Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12Get It Out There

Sean Corbett

Sean is one of the founders of HaveMyShift, an online service that allows shift workers to have more flexibility and freedom, and a graduate of the Techstars 2009 Boston class. He is currently the CTO at Hire Abby, an AI recruitment app.

HaveMyShift was an online marketplace for the 74 million hourly workers in the United States. We allowed people to trade shifts with one another, giving them options to choose a better work schedule for themselves. At our peak we helped over 5,600 employees in companies like Starbucks, Jamba Juice, Wegmans, Walmart, Ikea, Target, and Whole Foods trade over 44,000 hours of shifts.

When we started working on HaveMyShift, we consciously made an effort not to build more features than people wanted or needed. In fact, we launched the site within two weeks of writing the first lines of code. People have asked me how we’ve been able to go from idea to launch in two weeks. Well, it’s because of my bicycle.

I didn’t have a car, so I just got on my bike and rode around to several Chicago-area Starbucks stores and started asking employees and store managers what they wanted. What features would you need to start using our software? Not only were they excited about it, they helped me understand that if we could do one or two things well, then our software would be immediately valuable to them.

At first, we struggled with our decision to get our half-baked product into the hands of our users early in the development ...