Staffjoy
Staffjoy helped small businesses automate and improve scheduling for hourly workers.
Fatal mistake: Staffjoy built automated scheduling software for hourly workers (restaurants, retail). $2.3M raised from SV Angel, YC. Strong initial traction with restaurant chains. 2017: founder Alex Zhu shut the company, donated the code to MIT open source license, published a detailed autopsy blog post. The core problem: small restaurant owners (the primary buyers) would not pay the $99/month SaaS price when they had free scheduling options (paper, Google Sheets). Medium enterprise required longer sales cycles Staffjoy couldn't fund.