ZoomShift

What can you tell us about the team that built ZoomShift?

Zoomshift is a rather young 4-person team composed of 2 developers, a designer, and a sales and content person. Our team is very tight knit and incredibly passionate about entrepreneurship and technology. We are strong believers in lean methodology and are constantly searching for new technologies to set our product apart. We all agree that we can’t see ourselves doing anything else. We love what we do and have a strong passion for entrepreneurship.

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

The idea for ZoomShift was born from experience working in the service industry. From serving tables to selling tickets we realized first-hand that employee scheduling can be an absolute nightmare for many organizations. After doing some research we were unable to find a solution that was intuitive, affordable, and truly simplified the scheduling process. In turn, we decided to build ZoomShift with the goal of making scheduling simple for both employees and managers. Our vision for ZoomShift has always been very focused with the mentality that less is more. We focus on the core functionality of online employee scheduling and purposefully leave out all of the extra features that many other solutions provide.

Currently, we have customers ranging from restaurants and hotels to volunteer organizations and small medical clinics. ZoomShift is not designed to fit one specific industry, but rather it is intended to work for any organization that needs to schedule employees hourly. We love that our customers are other small businesses and from their feedback we are constantly finding new ways to make scheduling even simpler.

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter?

Choosing CodeIgniter was an easy decision for us. We wanted a lightweight and flexible framework that was relatively easy to learn. From a development perspective we didn’t want to be confined, and we knew that we would be needing to extend the framework quite a bit. CodeIgniter offered us a solid foundation in MVC that we could then comfortably build on top of. Also, it was incredibly important to us that the framework was well documented. The documentation was evidence to us that CodeIgniter was polished and built with care. We clearly made the right decision with CodeIgniter. It’s simple, not bloated, and suitable for the pro down to the novice.

What is next on the plate for ZoomShift? Any additional functionality.

Mobile is next. We have been waiting to pull the trigger on mobile development for a few months now. We really wanted to dial in the core feature set of the application before turning our focus to mobile. Now that we have a steady customer base and have validated our core features it is time to push onto mobile. While the current application runs smoothly on mobile browsers we want to offer our customers a native application for iOS and Android.

Do you have any other information you’d like to share with the community?

Build a strong team. It is the team behind a product that makes it great, and an idea is only worth something if you have the team to execute it. Finding a group of talented individuals that share a passion is incredibly powerful. Do what you love, talk about what you love, and go where other people are doing what you love. If you immerse yourself and reach out to others you will naturally build relationships with people that think like you do. These relationships will be a source of energy and inspiration as well as an incredible source of knowledge. Do what you love and make friends.

Posted by Marcus Neto on January 20, 2012