Ask HN: How do startups manage their operations?

Hey everyone, we are two guys with no tech background in need of some help understanding how successful startups managed their first hires, interviews, new leads, first paying customers, invoicing, customer communication, to do lists, who’s working on what, customer bookings, feedback, change of schedule, how to analyse customers needs to offer more services and all the data that all of this creates?

For a sense of scale and what we do, we have 100 paying customers, we sell a service, think at home haircuts, so we have 8 hairdressers and need to hire 2 more today, then we need to keep track of all the families and manage their bookings, one family might have 6 members, 2 parents with weekly haircuts at 2pm and 4 kids with haircuts from 4 to 6pm every two weeks all good until one kid can’t make an appointment and need to reschedule, so now we need to organise a time the kid and the same hairdresser are available, this happens quite often. But the biggest pain is matching desired customer time with available hairdresser schedule with lots of back and forth through emails and calls, then the next school term the school changes after school activities and we are back to zero, so this won’t ever be fixed.

Then we need to invoice every family, gather feedback, changing hairstyles, hairdresser notes, parents notes, kids feedback, parents goals, our goals, reviews, wom recommendations, new leads, book trial haircuts, trial feedback, etc…

On top of that we have all the CVs we are getting, interview notes, how to quickly find a past CV that wasn’t perfect but we are desperate so let’s interview them again and offer some training, book training, book trial haircut, invoice, get trial feedback from customer and hairdresser, analyse trial feedback, review, hire, etc..

Could go on..

edit: have posted as Ask HN now. thanks