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[StartUp Spotlight] Sean Corbett of HaveMyShift
StartUp Spotlight is where we’ll introduce you to the newest wave of Midwestern Entrepreneurs.
Introduce yourself:
I’m an entrepreneur, technologist, and Ruby on Rails developer. So In general, I write code for the Internet.
What are you currently working on?
I’m a co-founder of HaveMyShift.com. Stephen Wooten and I started with an idea to help solve a problem he was having: as a barista at Starbucks there was no easy way to find somone else to cover for you if you wanted to rearrange your work schedule.
How did you get to this point?
I graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in General Engineering in the summer of 2006. I pretty quickly started working on building sites for friends and family and realized how much I wanted to start a start-up.
How long have you been working on HaveMyShift?
We did the first proof of concept release of the site back in the summer of 2007. Steve came up with a way to make his problem go away and we spent a week or so developing a site to implement that. From there, we got good feedback and and strong response from the user-base that this was something they needed.
Is the site fully open yet?
Nope, the site is only open for barista’s at Starbucks right now.
What’s Next?
from here we are expanding the scope of the project to make this into a service anyone can set up for their company or organization. We plan to get the word out about the service in as many markets as we can find, and build the user-base. We are working on reliable feedback mechanisms to increase the accountability of actions people take on the site, a feature which employee’s and managers are both asking for.
Have you received any funding?
We are self-funded so far but we anticipate growing much more quickly if we were able to be working full time on the project so we’re open to partnering with someone or taking investment to make that happen.
Now the fun questions…
Best things about starting up in Chicago (and the Midwest)?
It’s easy to get in touch with people, the community is relatively close. An event like Tech Cocktail can really bring a large portion of the community together. We’ve got a lot of hard working people in Chicago with big ideas, people are willing to put in the energy to get something cool and new off of the ground. Rails, Django, TechCocktail are all examples of this.
Worst?
It takes more time [than it would in somewhere like Silicon Valley] to explain the kind of business I’m building to people who are not familiar with web ventures.
What would improve the community?
More open conversations about making startups work. A lot of people see their idea, their project, or their approach to business as do or die. There are a lot of things we can make happen just by working together and giving each-other a chance.
If you’d like to see a startup featured here, let us know: office at windywire dot com.
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