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Comment by ryanwjackson | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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. :-)

That doesn't even count the heavy hitters in the space, and even MS's recent entry add ons for o365.

I do find that the exit, open-sourcing their platform, and not burning all the cash before exiting is very classy indeed.

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].

[1] https://twitter.com/transitorykris/status/820009983601295360

[2] https://products.office.com/en-US/business/compare-office-36...

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.

Thanks, Ryan!

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!

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.

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