Max Brun discusses ShiftGig, a gig marketplace for warehouse and logistics workers that expanded from 6 to 14 cities before hitting cash burn problems. The company lacked retention metrics, exited unprofitable markets, then pivoted to selling workforce-management software to large employers like FedEx and UPS instead of operating as a marketplace.
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But if we kind of go back to, you know, to ShiftGig, could you maybe give us like an overview about ShiftGig as a marketplace and maybe even a breakdown?
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with ShiftGig-like businesses. So it was a gig marketplace. So shift workers, very local because in-person work delivered in industries ranging from know, warehouse workers, call centers, logistics, restaurants, conventions. You can really think of these short-term work arrangements that require, they had some kind of cross-sellability between different types of work. And at that point, our customers were people like Airmark or big convention centers to restaurants, you know, restaurant chains and We were kind of this contingent on-demand labor that you could, you know, order from your phone and someone will appear in 4 hours. And it was like magic. A lot of our effort at the time, you know, when I was, when I was, when I joined, we were, you know, growing from, we were in 6 cities, we went to 14 cities really quickly and revenue grew. A lot of our effort at the time was spent on demand, you know, generating more demand and then trying to reduce the cost of fulfilling that demand. But as I mentioned, so we lacked a lot of the proper retention metrics on both sides of the marketplace, which what that leads you to, I hope none of you learned this the way we've done is, you know, you burn a lot of cash and at some point, you know, the story's written out for you where you, you're gonna have to reduce your burn rate. And, um, that path becomes, um, you know, you make suboptimal choices along the way. Um, and we had, you know, several phases of that, which led us to first, we started, you know, exiting unprofitable cities and then hiring clients who were very hands-on and we were unprofitable. Then we went as far as, you know, pivoting from the marketplace model to taking the tools that we built And then selling those as, as a way for companies like FedEx and UPS or, you know, companies with large work pool, worker pools to deploy their workers themselves, which is an entirely different business. It's not a marketplace model anymore, but yeah, a lot of lessons there around expansion and, you know, what are the right metrics and, you know, how do you establish that stronghold and then grow from there for me.
