
Show HN: Staffjoy V2 – Text message-based employee scheduling app - philip1209
https://www.staffjoy.com/?v2
======
philip1209
Today Staffjoy (YC Fellowship 1) is launching a new version of our scheduling
application. We started by focusing on bringing big company scheduling
technology to small businesses. We found some early success with on-demand
startups and call centers. Yet, we had trouble crossing the chasm.

We stepped back earlier this year to focus on why so many businesses still run
on pen and paper. We found that offline scheduling was a symptom of deeper
communication issues.

Staffjoy V2 is a ground-up rewrite that focuses on sharing work schedules in
less time. We do this by sending workers their schedules over text message.
When there are changes, we send the latest schedule to affected workers.

We optimized our architecture for messaging, and we plan to expand beyond SMS
soon. You can read about it here:
[https://blog.staffjoy.com/staffjoys-v2-architecture-9d2fcb40...](https://blog.staffjoy.com/staffjoys-v2-architecture-9d2fcb4015fd)

We chose to focus on text messages after doing extensive user studies in the
service industry. We found that many workers lacked email addresses, and
operated on prepaid phones. Managers would text them photos of the schedule
because it was the best way to reach them. So, we automated this process.

Moving forward, we will focus on improving the core scheduling experience. We
plan to use text messages to engage directly with employees and create
flexibility. We also plan to integrate scheduling with other business tools.
To do that, we plan to announce our first integration partners later this
month.

Finally, today we’re excited to announce a $1.2M seed round of funding, led by
Caffeinated Capital (detailed here:
[http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/10/staffjoy-
raises-1-2-millio...](http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/10/staffjoy-
raises-1-2-million-to-help-small-businesses-manage-workflow-scheduling/) )

If you have any questions, I'm here to answer them!

~~~
martinald
Well done Phillip. I think you should be commended for actually going back and
finding the deeper reasons, rather than doing the usual throw more marketing
$/hire expensive sales team.

I think it's also great that you're building a product that is aimed at people
who aren't quite as 'online' as the usual HN crowd, which make up a quite
large %age of the population but are generally totally overlooked.

The only problem with that is it is harder to reach these companies (for the
very reason your product is interesting to them). I'm curious on what your
marketing strategy would be to those kinds of companies?

~~~
philip1209
We actually had some insights about reaching small businesses in our user
studies too. Restaurants largely ignore their phone now - orders and
reservations are online. They get bombarded with emails, which they ignore.
However, they look to peers through google groups and facebook groups for
recommendations.

So, we started a content series called Breaktime where we highlight small
businesses and the tools that make them succeed. Our goal is that the
businesses we feature will share the content with their networks, which is our
target market! We're using the articles and episodes to create rich content
across our social channels, too, and we plan to feature more Staffjoy
customers!

Here's Breaktime:
[https://www.staffjoy.com/breaktime/](https://www.staffjoy.com/breaktime/)

------
lovich
As someone who ended up working in a company with "dynamic scheduling" after
college, i.e. Walmart and call centers, I have an ethical problem with this
product. Many workers at the bottom of the wage scale have a need for multiple
jobs just to pay for rent and food. The companies I worked for with dynamic
schedules seemed to use the scheduling to force their employees into a sort of
indentured servitude by pressing on this need. They would change your schedule
every week, and if you didn't say you were available your hours would be cut
to nothing which would make putting food on the table literally impossible
some weeks.

The only thing that helped alleviate this pressure from the company was
arguing that you couldn't have seen a schedule change over the weekend if you
had not been originally scheuled to come in that day. All I see this tool
doing is helping managers force schedule changes ay any moment and forcing
employees into an even worse situation.

Nothing against the founders for their hard work, but this is the sort of
business I couldn't ethically invest in even if it gave me a guaranteed large
return

~~~
philip1209
This V2 product is not dynamic algorithmic scheduling. Managers manually
schedule, just like they would on paper. The focus is more on clear
communication to the employees. In the future, we want to focus on data
integrations (e.g. surfacing vacation days from other apps) and shift swaps
(which largely benefit workers).

~~~
lovich
My point is that managers are already manually scheduling employees on a way
that hurts the employee but benefits the company. The inability to guaruntee
that scheduling updates were seen by the employee was the only thing I saw
that kept people from being put to 0 hours or getting fired.

I witnessed multiple events where someone had acknowledged a schedule change
with a manage with a <1 week notice and had to refuse it. Every single time
that happened, that person suddenly had 0-4 hours of work each following week.

I don't see this product doing anything but forcing employees into even
tighter servitude for the worst paying employers with how the current
situation is in America. If there were greater workplace protections for
employees concerning schedule changes I would not have such an issue with this
product

~~~
philip1209
We're seeing the market care more about responsible scheduling now. The
delayed Obamacare rules means that many more workers are eligible for
overtime. We've seen many workers happy about this, and we're seeing more
businesses take ownership of scheduling.

If nothing else, Staffjoy maintains strict audit logs and could eventually
help companies evaluate managers (average lead time per schedule, etc).

~~~
lovich
I might be talking from a position of ignorance then as I haven't worked these
jobs in about 5 years, but how are the Obamacare rules making companies care?
My experience was that any benefit got tied to n hours of work per week,
employees were scheduled to n-1 hours.

This was held to so strictly across multiple companies that at one point I was
told to work 2 hours overtime on a Thursday. The next Friday, the last day of
the week for the business, I had the owner show up from their home in another
state to take over from me exactly 2 hours before my shift was scheduled to
end and I was sent home.

If you're targeting mid tier and above businesses where someone can live off
the salary of that one job, I could see them using this for a great benefit
for both employee and the employer.Unfortunately I can't see any way that an
employer paying minimum wage wouldn't use this to control their employees even
more strictly than before

------
throwaway_cto1
I worked with a competitor in the text-message-based scheduling space a little
over a year ago. They skipped out on the bill, claiming that they "didn't reap
the value" that I invoiced them for. A lengthy legal dispute later, and we
recovered a fractional percentage of the amount owed, after determining it to
not be worthwhile to go after the entire amount.

I worked with the competitor because I felt that this is a space ripe for
innovation, and that it's been a long time coming. I am incredibly happy that
someone is bringing the vision of my former client to life.

------
davis_m
This looks like a great idea. There were a few times I got in trouble at work
in high school because I didn't see updates my boss had made after I checked
the schedule. This would avoid any of the he said/she said BS.

Can this be used for covering shifts. When I worked in a job like this, we
were allowed to get shifts covered, as long as we found someone to cover it.
It would be neat if this service could be used to text everyone that is
eligible to cover a shift for the opportunity for extra time.

"Your coworker is looking for someone to cover their front desk shift, Fri
12/9 from 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM. Would you like to cover it?"

~~~
philip1209
Thanks! When we built our V1, we started to investigate building in shift
swaps. However, when we started doing the user studies, we had an "oh crap"
moment when we realized that so few of our users had smart phones or even
email addresses. P2P swaps wouldn't work with such low engagement.

We realized that we had to fix a communication problem before we could build
swaps. So, we went back to the drawing board and released V2!

You're spot on with your message - now that we have higher engagement with the
workforce, we hope to build in that feature :-)

------
chatmasta
It would be nice if you could post incoming jobs to the API, and any staff
members currently available could accept/decline the jobs (like uber does).
Currently it seems like it only handles scheduling availability, not job
assignment.

I'm currently building a similar product for a client who manages staff across
the country. He gets job leads, then the program needs to (1) identify who is
available during the requested time slot, and (2) assign the job to one of the
available staff members by texting them sequentially with a timeout asking if
they would like to accept/decline the job.

It seems that staffjoy v2 solves (1) and does a good job of keeping track of
an availability calendar. I would love to use it for that instead of
reinventing the wheel. However, without (2) job assignment, it's a non-
starter.

Possibly I could use staffjoy for maintaining the central availability
calendar, and then build out the job assignment functionality on top of that.
But that causes some usability problems for the staff member who now has two
numbers to text.

So, from this, two feature suggestions:

(1) Job assignment functionality (complex, logistics vary by use case)

(2) Ability to send arbitrary messages from the phone number to the user

It seems that (2) would be a simple feature to add and could make integrating
staffjoy much easier, because I could fill in the gaps for any missing
functionality by building on top of the messaging layer.

Right now, this product is about 50% of what I need, but there's no easy way
for me to add the additional 50%.

If you want to talk about this you can email me at milesrichardson@gmail.com

------
untilHellbanned
i mean do employees really want to deal with work stuff via text message too?
We have email, calendars, various video and chat messaging apps, old fashion
face-to-face communication, etc.

I'm pretty sure employees want to feel less on call, not to mention keep their
one last silo of personal communication free from yet another greedy overlord.

~~~
philip1209
Our goal is to create flexibility for workers. We looked at why so many
companies still used pen and paper scheduling, and built a product for that
market.

We found in user tests that many employees don't have email, and even run on
prepaid phones. So, every Sunday they drive to each of their jobs (sometimes
two or more) to find out when they are working. Alternatively, their manager
(or a coworker) takes a photo of the schedule and texts it to them.

That's the person we built this V2 for. We're saving them time compared to
traveling to work to see a printed schedule.

We want to further increase flexibility with tools like shift swapping.
However, like I detailed in our other comment, using methods like email didn't
have high enough engagement to give workers access to the feature. So, we
built Staffjoy V2 with the idea of increasing engagement so that we could
build more worker-friendly tools.

Finally, the workers can turn it off if they want.

~~~
ensignavenger
When I did part time shift work, I always checked my schedule when I was at
work... but that may not work too well if you only work at a job occasionally,
or if your boss is too incompetent to make the schedule in advance.

~~~
philip1209
It's tougher for employees who work multiple part-time jobs. They're in the
business less frequently, and they can't keep up with changes.

------
tabeth
I'm not familiar with this, but how is this better than just using calendar
invites and an intranet? (Can't access the link currently, pardon me if this
is addressed on the website)

~~~
philip1209
1) Workers on prepaid cell phones don't have access to a calendar. (Many don't
even have email addresses.)

2) When workers are onboarded via text message, we send them an ical links so
they can add the schedule to their phone calendar directly!

3) Calendar invites don't scale well beyond 5 employees. We've seen it in user
studies. It's ugly and hard to use.

