B2B SaaS · Seed · Workforce Management · Hospitality · Evaluated by Jo Wickham, Icehouse Ventures
Verdict
No to a 30 minute meeting
Shiftly is a well-executed product with real customers, genuine traction, and a founder who clearly knows her market - but it's in a crowded space with entrenched incumbents and a market ceiling that makes a venture-scale outcome very hard to construct from here.
What must be true for this to work
- ARPU must expand meaningfully - at $200 average MRR per customer, the unit economics don't support a venture-scale outcome without a significant step up in revenue per business, likely through a premium labour-forecasting tier or payroll integration upsell.
- A defensible moat beyond simplicity must emerge - being easier to use than Deputy is a reason to switch, not a reason to stay when Deputy responds.
- The team must demonstrate ambition and capability beyond the current product - prior scaling experience, a platform vision, or a technical edge that signals this can become something larger than a well-loved SMB tool.
What Shiftly Does
Shiftly helps small hospitality businesses - cafés, restaurants, and bars with 5 to 40 staff - replace spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, and last-minute texts with a single app that handles rosters, shift swaps, staff notifications, and labour cost forecasting, with one-tap export to Xero and MYOB.
Think: Deputy, but built specifically for the café owner who just wants it to work without a training session - and whose accountant already uses Xero.
Raising: $750k NZD pre-seed · Founder: Mara Te Rangi
Interested in learning more about Shiftly?
Shiftly Intro Email3 Things That Could Kill This
1. The market has a structural ceiling
Shiftly is honest about its addressable market: NZ hospitality SMBs (~$35-50M) and Australia (~$150-200M). That honesty is admirable - but it also surfaces the core problem. At current ARPU and in this geography, the path to $100M+ ARR or a $1B+ valuation is very hard to construct. This could become a profitable, durable business. That is not the same thing as a venture-scale one - and conflating the two leads to a capital strategy that quietly sets a founder up to fail.
Why this matters: Venture capital funds a specific risk-return profile. A fund needs to believe this company can return a meaningful portion of the fund on its own. The ANZ hospitality SMB market, as described, makes that belief very difficult to justify.
2. Simplicity is not a moat
The core competitive wedge is being simpler and more locally attuned than Deputy and Tanda. That is a legitimate reason for early customers to choose Shiftly. It is not a reason for them to stay when Deputy ships a "simple mode," cuts pricing for SMBs, or deepens its own Xero integration. Without a second-order advantage - proprietary data, network effects between venues, or a platform play into broader hospitality operations - simplicity gets competed away.
Why this matters: 3.2% monthly churn is typical for hospitality SMB SaaS, but it compounds. At that rate, Shiftly needs to replace roughly a third of its customer base every year just to stay flat - and that treadmill gets harder as incumbents respond.
3. Expanding to Australia too early
At $18.5k MRR and 92 customers - with 14 of those in Victoria - NZ growth isn't repeatable enough yet to justify a simultaneous push into a new market. Two geographies at pre-seed splits focus, complicates go-to-market, and stretches a small team before the product and sales motion are proven in one place.
Why this matters: Pre-seed capital is scarce. Spending it on two markets before dominating one is one of the most reliable ways early-stage companies stall - and $750k NZD doesn't go far across two countries.
Why This Might Actually Work
1. 92 paying customers is not trivial
$18.5k MRR from 92 businesses - 30% acquired through referrals - is genuine early product-market fit. People are paying, staying long enough to refer others, and telling their peers. At pre-seed, that level of organic growth signal is more than most investors see.
2. The founder-market fit is real
Mara Te Rangi spent ten years as a café manager. She built this for a problem she lived. That domain depth typically means faster product iteration, stronger customer relationships, and better instincts about what actually matters to the buyer - and it shows in the product's Xero/MYOB integration and the hospitality-specific UX choices.
3. The CTO brings a relevant technical edge
Chris Wong's background building internal scheduling systems at PayHero - a NZ payroll platform - is directly relevant. He understands the payroll integration layer that is Shiftly's most defensible near-term differentiator in the NZ/AU market, where Xero dominance is a real structural advantage.
4. The raise is appropriately sized
$750k NZD pre-seed reflects a founder who understands where the business actually is. It is not an overreach - and a sensible ask at this stage is itself a signal worth noting.
What the Founder Should Do Next
Before pursuing venture capital, it's worth asking whether it's the right capital for this business at all - 92 paying customers, referral-driven growth, and a founder with deep domain expertise are exactly the ingredients that revenue-based financing, a strategic angel round, or an SMB-focused fund are designed for.
- Prove the ceiling is wrong → Build a credible bottom-up model showing how Shiftly becomes a $100M+ ARR business. What does the premium labour-forecasting tier look like at scale? What adjacent products - payroll, compliance, rostering analytics - does Shiftly grow into? Show the path to a larger platform, don't assert it.
- Reduce churn before expanding → At 3.2% monthly churn, retention is the most important number to move before raising a larger round. Identify the top three reasons customers leave and address them directly. A credible churn reduction story changes the unit economics conversation significantly.
- Dominate NZ first → Pause the Australia push until NZ growth is genuinely repeatable and the sales playbook is documented. One market done properly - with strong retention data and a clear expansion formula - is far more fundable than two markets done partially.
- Show what this becomes → The team slide currently reads as practical and capable. What it doesn't yet show is ambition at scale. If there is a vision for Shiftly as a broader hospitality operations platform - beyond scheduling into labour compliance, payroll, or venue analytics - articulate it. That is what shifts the conversation from "good SMB SaaS" to "venture bet."
What This Teardown Teaches
Pattern 1 - Traction and venture fit are different questions
92 paying customers is real. It answers "is this working?" It does not answer "can this become disproportionately large?" Investors are asking both questions simultaneously. Strong early traction in a structurally capped market still results in a pass from most venture funds - not because the business isn't good, but because the fund math doesn't work.
Pattern 2 - Know which type of capital fits your business
Shiftly may be an excellent candidate for revenue-based financing, a strategic angel round, or an SMB-focused fund. Pitching to venture capital without directly addressing the scale ceiling leads to a lot of rejections that feel confusing but are entirely predictable. Matching your capital strategy to your actual business model saves months of wasted effort.
Pattern 3 - Simplicity gets you in the door, not to the exit
"Easier to use than the incumbent" is a compelling reason for early adopters to switch. It rarely survives as the primary competitive advantage at scale. The founders who win in crowded markets find a second-order moat - data, network, or platform - before the first-order advantage gets competed away by a well-resourced competitor.
30-Minute Meeting?
No - for now
The execution is solid, the traction is real, and the founder clearly knows her customer. But the current pitch doesn't show a defensible path to venture-scale returns, and the market is crowded with well-funded incumbents who have every incentive to compete on simplicity when they see a challenger gaining ground. If a future pitch builds a credible case for how Shiftly becomes a $100M+ ARR platform - not just a great scheduling tool - that conversation reopens. Investors are frequently proven wrong on ceiling calls.
Full VC Notes
Jo Wickham
Partner at Icehouse Ventures, with over ~$600m in funds under management and investments across 380+ New Zealand tech companies. Former General Counsel of NZX- and ASX-listed Vista Group and Head of Legal & Commercial at Movio.
1. Intro Email
The ICP is explicit, the pain is quantified, and the ask is reasonable for pre-seed. Slightly generic unhelpful framing (“straightforward scheduling”).
2. Problem
Well understood pain in hospitality SMBs, and the time + cost framing makes it tangible, however - not particularly novel.
3. Solution
Competent and sensible, but not obviously differentiated. Reads like a cleaner version of what already exists rather than a step-change - simplicity is the wedge, but that’s hard to defend.
4. Traction
$18.5k MRR from 92 customers with referral-driven growth suggests early signs of product-market fit. $18k MRR and building something that 92 customers pay for is not trivial & is impressive. That said, fees appear low, there’s limited data on retention/expansion, and hospitality SMB churn may structurally cap long-term value unless ARPU meaningfully expands.
5. Market
Honest, but highlights the ceiling. ANZ-only focus keeps things realistic, yet reinforces that this may be not have a venture-scale outcome.
What does “a venture-scale outcome” mean to you?
A venture-scale outcome is one that has credible potential to return a meaningful portion of the fund - ideally 1x+ the fund on its own, but at minimum a top-decile outcome that drives the power law meaning over $100m in recurring revenue, or a valuation over $1bn. The question isn’t whether this becomes a profitable, durable business (it might). The question is whether it has the characteristics to become one of the few outliers that matter disproportionately in a portfolio.
6. Competition / Alternatives
The “deck” acknowledges strong incumbents but underplays how entrenched they are. “Simplicity” alone may not be enough to win long-term against Deputy/Tanda without a clearer moat.
7. Team
Hospitality experience is a real asset here in terms of domain expertise but the team feels practical rather than aspirational. The team don’t immediately appear to have evidence of ambition and capability to build beyond a solid SMB SaaS e.g., prior scaling experience, asymmetric insight, technical edge, or vision to expand into a broader system-of-record platform but I’d definitely hold off on any judgment until I’ve spent some time with the team.
8. The Ask
Appropriate for traction and ambition. $750k pre-seed is sensible, though expansion to Australia this early may stretch focus unless NZ growth is already very repeatable.
But this team has 18.5K MRR and 92 customers. Isn’t this more traction (proof) than you normally see at Seed?
Yes - it is very real traction as noted above but the question isn’t validation; it’s velocity and ceiling. The bar isn’t “is this working?” - it’s “can this become disproportionately large?”
9. Overall
Primary reason you’d pass:
Crowded market with limited defensibility and a likely cap on venture-scale outcomes.
Primary reason you’d lean in:
Strong early traction, clear customer love, and a founder who deeply understands the problem.
10. 30-Minute Meeting?
No - while the execution looks solid, the market is crowded with well-funded incumbents and the current pitch doesn’t yet show a defensible path to venture-scale returns. We are always happy to be proven wrong though, and frequently are!
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