In 2015 we started Staffjoy with the goal of creating flexibility for workers and businesses. The project began as an automated scheduling algorithm that I started as a college senior project. We found first customers in on-demand startups, which needed help managing growing workforces.

In September 2015, Staffjoy joined Y Combinator’s inaugural Fellowship program and became our full-time job. During the program, we launched a scheduling application based on our algorithms. The company tried expanding to non-startup customers as we grew, but we learned that our software was not a good fit for their needs. Some business managers did not think of scheduling in such a mathematical way. Others already had sophisticated workforce management systems. In the end, we lacked the resources to compete for enterprise contracts.

Last summer, we set out to build a V2 of Staffjoy focused on small business and simple communication. We found that many small businesses still use paper or spreadsheets. Their biggest scheduling problem was communication, because many workers relied on prepaid phones. V2 addressed this issue by using text messages to share schedules with hourly workers. After a public launch in January, we found that people were willing to try the product, but the conversion rate to paying customers was not high enough to sustain the business.

Our early adopters supported the vision and were happy users of the product. However, after 18 months of effort, the product has strayed away from our original vision, and we have failed to achieve product/market fit. I considered pivoting the business into a new concept in a different space with new co-founders, but that didn’t seem fair to investors or future employees. So, we have decided to return over $1M in cash to our investors and shutdown Staffjoy.

We will be shutting down Staffjoy service on March 15, 2017. We are immediately turning off new account signups and any pending subscription renewals. We plan to open-source the code for Staffjoy on our Github page. Customers will have until the shutdown to retrieve existing data from Staffjoy. At that time, we will delete all user data.

Thank you to everybody that supported and built Staffjoy.