Shiftly Intro Email

Hi WFW VC Teardowns,

I’d like to introduce Shiftly, a straightforward scheduling and shift-management platform for small hospitality businesses still coordinating rosters through spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, and last-minute texts.

Owners and managers typically spend 3–6 hours per week building schedules, confirming staff availability, resolving shift swaps, and communicating last-minute changes. These inefficient manual processes lead to missed shifts, over/under-staffing, and labour cost overruns.

Shiftly streamlines the entire workflow in one app. Businesses that adopt Shiftly reduce weekly scheduling time by 70–85%, eliminate cross-tool confusion, and save an average of $350–$600 per month in labour-planning inefficiencies.

We currently serve cafés, restaurants, and bars with 5–40 staff across New Zealand and early customers in Australia. We’re raising a $750k NZD pre-seed to deepen our payroll integrations and expand our go-to-market across Australia.

Given your interest in clear, problem-driven SaaS products, we’d appreciate your perspective.

Best regards,

Mara Te Rangi

Founder & CEO, Shiftly

www.shiftlyapp.co.nz

Problem:

Small hospitality businesses (cafés, restaurants, bars) still run staff scheduling through spreadsheets, WhatsApp, and group texts. This causes:

• Constant confusion about who is rostered
• Missed shifts and last-minute scrambles
• Reliance on managers manually coordinating swaps
• Poor visibility into labour costs
• Fragmented communication across multiple channels

Owners lose 3–6 hours each week to manual scheduling and shift coordination.

Solution:

Shiftly is a simple scheduling and shift-management tool purpose-built for 5–40 person hospitality teams.

Key features:

• Drag-and-drop weekly roster
• Staff confirm shifts in-app
• One-tap shift swaps (manager approval optional)
• Automatic reminders and notifications
• Labour-cost forecasting to prevent over-staffing
• One-tap export to Xero/MYOB

Impact:

Shiftly customers reduce scheduling time by 70–85% and save $350–$600/month in labour-planning inefficiencies through fewer mistakes and better shift coverage.

Competitive Advantages:

• Extremely simple UX tailored to non-technical hospitality managers
• Local market focus (NZ/AU) where larger global tools are less embedded
• Native Xero/MYOB alignment for payroll workflows
• Strong founder-market fit from years of hospitality experience

Market Opportunity:

• NZ hospitality SMB software market: ~$35–50M
• AU: ~$150–200M
• Global expansion possible but dominated by Deputy, Tanda, When I Work, etc.

Shiftly’s near-term focus: ANZ hospitality SMBs underserved by global tools.

Traction:

• 92 paying businesses (mostly cafés, bars, small restaurants)
• $18.5k MRR
• Monthly churn: ~3.2% (typical for SMB hospitality)
• 30% of customers acquired through referrals
• Early AU traction: 14 customers in Victoria

Raise:

$750k NZD pre-seed to:

• Expand to Australia
• Deepen Xero/MYOB integrations
• Add labour-cost forecasting premium tier
• Hire small sales + customer success team

Team:

• Mara Te Rangi (CEO): Former café manager (10 years), deep practical experience.
• Chris Wong (CTO): Ex-PayHero engineer; built internal scheduling systems.
• Ava Patel (Customer Success): Hospitality operations trainer.