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I have a number of friends who work in the restaurant industry including some very close friends who are opening a restaurant and their families have numerous r

by physcab 11y ago

I have a number of friends who work in the restaurant industry including some very close friends who are opening a restaurant and their families have numerous restaurants throughout the Bay Area. I'm quite familiar with this pain point. Some questions: 1. Who are you targeting this to - small businesses or large managed groups? 2. How will you compete with time trackers as they get integrated with POS? Does yours integrate? 3. How are you going to handle training? In my experience, people in the restaurant business do not know technology and any type of software requires extensive training. 4. Do shift managers find value over using their own existing methods? The pricing seems ok but it's a tough market. Small businesses with hourly workers do not have a ton of money, while larger groups already have solutions in place. Just my 2 cents.

philip1209 11y ago
Restaurants are an interesting vertical because their technology is largely horizontally-integrated and heavily reliant on the POS system. We're currently working with courier companies and call centers primarily, and looking to move into retail, hospitality, and eventually medicine. 1. Who are you targeting this to - small businesses or large managed groups? Our target customers are in the range of 50 to 150 employees per location, and we support multiple locations (e.g. a chain). We've worked with teams as small as 8 and as large as 400. 2. How will you compete with time trackers as they get integrated with POS? Does yours integrate? The main benefit of time trackers in Staffjoy is that we can compare them to scheduled shifts. Detecting problems (missed shifts, truancy, clocking in without a shift) becomes significantly more powerful, and over time we can begin to model the performance of workers. We support integrations and are amid publishing our first. At least one app is looking to trigger clock-in/clock-out events from their courier app to our API using this. We have an open-source Python client for our API and will be publishing better API resources in the coming weeks. https://github.com/staffjoy/client_python https://github.com/staffjoy/client_python 3. How are you going to handle training? In my experience, people in the restaurant business do not know technology and any type of software requires extensive training. We're onboarding in new verticals very manually right now to learn the best way and develop more scalable training. 4. Do shift managers find value over using their own existing methods? Yes, because we automate a lot of decisions. The software shines when a new shift needs to be covered - e.g. somebody calls in sick - and the manager can find a replacement without having to recalculate a variety of overtime scenarios.
- physcab 11y ago
  Cool. Happy to see you're focused on other verticals that would be willing to pay. I see it every day with my friends. Manager sends out PDF of schedule, giant white board in back office, calls to manager on day of shift to reschedule. Manual optimization to cover the over / under problems. Plus the laws. As an engineer I was screaming but never could figure out how to make the business a good sell over their entrenched ways and existing ways of tracking.
  - philip1209 11y ago
    Exactly. There are a lot of problems worth solving in the space - like shift swapping, communication tools, etc - but what we found is that distribution/adoption becomes the largest issue, so to solve issues like PDF schedules it is better to target the core inefficiency of how scheduling works.
- ProAm 11y ago
  Does it handle prevailing wage considerations and mandatory downtime between shifts?
  - philip1209 11y ago
    We currently don't handle scheduled breaks (i.e. legally-required lunch or rest breaks). We plan to build better support for these features in the future. The inconsistency among businesses for how breaks are handled is surprising - some schedule 10-minute rest breaks; others oppose scheduling anything (including lunch breaks).

by physcab 11y ago

philip1209 11y ago

Restaurants are an interesting vertical because their technology is largely horizontally-integrated and heavily reliant on the POS system. We're currently working with courier companies and call centers primarily, and looking to move into retail, hospitality, and eventually medicine. 1. Who are you targeting this to - small businesses or large managed groups? Our target customers are in the range of 50 to 150 employees per location, and we support multiple locations (e.g. a chain). We've worked with teams as small as 8 and as large as 400. 2. How will you compete with time trackers as they get integrated with POS? Does yours integrate? The main benefit of time trackers in Staffjoy is that we can compare them to scheduled shifts. Detecting problems (missed shifts, truancy, clocking in without a shift) becomes significantly more powerful, and over time we can begin to model the performance of workers. We support integrations and are amid publishing our first. At least one app is looking to trigger clock-in/clock-out events from their courier app to our API using this. We have an open-source Python client for our API and will be publishing better API resources in the coming weeks. https://github.com/staffjoy/client_python https://github.com/staffjoy/client_python 3. How are you going to handle training? In my experience, people in the restaurant business do not know technology and any type of software requires extensive training. We're onboarding in new verticals very manually right now to learn the best way and develop more scalable training. 4. Do shift managers find value over using their own existing methods? Yes, because we automate a lot of decisions. The software shines when a new shift needs to be covered - e.g. somebody calls in sick - and the manager can find a replacement without having to recalculate a variety of overtime scenarios.

physcab 11y ago
Cool. Happy to see you're focused on other verticals that would be willing to pay. I see it every day with my friends. Manager sends out PDF of schedule, giant white board in back office, calls to manager on day of shift to reschedule. Manual optimization to cover the over / under problems. Plus the laws. As an engineer I was screaming but never could figure out how to make the business a good sell over their entrenched ways and existing ways of tracking.
- philip1209 11y ago
  Exactly. There are a lot of problems worth solving in the space - like shift swapping, communication tools, etc - but what we found is that distribution/adoption becomes the largest issue, so to solve issues like PDF schedules it is better to target the core inefficiency of how scheduling works.
ProAm 11y ago
Does it handle prevailing wage considerations and mandatory downtime between shifts?
- philip1209 11y ago
  We currently don't handle scheduled breaks (i.e. legally-required lunch or rest breaks). We plan to build better support for these features in the future. The inconsistency among businesses for how breaks are handled is surprising - some schedule 10-minute rest breaks; others oppose scheduling anything (including lunch breaks).