10 ms·

Staffjoy is shutting down

238 points by philip1209 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mring33621 10y ago
Thank you for the pragmatic writeup rather than the usual "fantastic journey" blather. Also, returning investor money, rather than wasting it, demonstrates leadership.
- transparentlabs 10y ago
  Agree with this. Question, it looks like this company just raised a seed round in January 2017 according to crunchbase. How can you raise a seed round in one month and then completely shut down the next?
  - philip1209 10y ago
    We closed the round in July of last year, prior to starting the V2. We sat on the announcement until we needed a press boost on a product announcement.
    - transparentlabs 10y ago
      Gotcha, thanks for the clarification! As an entrepreneur myself, greatly respect the decision to shut down and return money to investors instead of just spending until theres nothing. Good luck in your future endeavors!
    - amorphid 10y ago
      A graceful shutdown of a funded startup w/ money still in the bank is a classy move. +1 gold star for you. Sorry it didn't work out the you hoped.
      - philip1209 10y ago
        I'm moving onto a new idea in a different space. With our lawyers and investors, we decided that a restart was a better idea than a pivot for a variety of reasons.
- wyc 10y ago
  Agreed. I don't know all the details, but it sounds like you're really doing right by your people. I don't hear about this enough.
- tomhallett 10y ago
  Is there any feedback if investors would prefer to get some of their money back or see you roll the dice on another pivot?
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Arguably, if they'd like you to roll the dice on another project, they can always just... invest in your next project.
    - bredren 10y ago
      ...with a clean cap table.
    - holtalanm 10y ago
      isn't that what they are doing? They are dissolving the old project, and returning investments. Some of the investors have pledged to reinvest in this new project, that is completely new and separate from the old project. Thats how it sounds to me, at least. Doesn't sound shady.
  - philip1209 10y ago
    Had this discussion with the investors. I plan on exploring a different idea in a different space with a new founding team. The investors suggested restarting the corporate structure, and some have committed to reinvesting the money into the new company.
    - nikanj 10y ago
      That..that sounds a bit like "me and the investors decided to kick out the other founders with zero compensation". This /might/ be a nasty setting for lawsuits later, if newco turns into a unicorn.
      - philip1209 10y ago
        This isn't the case, and there is no newco at this time. Unfortunately, I had to lay off all of employees today. In addition, we are liquidating any IP, closing customer accounts, paying out our cash, and dissolving the corporation.
- gigatexal 10y ago
  What percentage was given back to the VCs? (just curious) I, too, found the post easy to read and straight-forward. If there was ever a great way to answer the hiring question of "Tell me about a time where you failed and what you did about it?" it would be this. Good luck in your next gig!
  - philip1209 10y ago
    Will be about 60% back to VCs
ryanwjackson 10y ago
Startups are hard. 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!
- philip1209 10y ago
  Thanks, Ryan!
  - skaber 10y ago
    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. Good luck with your next venture!
    - throwaway7645 10y ago
      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.
- leothekim 10y ago
  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. :-)
tarr11 10y ago
Sorry to hear this. Any lessons learned? I use WhenIWork for this area, which suits our needs. Not sure what would make me switch, probably not a text messaging. Most of my employees have smartphones, so a mobile app is fine. Biggest problem for me (as a business owner) is managing schedules to a budget, and making sure we are being as efficient as possible with our staffing spend. Most tools I've seen have a pretty weak budgeting feature. (You just put your budget in and it tells you how you did)
- madenine 10y ago
  I know some companies are using ML to do this internally - predicting staffing needs, optimizing costs, etc. It strikes me as a very individualized problem; might be hard to generalize - or the markets you could generalize too aren't that big/don't need a solution all that much.
  - philip1209 10y ago
    ML is more statistical - good for forecasting. We were doing optimization mathematics with hard constraints for the scheduling. One of the issues that we encountered was that a generalized algorithm was tough. Different companies had different requirements for an algorithm, and it started to feel like a consulting company. For instance, if a big box retailer would rather be slightly underscheduled at peak time rather than adding additional employees (and being over-scheduled near the peak time). A high-end boutique retailer (like a diamond shop) might be the opposite - each sales brings in so much money that they overstaff at non-peak hours so that they can service customers during peak hours.
    - xapata 10y ago
      Sounds like a machine learning problem. The dependent variable is profit, not budget.
      - princeb 10y ago
        scheduling is a classic mgmt. science problem.
debt 10y ago
"small businesses still use paper or spreadsheets" that's usually your first red flag. when management starts going after this market then things aren't looking good. low margins, sales dominated org if you're lucky can keep you afloat for a bit. long work days etc. avoid. the real money is always in enterprise. liability is a huge issue. ain't no huge corp going to throw down millions on some random scheduling software run by a couple of dudes. in the rare event that it does happened, raise as much money as possible and hire as quickly as possible. reduces risk and your work load. they just didn't have the capital to compete. the market is there though clearly they just ran out of dough.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  You are forgetting enterprise space is a very capita/resource intensive field with very high CAC where lot of companies end up spending $2 to make $1. Part of the reason why you can't be a garage startup and expect to close a six digit contract after 1.5 years of trying to close it. I wouldn't touch enterprise until you've hit some maturity with lower tier markets which are easier to sell to.
- icehawk219 10y ago
  I'm currently working on a product with a team and we did a bit of exploration for an idea for SMB's and had that same issue. We were talking to someone who on the surface would be a perfect fit for the product but then we asked how they handled organizing a job. They reached down into their bag, pulled out a file folder, opened it up and spread a few sheets of paper in front of us and went "will this page is this thing, this one is the other thing, and that one is another thing". An entire jobs worth of documentation and info right there laid out in front of us all at once in 3 seconds flat. That was the moment we realized the reason our target industry was still using paper and spreadsheets. Because they're not just "good enough". In most cases, they're the best possible option. Maybe with enough iterating and testing we could've come up with a UX that could've put all that information in front of 4 people in one shot that quickly. But the odds are against it and even if we did it would've taken a long time to get there. A lot of startup founders view "legacy" as a four letter word. But sometimes it's simply the best course. Not everything needs a high tech solution. And accepting that can be really tough sometimes.
dorianm 10y ago
> So, we have decided to return over $1M in cash to our investors. That's some nice common sense there!
wsh91 10y ago
Really sorry to see this; your candor is refreshing, and I've been interested in the optimization work you've been doing for some time. Best of luck with what comes next.
brilliantcode 10y ago
Like other YC companies that failed, I've never heard of this one and many more are likely to follow. It's really tough to "make stuff people want" AND willing to pay you every month for it.
uladzislau 10y ago
So they launched right after the holidays in the slowest time possible and are shutting it down only after a month? I think we don't have the full story here. It looks like a panic either on the investor's side or startup side, or both.
- ithinkinstereo 10y ago
  The holidays is a great time to launch an employee scheduling application... that's usually the busiest time of the year for retail operations and businesses that depend heavily on employee shifts.
- philip1209 10y ago
  We did outbound for multiple months, and were feature-complete on the product in November. Our first users on the V2 came onboard in early December. Based on our user research, our primary markets (service and retail industries) freeze all of their software during the holidays. During the lull in January, they evaluate new purchases. Launch is basically a one-time bump in inbounds that doesn't scale, so we timed it when we thought it would have greatest effect. However, we had been doing more scalable outbound - e.g. emails, canvassing neighborhoods with flyers, etc - for months. Conversions to signups were remarkably low, and conversions from signups to paid were also low. We basically realized that we were not solving a core burning problem for these businesses. That's more what contributed to the shutdown.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    Aw man, I run a live English tutoring operation overseas, with real human tutors working shifts in my app. This could've been really handy (since Upwork didn't really have a nice way of tracking time on mobile, and we just didn't have the dev bandwidth to build something like your product ourselves).
  - ___start 10y ago
    I was a partner in a startup a few years ago doing roughly the same thing. After working on an early prototype, the project fizzled out due to involvement in other projects, but a competitor launched with the same idea soon after that called shiftplanning.com. They did literally the exact same thing except they got to market before us and they (from what I can tell), made it big. The market for this type of software is massive but obviously you need to find some key business up front. Maybe you had the wrong investors? At the time we had an investor that wanted to put money in AND have his large restaurant chain start using it; a strategic partner... Something to think about...
simplehuman 10y ago
Never heard of Staffjoy before this. Honestly, the hardest part of a startup is simply getting known and spreading the word that it exists.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
  I think you're right and this isn't the first time for me, there's been dozens of times a startup is announcing they are closing here on HN and it's the first time I have heard of them. Not a criticism of Staffjoy of course, it's just a general truth.
dvt 10y ago
Any chance of a postmortem? Failure is part of the journey, but it still sucks. Good luck in the future!
65827 10y ago
Man they aren't even lasting 2 years nowadays? I think it's official: the startup bubble is over in 2017 officially.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Thanks for committing to open source your code! Nobody else has highlighted this in the comments yet, but this helps ensure the money spent on your company didn't end up wasted: At the end of it you will be leaving behind a valuable contribution to the open source community.
- philip1209 10y ago
  Thanks, most of the code for V1 and V2 should be online by the end of the week. Two of the repos use applied math libraries that cannot be open-sourced. For one, I think I can drop in an open-source alternative. The other I may not be able to open source. I'll also be publishing our YCF application and our pitch decks in the coming days.
  - heinrichf 10y ago
    May I ask what these libraries are ?
    - philip1209 10y ago
      Gurobi. The pre-V1 algorithms used the Julia JuMP package [1], which allows swapping of the backend solver easily. I don't think some of the functional tests would pass on the open source solver though (precutting and heuristics in gurobi caused a huge speed gain). The later iteration of the algorithm used the Gurobi python library directly, which is closed source. [1] https://blog.staffjoy.com/retro-on-the-julia-programming-language-7655121ea341#.l3t8azsbz https://blog.staffjoy.com/retro-on-the-julia-programming-lan...
      - sandGorgon 10y ago
        would love to see the solver application (if you are planning to swap an open source solver for gurobi). These class of problems are something I have wondered about, but never truly tried ny hand at.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
taytus 10y ago
$1M in cash, and you decided to return the money instead of pivot and try something different? Why? I might be totally wrong, but I guess those investors invested in you, more than your original idea. Good for you for not burning the money in something you know eventually won't work, but why not try a different idea? Man, I wish I had just a portion of that capital to at least validate my own startup.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  Looks like he is retaining at least some of the investors for his next attempt. [0] I'm sure giving them some of their money back made that discussion a lot easier. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13648162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13648162
- pc86 10y ago
  Because the investors gave money to StaffJoy, not the idea one founder had when it because apparent SJ wasn't working out. And it sounds like either the other cofounder(s) either aren't interested in the new idea or aren't welcome to the new team as he says there will be a new founding team. That makes it very complicated especially if it's the same corporate structure moving forward with a different idea, you don't want un-involved prior cofounders sitting on equity. So they're giving the money back, wiping out the corporate structure and starting fresh with one of the cofounders and what sounds like some but not all of the investors.
  - throwawaydbdksn 10y ago
    Sounds like the founders didn't get along and they're trying to exit without losing individual marketability
arjie 10y ago
The name reminds of those half a dozen home cleaning service startups that a couple of people kept starting.
- philip1209 10y ago
  I got the .com for $10 3 years ago, so I've been happy with it :-)
mmanfrin 10y ago
This is superficial, but what is the successrate of startups that end in -joy? Homejoy and Staffjoy closed shop, are there others that closed or survived?
- Alex3917 10y ago
  Ridejoy was also YC funded and closed. (This was the first thing I thought of also.)
- gukov 10y ago
  Cratejoy should be concerned, then.
  - philip1209 10y ago
    Considering the failure rate of startups, I think the data shows that we just have a representative sample :-)
- jpatokal 10y ago
  At least Chickenjoy (aka Jollibee) is still going strong: http://www.jollibee.com.ph/chicken-joy/ http://www.jollibee.com.ph/chicken-joy/
jakestl 10y ago
Have you considered starting your next company back in St Louis?
- philip1209 10y ago
  I've considered making it remote.
csolorio 10y ago
Can you share any revenue / growth numbers that resulted in your decision?
- philip1209 10y ago
  Here's one fun fact: Our three-touch outbound email campaigns to restaurants had a ~0.1% conversion rate.
  - aedron 10y ago
    Trying (and failing miserably) to sell to small/medium businesses is almost a rite of passage for new entrepreneurs.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
>Their biggest scheduling problem was communication, because many workers relied on prepaid phones. I don't see what's the problem with prepaid phones. Do you mean feature phones?
- philip1209 10y ago
  Many workers didn't have access to email, or they were wary of providing it to an employer. Without smart phones, they lacked access to apps. So basically, they had no way to register for an account and see their schedule on other applications. During user studies, we saw that restaurants would still print out their schedules, and managers would take a photo and text it to employees. This created problems when the workers treated this channel as two-way. For example, workers running late would text the manager, and the manager would not notice the message promptly while working.
  - callalex 10y ago
    Twilio!
    - CamelCaseName 10y ago
      ...How is Twillio the solution?
deleted 10y ago
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known 10y ago
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
sinamdar 10y ago
One of the points mentioned often by @sama is that founders give up too quickly. What advice did you get from your YC Partner on this conundrum of being cockroaches versus shutting down?
- mildbow 10y ago
  From the outside, it seems like the founder saw a bigger opportunity and decided to move on. So, the primary motivation isn't shutting down this startup. The primary motivation is moving on to the next startup which they believe is a bigger opportunity. Not too awesome for current employees: hope they are getting taken care of.
philip1209 10y ago
I posted our YCF Application today: https://blog.staffjoy.com/staffjoys-yc-fellowship-application-5771c8a105cd https://blog.staffjoy.com/staffjoys-yc-fellowship-applicatio...

238 points by philip1209 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Thank you for the pragmatic writeup rather than the usual "fantastic journey" blather. Also, returning investor money, rather than wasting it, demonstrates leadership.

transparentlabs 10y ago
Agree with this. Question, it looks like this company just raised a seed round in January 2017 according to crunchbase. How can you raise a seed round in one month and then completely shut down the next?
- philip1209 10y ago
  We closed the round in July of last year, prior to starting the V2. We sat on the announcement until we needed a press boost on a product announcement.
  - transparentlabs 10y ago
    Gotcha, thanks for the clarification! As an entrepreneur myself, greatly respect the decision to shut down and return money to investors instead of just spending until theres nothing. Good luck in your future endeavors!
  - amorphid 10y ago
    A graceful shutdown of a funded startup w/ money still in the bank is a classy move. +1 gold star for you. Sorry it didn't work out the you hoped.
    - philip1209 10y ago
      I'm moving onto a new idea in a different space. With our lawyers and investors, we decided that a restart was a better idea than a pivot for a variety of reasons.
wyc 10y ago
Agreed. I don't know all the details, but it sounds like you're really doing right by your people. I don't hear about this enough.
tomhallett 10y ago
Is there any feedback if investors would prefer to get some of their money back or see you roll the dice on another pivot?
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Arguably, if they'd like you to roll the dice on another project, they can always just... invest in your next project.
  - bredren 10y ago
    ...with a clean cap table.
  - holtalanm 10y ago
    isn't that what they are doing? They are dissolving the old project, and returning investments. Some of the investors have pledged to reinvest in this new project, that is completely new and separate from the old project. Thats how it sounds to me, at least. Doesn't sound shady.
- philip1209 10y ago
  Had this discussion with the investors. I plan on exploring a different idea in a different space with a new founding team. The investors suggested restarting the corporate structure, and some have committed to reinvesting the money into the new company.
  - nikanj 10y ago
    That..that sounds a bit like "me and the investors decided to kick out the other founders with zero compensation". This /might/ be a nasty setting for lawsuits later, if newco turns into a unicorn.
    - philip1209 10y ago
      This isn't the case, and there is no newco at this time. Unfortunately, I had to lay off all of employees today. In addition, we are liquidating any IP, closing customer accounts, paying out our cash, and dissolving the corporation.
gigatexal 10y ago
What percentage was given back to the VCs? (just curious) I, too, found the post easy to read and straight-forward. If there was ever a great way to answer the hiring question of "Tell me about a time where you failed and what you did about it?" it would be this. Good luck in your next gig!
- philip1209 10y ago
  Will be about 60% back to VCs

ryanwjackson 10y ago

Startups are hard. 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!

philip1209 10y ago
Thanks, Ryan!
- skaber 10y ago
  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. Good luck with your next venture!
  - throwaway7645 10y ago
    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.
leothekim 10y ago
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. :-)

tarr11 10y ago

Sorry to hear this. Any lessons learned? I use WhenIWork for this area, which suits our needs. Not sure what would make me switch, probably not a text messaging. Most of my employees have smartphones, so a mobile app is fine. Biggest problem for me (as a business owner) is managing schedules to a budget, and making sure we are being as efficient as possible with our staffing spend. Most tools I've seen have a pretty weak budgeting feature. (You just put your budget in and it tells you how you did)

madenine 10y ago
I know some companies are using ML to do this internally - predicting staffing needs, optimizing costs, etc. It strikes me as a very individualized problem; might be hard to generalize - or the markets you could generalize too aren't that big/don't need a solution all that much.
- philip1209 10y ago
  ML is more statistical - good for forecasting. We were doing optimization mathematics with hard constraints for the scheduling. One of the issues that we encountered was that a generalized algorithm was tough. Different companies had different requirements for an algorithm, and it started to feel like a consulting company. For instance, if a big box retailer would rather be slightly underscheduled at peak time rather than adding additional employees (and being over-scheduled near the peak time). A high-end boutique retailer (like a diamond shop) might be the opposite - each sales brings in so much money that they overstaff at non-peak hours so that they can service customers during peak hours.
  - xapata 10y ago
    Sounds like a machine learning problem. The dependent variable is profit, not budget.
    - princeb 10y ago
      scheduling is a classic mgmt. science problem.

debt 10y ago

"small businesses still use paper or spreadsheets" that's usually your first red flag. when management starts going after this market then things aren't looking good. low margins, sales dominated org if you're lucky can keep you afloat for a bit. long work days etc. avoid. the real money is always in enterprise. liability is a huge issue. ain't no huge corp going to throw down millions on some random scheduling software run by a couple of dudes. in the rare event that it does happened, raise as much money as possible and hire as quickly as possible. reduces risk and your work load. they just didn't have the capital to compete. the market is there though clearly they just ran out of dough.

brilliantcode 10y ago
You are forgetting enterprise space is a very capita/resource intensive field with very high CAC where lot of companies end up spending $2 to make $1. Part of the reason why you can't be a garage startup and expect to close a six digit contract after 1.5 years of trying to close it. I wouldn't touch enterprise until you've hit some maturity with lower tier markets which are easier to sell to.
icehawk219 10y ago
I'm currently working on a product with a team and we did a bit of exploration for an idea for SMB's and had that same issue. We were talking to someone who on the surface would be a perfect fit for the product but then we asked how they handled organizing a job. They reached down into their bag, pulled out a file folder, opened it up and spread a few sheets of paper in front of us and went "will this page is this thing, this one is the other thing, and that one is another thing". An entire jobs worth of documentation and info right there laid out in front of us all at once in 3 seconds flat. That was the moment we realized the reason our target industry was still using paper and spreadsheets. Because they're not just "good enough". In most cases, they're the best possible option. Maybe with enough iterating and testing we could've come up with a UX that could've put all that information in front of 4 people in one shot that quickly. But the odds are against it and even if we did it would've taken a long time to get there. A lot of startup founders view "legacy" as a four letter word. But sometimes it's simply the best course. Not everything needs a high tech solution. And accepting that can be really tough sometimes.

dorianm 10y ago

> So, we have decided to return over $1M in cash to our investors. That's some nice common sense there!

wsh91 10y ago

Really sorry to see this; your candor is refreshing, and I've been interested in the optimization work you've been doing for some time. Best of luck with what comes next.

brilliantcode 10y ago

Like other YC companies that failed, I've never heard of this one and many more are likely to follow. It's really tough to "make stuff people want" AND willing to pay you every month for it.

uladzislau 10y ago

So they launched right after the holidays in the slowest time possible and are shutting it down only after a month? I think we don't have the full story here. It looks like a panic either on the investor's side or startup side, or both.

ithinkinstereo 10y ago
The holidays is a great time to launch an employee scheduling application... that's usually the busiest time of the year for retail operations and businesses that depend heavily on employee shifts.
philip1209 10y ago
We did outbound for multiple months, and were feature-complete on the product in November. Our first users on the V2 came onboard in early December. Based on our user research, our primary markets (service and retail industries) freeze all of their software during the holidays. During the lull in January, they evaluate new purchases. Launch is basically a one-time bump in inbounds that doesn't scale, so we timed it when we thought it would have greatest effect. However, we had been doing more scalable outbound - e.g. emails, canvassing neighborhoods with flyers, etc - for months. Conversions to signups were remarkably low, and conversions from signups to paid were also low. We basically realized that we were not solving a core burning problem for these businesses. That's more what contributed to the shutdown.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Aw man, I run a live English tutoring operation overseas, with real human tutors working shifts in my app. This could've been really handy (since Upwork didn't really have a nice way of tracking time on mobile, and we just didn't have the dev bandwidth to build something like your product ourselves).
- ___start 10y ago
  I was a partner in a startup a few years ago doing roughly the same thing. After working on an early prototype, the project fizzled out due to involvement in other projects, but a competitor launched with the same idea soon after that called shiftplanning.com. They did literally the exact same thing except they got to market before us and they (from what I can tell), made it big. The market for this type of software is massive but obviously you need to find some key business up front. Maybe you had the wrong investors? At the time we had an investor that wanted to put money in AND have his large restaurant chain start using it; a strategic partner... Something to think about...

simplehuman 10y ago

Never heard of Staffjoy before this. Honestly, the hardest part of a startup is simply getting known and spreading the word that it exists.

ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
I think you're right and this isn't the first time for me, there's been dozens of times a startup is announcing they are closing here on HN and it's the first time I have heard of them. Not a criticism of Staffjoy of course, it's just a general truth.

dvt 10y ago

Any chance of a postmortem? Failure is part of the journey, but it still sucks. Good luck in the future!

65827 10y ago

Man they aren't even lasting 2 years nowadays? I think it's official: the startup bubble is over in 2017 officially.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

Thanks for committing to open source your code! Nobody else has highlighted this in the comments yet, but this helps ensure the money spent on your company didn't end up wasted: At the end of it you will be leaving behind a valuable contribution to the open source community.

philip1209 10y ago
Thanks, most of the code for V1 and V2 should be online by the end of the week. Two of the repos use applied math libraries that cannot be open-sourced. For one, I think I can drop in an open-source alternative. The other I may not be able to open source. I'll also be publishing our YCF application and our pitch decks in the coming days.
- heinrichf 10y ago
  May I ask what these libraries are ?
  - philip1209 10y ago
    Gurobi. The pre-V1 algorithms used the Julia JuMP package [1], which allows swapping of the backend solver easily. I don't think some of the functional tests would pass on the open source solver though (precutting and heuristics in gurobi caused a huge speed gain). The later iteration of the algorithm used the Gurobi python library directly, which is closed source. [1] https://blog.staffjoy.com/retro-on-the-julia-programming-language-7655121ea341#.l3t8azsbz https://blog.staffjoy.com/retro-on-the-julia-programming-lan...
    - sandGorgon 10y ago
      would love to see the solver application (if you are planning to swap an open source solver for gurobi). These class of problems are something I have wondered about, but never truly tried ny hand at.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago

taytus 10y ago

$1M in cash, and you decided to return the money instead of pivot and try something different? Why? I might be totally wrong, but I guess those investors invested in you, more than your original idea. Good for you for not burning the money in something you know eventually won't work, but why not try a different idea? Man, I wish I had just a portion of that capital to at least validate my own startup.

jdmichal 10y ago
Looks like he is retaining at least some of the investors for his next attempt. [0] I'm sure giving them some of their money back made that discussion a lot easier. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13648162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13648162
pc86 10y ago
Because the investors gave money to StaffJoy, not the idea one founder had when it because apparent SJ wasn't working out. And it sounds like either the other cofounder(s) either aren't interested in the new idea or aren't welcome to the new team as he says there will be a new founding team. That makes it very complicated especially if it's the same corporate structure moving forward with a different idea, you don't want un-involved prior cofounders sitting on equity. So they're giving the money back, wiping out the corporate structure and starting fresh with one of the cofounders and what sounds like some but not all of the investors.
- throwawaydbdksn 10y ago
  Sounds like the founders didn't get along and they're trying to exit without losing individual marketability

arjie 10y ago

The name reminds of those half a dozen home cleaning service startups that a couple of people kept starting.

philip1209 10y ago
I got the .com for $10 3 years ago, so I've been happy with it :-)

mmanfrin 10y ago

This is superficial, but what is the successrate of startups that end in -joy? Homejoy and Staffjoy closed shop, are there others that closed or survived?

Alex3917 10y ago
Ridejoy was also YC funded and closed. (This was the first thing I thought of also.)
gukov 10y ago
Cratejoy should be concerned, then.
- philip1209 10y ago
  Considering the failure rate of startups, I think the data shows that we just have a representative sample :-)
jpatokal 10y ago
At least Chickenjoy (aka Jollibee) is still going strong: http://www.jollibee.com.ph/chicken-joy/ http://www.jollibee.com.ph/chicken-joy/

jakestl 10y ago

Have you considered starting your next company back in St Louis?

philip1209 10y ago
I've considered making it remote.

csolorio 10y ago

Can you share any revenue / growth numbers that resulted in your decision?

philip1209 10y ago
Here's one fun fact: Our three-touch outbound email campaigns to restaurants had a ~0.1% conversion rate.
- aedron 10y ago
  Trying (and failing miserably) to sell to small/medium businesses is almost a rite of passage for new entrepreneurs.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

>Their biggest scheduling problem was communication, because many workers relied on prepaid phones. I don't see what's the problem with prepaid phones. Do you mean feature phones?

philip1209 10y ago
Many workers didn't have access to email, or they were wary of providing it to an employer. Without smart phones, they lacked access to apps. So basically, they had no way to register for an account and see their schedule on other applications. During user studies, we saw that restaurants would still print out their schedules, and managers would take a photo and text it to employees. This created problems when the workers treated this channel as two-way. For example, workers running late would text the manager, and the manager would not notice the message promptly while working.
- callalex 10y ago
  Twilio!
  - CamelCaseName 10y ago
    ...How is Twillio the solution?

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known 10y ago

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

sinamdar 10y ago

One of the points mentioned often by @sama is that founders give up too quickly. What advice did you get from your YC Partner on this conundrum of being cockroaches versus shutting down?

mildbow 10y ago
From the outside, it seems like the founder saw a bigger opportunity and decided to move on. So, the primary motivation isn't shutting down this startup. The primary motivation is moving on to the next startup which they believe is a bigger opportunity. Not too awesome for current employees: hope they are getting taken care of.

philip1209 10y ago

I posted our YCF Application today: https://blog.staffjoy.com/staffjoys-yc-fellowship-application-5771c8a105cd https://blog.staffjoy.com/staffjoys-yc-fellowship-applicatio...