It’s been almost two months since Startmate’s Adrian Dean and Ludek Dolejsky, co-founders of Shiftr, arrived in Sydney — Dean from Canberra, and Dolejksy from the Czech Republic — to join the other companies taking part in the Startmate accelerator program.

The pair has been working on an app-based platform which allows casual and part-time employees to swap shifts with colleagues. They aim to save time for managers who previously had to text or ring around to find staff that could cover when someone else couldn’t work.

With coffees in hand, we sink into the maroon lounges in the office foyer on a drizzly March Friday morning. Dean and I chat while Dolejsky taps away on his laptop, interrupting occasionally to demonstrate a new feature or add his thoughts.

Dean has been thinking a lot about pitching lately; how he can refine and improve the company’s message to present a compelling case to investors. Of course there’s nothing like pressure to focus the mind. This week it was the Optus Innov8 pitch session in front of a room-full of potential investors. And so, one morning last week, Dean made the journey up to Newport to spend time with Startmate mentor and FLT Editor-in-Chief Alan Jones. Over two hours, Dean workshopped his pitch and re-shaped the pitch with a clearer story. And then again on Monday, he took part in FLT’s pitch clinic with Tyler Crowley. The pitch now tells a clear story, and Dean is feeling more confident.

“What I learnt from Tyler, is that you really want to create an emotional connection. You have 15 seconds or the audience will be back on their email, or their phones.”

Dolejsky looks up from his laptop; he’s clearly excited to show me the latest version of the pitch deck. Most of the text in the presentation has gone, and there are noticeably more images. There’s also a clear storyline; a guy who wants to go to a friends’ party but can’t get out of his work shift, a girl who has to pay her way through law school and needs the extra money, and a stressed-out manager who doesn’t want to spend hours on the phone trying to find a replacement staffer.

The pitch introduces the characters and then solves their problems using a pre-recorded product demo. It’s effective and shows a clear narrative with an introduction, a complication and a resolution. It’s the mental-movie approach which Crowley advocates. A smattering of jokes and then the traction slide — almost a hockey-stick graph showing the level of engagement within current McDonald’s restaurants — and the pitch is done.

I’d followed the Innov8 session on social media, unable to make it in person. Dean’s performance proved a hit, at least in the twittersphere. Stuart Richardson, founder of Melbourne-based Adventure Capital, tweeted “Impressive pitch @Shiftr – tackling a common pain, with a simple & elegant solution.” While the outcome of the pitch won’t be known for a few weeks, it has already resulted in a few introductions to potential customers and investors. It also gave the pair the focus needed to refine their pitch.

Updates to the product had also helped boost Dean’s confidence. Over the past few days Dolejsky had added functionality, allowing managers to see who had approved shift-swaps, check potential additional costs incurred if someone swapped shift (i.e., penalty rates for working more than a standard shift, or an increase in wage costs due to age differences), and a new feature the pair is rolling out so that any manager can check shift swaps on the office computer.

“You get some confidence from the strength of the product, and from the pitch prep. We wrote this version the night before, and doing all that and practising made me feel confident about our story,” says Dean.

Shiftr founders Ludek Dolejsky and Adrian Dean (Image: Zach Kitschke)

Shiftr has been growing steadily since speaking to FLT in January, yet the company is at a turning point. Until now, its growth strategy has been to expand within the McDonald’s empire, targeting franchise owners with multiple restaurants. It seemed like a sensible strategy; Dean and Dolejsky would learn from each new store that came onboard, and could refine the product to cater to exactly what managers require. A satisfied manager would refer Shiftr to other store owners, and there was a clear growth strategy. However the pair is now looking towards the U.S., and wondering what questions a potential investor might ask.

There’s an important McDonald’s owner-operator conference in Auckland, New Zealand, next week and it could be a perfect opportunity to secure a number of new customers. The pair is considering whether or not to attend. At the same time, the pair is realising their current focus on one customer is concerning for investors. They know the concept works at McDonald’s, but can it work elsewhere?

“Bart [Jellema, Startmate mentor] was like ‘Okay, that’s great, but from an investor point of view growing from 30-60 McDonald’s might mean some more revenue, but it might not be replicable’,” explains Dean. “He had a good idea about screwing the New Zealand conference and focussing on a mail-out.”

The pair will make the decision on Monday, following a meeting with an influential NSW McDonald’s executive with ties to a number of restaurants. More than likely, they’ll use the money they would have spent on flights, accommodation and marketing materials to do a mailout to the 750 Australian McDonald’s restaurants. They’ve created a ‘starter kit’ which allows a manager to setup on Shiftr in a few minutes, using a packaged USB dongle and step-by-step instructions. Once they’ve made the push, they’ll turn their focus to securing some other paying corporate customers, and focus on proving that the platform can work elsewhere.

The initial signs are encouraging. In the past few weeks, the pair has had several meetings with one of Australia’s largest retailers, following an introduction by one of the Startmate mentors. The retailer is interested in doing a trial. While it sounds like good news, the pair is trying to work out whether spending months securing a large enterprise deal is worth the effort, or whether it’s better to continue with the bottom-up approach they’ve had from the start. The pitter-patter of rain drops continues outside.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” says Dean. “If we land a huge roll-out deal, it gives us the opportunity to prove the system at scale. We’re getting a lot of interest from the enterprise side, but it raises all sorts of questions about white-labelling, security, they’re even concerned about who our cloud-service host is.”

The Shiftr founders will fly to San Francisco with the rest of the Startmate companies in late-April. Before then, Shiftr, like the other companies, will need to prove its business model and demonstrate traction. Without these two ingredients, companies will struggle to attract the attention of investors.

While for now the Shiftr founders seem upbeat, some of the other companies are clearly buckling under the pressure. Perhaps it’s the boost that comes from from delivering a strong pitch, or promising conversations with potential customers and investors that’s buoying Dean and Dolejsky’s mood today. Either way, the pair seem clear on what they need to do in the next few weeks.

“The point of this program is to prove the business case. We’ve got a business case, so it’s now about proving traction,” says Dean.