7shifts, Homebase, When I Work
Handle regular shift planning but offer no help when a shift breaks. The business is still on its own to find coverage.
For investors
We're the first platform that combines scheduling, emergency fill, and worker-side negotiation in one system — built for the 95% of shift businesses that current marketplaces ignore.
Pitch deck and full financial model available on request: investors@shiftsee.com
The thesis
There are roughly 70 million hourly shift workers in North America. They move between employers constantly — the average restaurant worker holds 2–3 jobs at once. The businesses that employ them (small restaurants, cafés, hotels, studios, cleaning services) lose money every week to shifts that fall apart at the last minute. The median independent restaurant spends roughly 4 hours per week chasing coverage for cancelled shifts.
Two categories of software exist for this market today:
Handle regular shift planning but offer no help when a shift breaks. The business is still on its own to find coverage.
Deploy strangers for one-off shifts but have no relationship to the business's regular crew and no negotiation mechanics. They work for enterprise but are a bad fit for the single café, the 40-person restaurant, or the family-owned hotel.
ShiftSee is the first platform that unifies the two. Regular scheduling, targeted negotiation, and emergency broadcast — all running through the same connected-workforce graph.
The differentiator
ShiftSee is the only shift platform in the market where workers can counter-offer on time and rate. This one feature is doing several things at once:
Workers self-select onto a platform that treats them like professionals.
Workers stay because their leverage is real.
The 10% worker-side fee becomes justifiable: you're paying for the right to negotiate, not for access.
We expect the next wave of shift platforms to copy this. By then, we'll own the positioning.
The moat
Every shift on ShiftSee flows through a connection between a business and a shifter. Over time, businesses build private rosters of 15–60+ trusted shifters. That roster becomes more valuable each month — reliability data accumulates, preference patterns emerge, substitution ease improves.
Switching to another platform would require rebuilding the entire roster from scratch. This is a classic marketplace moat, but unlike Uber-style supply-demand liquidity moats, it's a relational moat: the business isn't just switching platforms, it's walking away from relationships it has built over months or years.
We believe this is the strongest defensible structure in the shift-work category and the reason ShiftSee will outlast better-funded competitors.
Why we're not raising a sales team
Traditional marketplace companies raise to hire 30-person sales teams. We're not doing that.
ShiftSee is built and iterated daily by a solo vibe-coder (Tony) with AI-assisted development. Features that used to take a dev team weeks now ship in days. The product improves faster than competitor roadmaps can track. Every customer-facing issue becomes a feature fix within hours.
On the go-to-market side, we're raising to deploy capital into marketing flywheels, not headcount. Programmatic SEO covering every shift-based business and role across our markets. Paid search targeting the moments of highest intent. Comparison pages capturing competitor-dissatisfied searchers. Content targeting niche communities (dance instructor subbing, yoga studio coverage, hospitality multi-job stacking).
The same $180K/year that would fund a single sales rep can produce 150–300 qualifying signups per month deployed as marketing spend — several orders of magnitude more reach in the same period.
Traction
We are launching in public at Web Summit Vancouver on May 11, 2026 with three anchor businesses: Takeout Near You (a restaurant operated by our founding team), a family-held hospitality operation, and a competitive dance studio on Vancouver Island — our first dance industry design partner in one of the most underserved shift-coverage verticals we've identified.
These aren't vanity numbers. They're real businesses with real shifts, running on ShiftSee publicly from day one. Every shift that gets completed, every payment that flows, every piece of feedback we get from these operators is informing the product in real-time.
We're being deliberate about early scale. By Q3 2026 we expect to have 40–80 paying businesses across Vancouver Island; by Q4, Vancouver Metro.
The model
We've built a full 36-month financial model (available on request) with three scenarios:
All three hit the "$10M ARR with restaurants alone" thesis from the original deck. The model is cohort-based (not straight-line), with age-dependent churn curves, maturity ramps per business, and mix-weighted blended wages across geographic tiers.
At maturity, a single connected restaurant generates ~$11,500/month GMV ($2,300/month net revenue) on ShiftSee. The path to $500K MRR requires ~200–250 mature businesses across our target geos. The model projects we reach that by month 23 in base case.
The raise
Heavy front-load Year 1 ($60K/month), scaling to Year 2 ($70K/month), normalizing Year 3 ($50K/month). Programmatic SEO infrastructure, paid search across top-20 SEM keyword targets, comparison pages, content engine, niche community campaigns.
From bootstrap minimum to market rate. $120K Y1, $150K Y2, $180K Y3.
Scaling Kolkata dev team and hosting as volume grows.
Emergency buffer and legal/compliance.
Why $2M: it's what we need to run the marketing flywheel at scale for the 24 months it takes to hit the inflection point. We can get there without the raise, but the raise compresses the timeline by roughly 12–15 months and captures market position while competitors are still figuring out their product.
Why us
Co-founder & CEO
25+ years in internet and SEO. UVA '97. Early ColdFusion dev. Worked at AltaVista/Inktomi in the early SEO era. Scaled MyLife.com from 60K to 1M daily uniques using the original "page for every person" programmatic play. Later at Realtor.com/Move Inc. and ZipRecruiter. Creator of Root-Indexed Browse Architecture (RIBA), the methodology underneath ShiftSee's programmatic SEO strategy. Lives on Denman Island, BC.
Co-founder & Head of Operations
Frontline hospitality operator. Co-owner of Takeout Near You (ShiftSee's first anchor business). Runs Filberg House in Comox. Deep labor experience with relentless focus on real-world execution. Pat personally onboards every new business on ShiftSee.
Contact
We're based on Vancouver Island, BC, but available on Zoom any reasonable hour Pacific Time.