From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7shifts (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were your other co-founders technical?

Jordan Boesch: My wife is not technical. She was doing client success, sales, and business development. I was doing design and web development. Our third co-founder was doing the mobile apps.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find him?

Jordan Boesch: We were connected through a mutual friend earlier on. The province that we’re in is only a million people. Naturally, the development community is pretty small, so we knew each other from events.

Sramana Mitra: That’s wonderful! I love stories from small communities.

Jordan Boesch: When we raised $150,000 and brought it back to Canada, people thought we were stupid for leaving the tech ecosystem of the world.

Sramana Mitra: You want to keep your cost down as a startup. If you’re acquiring customers from all over the world via digital marketing means, it doesn’t matter where you are located. That’s how off-center geographies are building world-class companies these days.

Jordan Boesch: There are pros and cons. The cons were clear that there’s not as much senior talent. It’s not like we were moving to Toronto or Vancouver. We moved back to Saskatchewan. At that time, I could count on my hand how many software companies were in the city.

It was a big move for us. We were very determined that we wanted to be part of building and shaping the tech ecosystem where we’re from. We thought we could take so many great learnings and bring it back to our community and help grow it. I like being part of that pioneering journey.

Sramana Mitra: This new product development effort that you were putting in, did that also result in you changing business models? What was the impact?

Jordan Boesch: It was for building more features. It was all for R&D. We didn’t change prices a whole lot. We were more focused on just building a sticky product.

Sramana Mitra: It was still a dollar per employee per month.

Jordan Boesch: Yes. We just invested in building additional features. We also used it to integrate it with restaurant-focused POS. That was what helped catapult us into restaurants. Our product wasn’t quite there yet for restaurants. It took years to build some of the functions that we felt were important and unique.

What actually pulled us into the segment more was the partnerships. It was establishing great partnerships that integrated with other restaurant technology. That gave us more customers in the restaurant space. That also gave us more feedback.

Sramana Mitra: What was the first platform partner that you went for?

Jordan Boesch: The first one was Toast.

Sramana Mitra: Toast has a marketplace, right?

Jordan Boesch: Right. That was very important in the early days.

Sramana Mitra: The marketplace was generating a lot of leads for you?

Jordan Boesch: It was generating some. What was interesting is, as these cloud POSs raised money and converted more restaurant customers to the platform, these customers started seeking out other software that integrated with the product they just bought. There was this new persona of a restaurant type of person that was looking for software now. We were in the marketplace. For other customers that were more interested in cloud POS and cloud products, we also saw a lot of those too.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From Solo Developer to Venture Scale Entrepreneur: Jordan Boesch, CEO of 7shifts
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