FLT is covering the 2013 Startmate accelerator program, which aims to help early-stage companies become enduring internet companies. Here, we introduce Adrian Dean and Ludek Dolejsky of Shiftr.
It’s the end of the first week for the eight companies selected as part of this year’s Startmate program, and they’ve well-and-truly settled now; there are some desk plants floating around, and proper computer screens are beginning to pop up among the sea of MacBook Airs. The office is now full; all 20 founders have claimed their desks.
The final arrival was Shiftr co-founder, Ludek Dolejsky, who was recovering from jet-lag after a 24-hour journey from the Czech Republic when we caught up. He arrived on Wednesday, and joins co-founder, Adrian Dean, a Canberra expat with a background in marketing, business development and customer relations.
The pair has developed an app which allows casual and part-time employees to swap shifts with colleagues, saving time for managers who previously had to send text messages or ring around to find staff that could cover when someone else couldn’t work.
“We’re trying to be a really lightweight solution for when your pristine roster goes to shit,” says Dean. “We’ve been running the app with a number of McDonald’s franchises is Canberra.”
Dean and Dolejsky will share a house for the next three months. They’ve negotiated a good deal on a place in Balmain, in exchange for moving the owners furniture from Canberra to Sydney. They spent the weekend on the road; heading to Canberra to organise removalists for the couches, tables and chairs which will fill their currently-empty residence.
Even so, they’ve been working hard over the past few days to improve the Shiftr app, and get more users. The pair has been experimenting with ways to improve the uptake of the app within the current workplaces. By sending emails or text messages to staff who started the sign up process, but never completed it, they’ve managed to boost usage from 35% to 40% across the 13 or so workplaces now using the tool.
“It bridges their existing system, and they haven’t had to change anything. You can check your roster on the phone, click ‘swap’ on shifts you can’t work and it broadcasts a message to all crew,” says Dean.
They’ve already got more than 1000 people using the app: staff from a number of McDonald’s restaurants in the ACT and NSW and Sydney’s Star Casino.
“The best thing is that the manager doesn’t lose any control. Alternatively, we can set up a peer-to-peer mode,” says Dolejsky.
Shift founders Ludek Dolejsky and Adrian Dean (Image: Zach Kitschke)
Niki Scevak, Startmate founder and coordinator, has suggested the Shiftr founders focus on getting the system working really well for a small group of workplaces, before opening it up publicly. As a result, the pair plan to tackle more McDonald’s restaurants and continue to develop the product. By the end of the program, the duo say they hope they can have their app working at at least half of the fast-food chain’s 700 outlets.
They’re considering taking a Yammer-style approach to rolling out elsewhere — get staff and managers onboard and use these initial ‘converts’ to convince corporate heads to buy-in. The idea is you give individual users the ability to sign up and use the platform for free, but if a company wants to claim their presence or access additional features, they’ll need to subscribe (this blog post explains the Yammer strategy).
“We’ll be trying to take a bottom-up approach,” says Dolejsky. “We want to get the managers raving, and we also want to open to the public.”
When the app first launched in April, Dean says he had to drive around to each fast-food outlet in Canberra and pick up a printed PDF version of the roster, take it back home and manually import all the shift information. He laughs, “it was pretty time consuming”. Thankfully, Dolejsky has now built a tool which can pull shift information from McDonald’s own rostering system, MeTime.
Dolejsky has been programming since he was young. Now 30, he’s spent the past few years in enterprise consulting, travelling around the world and working for large companies. The firm he started back home now employs five staff. He stayed with Dean in Canberra for a few months last year, after connecting in 2011 online. The pair had played around with a few different ideas before settling on Shiftr.
It’s still early days, but Shiftr plans to charge a monthly fee per site, depending on the number of staff. For a workplace with a hundred employees, the company is looking at charging somewhere between $20-$40 per month. The pair say the employers they have been speaking with say they often spend $300-$400 a month on text messages to employees. Alternatively, it can sometimes take 20 minutes on the phone to fill a shift.
“There are a number of bigger players, but their sales process is much bigger — they offer a whole platform doing rostering, invoicing, payroll. We’re just trying to solve this specific problem,” says Dean.
As the primary business development resource, Dean is focussed on growing the number of users within existing workplaces, and pursuing new opportunities. Dolejsky jokes that Dean creates all the work, and he makes it happen. They have also brought on a third co-founder, Tomas Svoboda, a friend of Dolejsky’s.
Svoboda may join the pair in San Francisco, but for now the third co-founder enables the team to work around the clock. Dolejsky can check in at the end of the day, and Svoboda can take the reins and work through the night: well, that’s the plan at least.
So, why Startmate? Dean thinks the program will be most useful because of the mentoring. Having worked alone in Canberra, he knows it can be hard to hit goals without a co-located team. In terms of funding, he’d looked at a number of government programs but says the benefit wasn’t always clear.
“Cash is cheap,” he says. “Many of those programs only give cash but don’t offer much else. Now that we have the first version, we’re really focussed on trying to grow, and hopefully Startmate will help with that.”
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