Startup of the Week: ZoomShift

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Employee Scheduling Software

ZoomShift helps small businesses operate better by giving them an easy way to schedule and communicate with their employees. With ZoomShift managers can create and post schedules quickly, and send email and text message notifications to everyone in the group. Employees are then able to sign in and see when they work, trade shifts with other employees, make availability requests and communicate with the whole team from anywhere at any time.

ZoomShift is positioned as a simple solution to a complex problem and serves restaurants, retail stores, universities, customer support teams, volunteer organizations and many other small businesses - including Chick-Fil-A, Sonic, Plato’s Closet and Little Caesars to date. ZoomShift uses a freemium model to give groups a chance to try out the software for 30-days risk free. After the trial ends, groups can continue using ZoomShift for a monthly fee based on the number of employees in the group. Any group with five employees or less can use ZoomShift for free forever.

Recently, Zoomshift launched a new, fully mobile, responsive version of their software. They’ve seen an uptick in sign ups, including free trials from software giants such as Google, 37Signals and SquareSpace.

Startup of the Week: Okanjo

Okanjo (oh-kahn-jo), which means “checkout” in Japanese, connects buyers, sellers and communities with the things they care about. Headquartered in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward, Okanjo launched on February 1. The site is a national platform, like eBay, with the locality of Craigslist, featuring a secure transactional platform. Okanjo also makes giving easy by providing sellers the opportunity to donate a portion or all of their proceeds from sales to any cause that they care about. To start selling easier and buying happier, visit www.okanjo.com.

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We love this post by local entrepreneur, Nick Gartmann…

“PPaaS (Potato Peeler as a Service)”

Nick Gartmann, entrepreneur and co-founder of local startup companies, RokkinCat and Tappr, asks if your startup is a “PPaaS (Potato peeler as a service).”

Gartmann points out an alarming trend: It’s “becoming more and more popular (maybe sexy?) to be the founder of a startup, so people are looking for ideas of where they can shave a few seconds off the time it takes to do something by throwing technology at it.”

The old notion that “any business is good business” comes with warning. If your product neither solves a problem nor genuinely makes life more enjoyable – if it’s a Magic Bullet® (which Gartmann refers to in his post), that you may have purchased and used once, only to find that your pockets are lighter (and your old blender worked just as well) – you’re in dangerous teritory.

Gartmann warns, “The dangerous thing about this practice [PPaaS], is that it makes it difficult to sift through the bulls*** to find the real gems. Many great products have to struggle to yell through the noise to get their product seen and – more importantly – taken seriously.”

And we agree.

You can read the full post on NickGartmann.com - “PPaaS (Potato Peeler as a Service)”

February Meetup follow-up!

Thanks to everyone who was able to make it to our February meetup last night!

Here are links to the startups that presented:

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