From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7Shifts (Part 1)

Jordan started as a solo entrepreneur in a small province of Canada, Saskatchewan, and has built a heavily funded, high-growth SaaS business. Fascinating journey!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, and raised, and in what kind of background?

Jordan Boesch: I’m from Saskatchewan, a province in Canada. I’m the CEO at 7Shifts which is a team management platform. Before 7Shifts, I was a software developer for many years. I ended up working for my dad who ran some Quiznos locations.

It was there that I saw some of these challenges around managing teams – scheduling and communication being a core aspect. That’s what spurred my interest in taking some of the things I had learned about building websites to try and build something to help my dad.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you do software programming? Did you just self-learn?

Jordan Boesch: I was big into gaming. I was building websites for the teams that I was gaming for. That was an entry point into what spurred my interest in building apps and software. I ended up going east to Ottawa to take a multimedia development diploma. Part of that diploma was classes in coding.

I didn’t have the grades to get into university, so I took a diploma program in college. It spans the gamut of audio and video editing, design, and programming. After that was finished, and even during, I was already consulting and working on the side. I ended up taking a job in the field after that diploma program was over.

Sramana Mitra: What years are we talking?

Jordan Boesch: This was 2007.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you do this mode of software development work working for other people as a developer before starting 7Shifts?

Jordan Boesch: 7Shifts was in tandem with this. It was just a fun side project to help my dad with scheduling at his restaurant. It was something that I had opened up to the online world to sign up and pay with PayPal. I had all that going on and some trickling clients here and there while I was doing some consulting. It wasn’t until 2013 when that scale tipped so hard onto one side that I was able to do 7Shifts full-time.

Sramana Mitra: Between 2007 and 2013 while 7Shifts is going in parallel, what was the product?

Jordan Boesch: It was really just a portal where employees and managers could log in to build schedules and employees could log in to check their schedules. It started out initially as the ability for my dad to just upload an Excel spreadsheet and staff would share the exact username and password and download that spreadsheet. It was very basic.

In that time between 2008 and 2013, it was something I worked on for an hour here and there because I enjoyed building things. Everything I learned, I would take that and build more into 7Shifts. It was a fun learning exercise.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7Shifts
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