit. Visible work, photogenic output, repeat customers, real GDPR exposure, dense local search, and an owner who is also the operator. The structure of the product works the same way for every independent local business whose best marketing material is produced as a byproduct of its work. Barbers, nail techs, beauticians, tattoo studios, restaurants, cafes, gyms, pet groomers, mechanics, tradespeople, photographers, florists.

The ten-year version of Yeroku is a single operating system for the independent local economy. The first vertical is salons. The thesis is the same in every vertical underneath it: the moment of doing the work should fuel the visibility, the content, the reviews, the compliance, and the data, automatically.

Read the full thesis

Background

  • Founder of Yeroku
  • Background in AI search, local search, and the technical marketing layer underneath both
  • Studying how AI search is changing how people find local businesses
  • Building independently, no external capital

How I work

Walk in. Do the work. Publish what we find.

Research is the spine. Content is the surface. Field is the moat.

Document everything. Show the working.

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