It's even harder to be open and honest with yourself, your employees, your customers and everyone else when shutting down. Perhaps somewhat weird, but I find it refreshing to see posts like these. I think it's the sign of a good and healthy entrepreneur/team (albeit hard to write).
I'm sure you and your team learned a lot, and I love the gesture to open source your software.
Scheduling is hard too. Every company has different requirements around how their scheduling works. Lots of businesses need their employees to clock-in and -out of their assigned shifts for accountability reasons, not sure if Staffjoy supported that. The shifts can have requirements too, e.g. the maintenance shift can only be scheduled for 8 and 12 hours, but nothing longer/shorter. There are usually payroll and billing implications, so adapting to an existing payroll/billing system would be an additional challenge, and not doing so would be a non-starter for lots of businesses.
If anything, the product surface area they were trying to tackle is really broad. Probably could have focused on a particular vertical and provided more value-adds.
I'm excited to see what gets open-sourced. Schedule visualizations are also hard. :-)
We looked at the Microsoft tool [1]. I honestly think it's more of an upsell play for existing customer than a new customer acquisition play. The pricing is confusing and not competitive [2].
I also tried a startup which was largely premised on having better scheduling, and solving obvious operational inefficiencies with competitor businesses.
In hindsight, that was dumb, because we never got to anything near the scale where the scheduling would matter.
We didn't have a better way of acquiring customers, so efficiency never came into play. Conversely, if you have enough customers, operational efficiency doesn't matter that much.
Anyway, no profound insights here... just pointing out to people that if you have a great startup idea based on using a more elaborate scheduling algorithm than your competitors (an attractive trap for programmers, no doubt), then think again.
Business execs are often taught to distinguish between cost centers and profit centers, and to focus their attention and resources on the profit centers.
Any product that's premised on making a company's cost centers (e.g. HR scheduling) marginally more efficient is going to see very slow adoption just because it's not something execs will focus on -- they have so many other priorities that are higher on the list.
Also, SMBs almost never want to convert to pay cash for anything because they are usually so cash crunched.
Yep, it totally makes sense when put in those terms.
Also, any attempt to make the cost centers more efficient (by introducing elaborate software and algorithms) will probably make them quite a bit less flexible, require higher skilled staff, etc.
I sincerely feel your pain, we also had to fight old paper and excel habits with a digital tool. I am also in a startup working on a Scheduling product with math optimizations (absence management, work constraints, IBM Cplex solver)...! I will be happy to review your open source code and see if anything can be reused on our side. PetalMD has a freemium approach in a niche market (Canadian healthcare providers), and we burned lots of money before we finally focused on the core value for our user base. The freemium gave us the critical mass and leverage to have discussions with partners and we learned through the years what had to be enhanced in our product to offer several pricing plans.
Our niche is really helping focusing the product enhancements and the marketing efforts. Scheduling needs are broad and we constantly have to refuse opportunities.
I use CPLEX at work. I've also been told that Gurobi has a lot of people that left CPLEX and is generally up for trying more advanced albeit risky advancements.
@encoder, to your point, this is exactly what we (Paid, www.paidapi.com) do. Definitely reach out to us if you have any questions. Would love to see how we can help you out.
1. Many of our customers get paid by checks. We receive checks for some of them, and our goal is to make as easy as possible to reconcile those payments.
2. If your customer's card is out of date, we prompt the customer to update their card and store it back to Stripe for you.
3. You aren't alone. Some customers use us for pieces of their transaction volume (i.e. only the invoiced customers or only customer paying via ACH)
4. A la #3, you can send us a portion or all. We're also happy to help you get started. It's free to get set up, so you can try it out. We also provide a test environment so you can play around with it as much as you want.
Feel free to always shoot us an email at hello@paidapi.com.!
Roy says[1] that to be truly RESTful, your resources (documents) need to be linked between each other, just like HTML pages. There are no definite standards yet (that I'm aware of), but JSON HAL[1] seems to be on the IETF standards track to be the one solution we settle on (just like we "settled on" <a href> in HTML). See also [3] for a broader overview on links in JSON and [4] for more information on resource linking and stuff in general.
Having always been asked "Do you know someone who does X?" a lot, I have certainly found it most difficult to answer for those in hardware. Perhaps it's just from my perspective having been in software so long, but I am excited to see a focus on Hardware networking, particularly at the founder level.
Curious to hear how hardware people have found co-founders/early employees to date. Classmates? Former co-workers?
I was in the same shoes, and I decided to learn Rails. I haven't looked back since, but then again, I was in a startup and wanted to walk out with some new skills.
Rails is great, not for everything, but it does make standing up a new site pretty darn easy. Personally, I won't touch PHP again if I have my choice.
Thanks for that :) I'm looking into RoR but I don't know where to learn it, can you give any suggestions? Also does RoR have support with mongo?
EDIT: I think I'm going to go with node.JS
Thanks for the feedback spaghetti. To some extent, and for some positions, hard metrics such as revenue are definitely a very strong indicator of performance. However, this approach neglects the fact that businesses and types of employees are extremely nuanced.
Often times it is very difficult for an employee to identify the reasons why they are not performing up to expectations (this even applies to the revenue model).
In our research, we have also found that a culture driven only by numbers and money typically produce unhappy employees and decreased morale. Cultures that are driven on improvement and achievement through performance tend to produce happier employees that are excited to work for a what is likely unique company.
Ultimately, we created MicroEval to increase the conversations happening in the work place. And we want to provide the participants of those conversations concrete things to talk about. Having identified the nuances of one's performance gives them a clearer target for improvement.
I think youre on the right track - Ive worked on an eval application in the past and your research about numbers / metrics is spot on. Try to stay away from quantifying performance and focus on helping managers / employees capture achievements / shortcomings. Give employees an opportunity to demarcate the achievements / shortcomings they jotted over the year before the final eval.
I'll be really excited if this works for _truly top-notch_ restaurants. It would be awesome to avoid the lines and eat the same quality food in the comfort of my own home. Would make for an awesome dinner-party...
It's even harder to be open and honest with yourself, your employees, your customers and everyone else when shutting down. Perhaps somewhat weird, but I find it refreshing to see posts like these. I think it's the sign of a good and healthy entrepreneur/team (albeit hard to write).
I'm sure you and your team learned a lot, and I love the gesture to open source your software.
Best of luck on the next step!