Good luck man.. it's a tough field to break into. Tons and tons of competitors (like me) and few businesses who would actually use it.
- James F. Founder, Fendza.com (http://www.fendza.com)
Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)
#32Good luck man.. it's a tough field to break into. Tons and tons of competitors (like me) and few businesses who would actually use it. - James F. Founder, Fendza.com ( http://www.fendza.com )
BTW; your site looks good, nice clean design.. I, too, would probably change the screenshot away from Office to something like restaurants, retails stores, etc.
Funny thing is; you'll start getting people copying you almost exactly. I found two other 'employee scheduling software' sites that almost directly ripped off my entire website.
Anyways, feel free to hit me up if you have any questions about anything.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)
#33The majority of places I've worked where schedules were 'posted' and I would 'trade shifts' with someone else have been retail and food service jobs, not 'office' jobs. Yet the signup page only talks about different sizes of offices ('small','medium', etc). Might want to reconsider that wording ("organization"?)
I like that wording a lot more and think you're right about that.
As someone who manages a dozen retail employees I concur. I'm using a custom developed Excel/VBA solution but would love to use something web-based.
If you are going to target retail business (I think you should) you should keep in mind that most people working retail are young and have other commitments (school, other jobs, etc). For this reason I think having employee-editable "availability" schedules would be a killer feature.
edit: I see that you have a "request day off" feature: is it possible to request just a portion of a day off? Think - "I have an exam that morning but can work at noon"
Re: Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)
#34I built a similar project last year, but abandoned it due to lack of business. Just around the time I got my beta out, I discovered shiftplanning.com (they were in beta about a month before me) - I would say quality wise, my build was very similar to shiftplanning, much better than schedulefly. The reason I ditched it was that after working with a number of local businesses, I found they always had excuses to not use…
I don't know. We pay ADP for similar software currently that is completely horrible from a user experience. However, they've got us because of the integration with the rest of our payroll and HR systems.
Jason's site looks extremely well-designed and user-friendly, but I'd wager a lot of companies will require some integration work to really see the benefit.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)
#35The hardest part about making a complicated schedule is making sure all the posts are covered. Do I have six editors, four designers, two rewrite, one reader and three runners in on Sunday? And if not, who is available -- they haven't worked six days in a row, aren't due off that day or on vacation and have the right skills -- to cover? When your app can answer this for schedulers you've got something great. Otherwis…
I work for a company that specialises in scheduling software - our main market is healthcare, where this 'do we have the right staff?' question is key.
It's a completely different ball game from simple 'this person is doing this' scheduling. You essentially have to understand the demand - not just number of staff of different types, but complex skill requirements; lots of info about supply (staff - their skills and various other bits of info that rules need to know about) and then have a rules engine that matches them together and can check for items like working too long in a row, or too many weekends, or whatever - all parameter driven as every manager wants different things.
When you get this right - ie proper 'demand driven' scheduling - this is where the real benefits of scheduling software vs excel or paper come in. Instead of simply answering 'what is everyone doing' you are answering 'do we have the right staff - and if not, what is going wrong?'
But a word of warning - it's a nightmare to get your product there. The devil is very much in the detail. If you've modelled the demand as three shifts, but some people fulfil the demand working 12 hour shifts, how do you show that all matched up? How from a ui perspective do you assign shifts in a way that prevents over staffing and understaffing? How can we model the demand in a way that allows for flexibility but isn't a massive pain to create for each schedule?
I think you've done a good job of a simple and straightforward scheduling product that is affordable. Be careful about going down the rabbit hole of demand and rule driven scheduling. It sounds like a quick bolt on but actually you need to build it from the ground up with that concept in mind to really make it work.
Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like that wording a lot more and think you're right about that.
As someone who manages a dozen retail employees I concur. I'm using a custom developed Excel/VBA solution but would love to use something web-based. If you are going to target retail business (I think you should) you should keep in mind that most people working retail are young and have other commitments (school, other jobs, etc). For this reason I think having employee-editable "availability" schedules would be a ki…
Yep that's built in though I should probably highlight it more on the tour. There are two possible ways to request time off:
- In your profile. These are times that you can never work and they are recurring. You can set yourself to be unavailabile every Monday from 2-4pm, for example.
- In the Requests Off section. This section is for one time requests off, as in your exam example.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)
#37You might prevent the last person removing themselves from the project. After creating a project, I was able to remove myself. The project now has no one to be administered by.
Thanks a lot for that, I'll add in the validation.
Re: Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)
#38I noticed pedalpete actually mentioned my staff scheduling business (http://www.helloscheduling.com), Hello Scheduling in his compete metrics. A few important things to think about:
1) Those compete metrics are really far off compared to what I am seeing in Google Analytics.
2) You have to remember that Excel and paper schedules are REALLY flexible. If your scheduling software is rigid, people will sign up, but then abandon returning to what feels comfortable to them.
Since we launched our application in mid-January 2011, we have consistently had sign ups but then high abandonment. As we've release features that made the product more flexible and addressed more unique scheduling needs, we've seen usage increase.
This is a really tough space, but don't lose heart.