How 7Shifts Reached 1 in 10 Restaurant Workers in the US

What if your side project — built to solve your dad's scheduling headaches — ended up in 50,000 restaurants? Jordan Boesch did exactly that. On The Product Market Fit Show, he breaks down the unsexy, compounding moves that turned 7shifts from a passion project into a category leader.

Key Facts

• Restaurants on platform: 50,000 (Jordan Boesch)
• US market penetration: 1 in 10 restaurant workers (Jordan Boesch)
• ARR when Jordan went full-time: $35,000 (Jordan Boesch)
• Lowest runway reached: 4 months (Jordan Boesch)
• First seed round raised: $1 million (Relay Ventures, ~2016) (Jordan Boesch)

From Dad's Restaurant to Restaurant Scheduling Software

Jordan Boesch built the first version of 7shifts at 18 to solve his father's scheduling problems at a Quiznos franchise. The pain was real — scheduling, communication, and availability tracking were daily headaches. That firsthand exposure gave him a problem worth solving before he ever thought about building a company.

Jordan grew up working in quick-service restaurants — his dad ran Quiznos locations, his grandparents ran Orange Julius franchises. Watching his father wrestle with paper schedules and phone-tag availability checks planted the seed. As a self-taught web developer addicted to gaming and building team websites, Jordan had just enough skill to try fixing it.

The first version wasn't called 7shifts. It was called Employee HQ — a rudimentary app that let staff log in and download the Excel spreadsheet his dad would upload. Built around 2006-2007, it was functional, not fancy. But his dad kept using it after Jordan left — a quiet signal that it was actually solving something real.

Jordan rebuilt 7shifts multiple times across different frameworks while working nine-to-five web jobs in Ottawa, coding from 6pm to 1am. It was a passion project long before it became a business. The first paying customer outside his dad — an A&W in Richmond, BC — signed up organically. Jordan called them afterward.

"It was never about making money or having stability in this way. It was more that I was fueled. I continue to be fueled by solving problems and people going, 'Wow, this is really helping me. Thank you so much.'" — Jordan Boesch

How SEO and POS Integrations Drove Early Restaurant SaaS Growth

7shifts grew early through two channels: SEO targeting 'restaurant scheduling software' — a keyword nobody owned — and deep integrations with POS systems like Toast and TouchBistro. These integrations made 7shifts the default labor partner for fast-growing POS companies, so when they scaled, 7shifts scaled with them.

With no marketing budget and a tiny team wearing every hat, Jordan leaned into SEO. The phrase 'restaurant scheduling software' had no real competition. Jordan and his co-founders built content and optimized their site around it relentlessly — grunt work, no AI tools, just consistency.

The bigger unlock was partnerships. When cloud-based POS systems like Toast and TouchBistro were emerging, 7shifts became their first labor integration partner. Jordan's team wrote the playbook on these integrations from scratch. As those POS companies raised capital and expanded, 7shifts rode their distribution.

The partnership model wasn't passive. Jordan's team shared Slack channels with partners, sponsored their sales rep events, and stayed visibly active at every partner touchpoint. Competitors noticed. According to Jordan, people in the space would remark that '7shifts is everywhere with partners' — and that was entirely intentional.

"If you look around at our competitors in the space, like they all were like, oh my god, 7shifts is everywhere with partners. Well, that was the strategy." — Jordan Boesch

• Targeted 'restaurant scheduling software' — a zero-competition SEO keyword in early days.
• Built restaurant-specific POS integrations before any competitor.
• Created shared Slack channels with partner teams for real-time wins and problem-solving.
• Sponsored partner sales events to stay top-of-mind with reps.
• Revenue share arrangements formalized as partnerships matured.

Why Most Partnerships Fail — and What 7Shifts Did Differently

Most partnerships fail because the smaller company integrates and then waits. 7shifts succeeded by treating partners as extensions of their own team — co-marketing, incentivizing partner reps, and maintaining constant presence at partner events. Structure and proximity made the difference.

Pablo Srugo pressed Jordan on a real tension: partnerships are alluring but usually disappoint. The bigger partner has a hundred priorities. The smaller one has one. Jordan's answer was operational: don't just integrate, co-market. Get inside their sales motion. Understand how their reps are incentivized and align with that.

The Slack channel tactic sounds minor but Jordan considers it underrated. Real-time wins shared across a joint channel build momentum and keep the partnership warm. It turns a business arrangement into something closer to a team. That emotional pull matters when a rep is choosing which tool to recommend in a sales call.

Jordan also emphasized showing up physically. 7shifts sponsored partner events, sent people to their sales kickoffs, and made their presence unavoidable. That kind of visibility doesn't happen by accident — it requires deliberate investment and a conviction that the partnership is worth it.

"Throw up a Slack channel and get the key people in there because you want to solve things in real time and share wins in real time. It sort of makes people feel good and it propels the partnership further." — Jordan Boesch

Surviving Near-Failure: Four Months of Runway and Burnout

Around 2017-2018, 7shifts hit a wall — four months of runway left, a growing team, and Jordan experiencing what he described as depression for the first time. He didn't cut the team. He raised money through sheer persistence, the same way he'd secured his seed round: relentless relationship-building with investors.

The near-death moment came after 7shifts had real momentum. They'd hired people with families depending on them. Then runway compressed to four months. Jordan describes feeling 'emptiness and sadness' — a darkness he hadn't encountered before. He recognized it as burnout and depression, not weakness, and pushed through.

His method for raising wasn't sophisticated — it was persistent. For his seed round with Relay Ventures (introduced by TouchBistro), Jordan flew to Toronto repeatedly throughout the year to update the firm on metrics. His future board member jokes that he invested partly out of exhaustion. 'You wore me out, and the numbers were good, so we invested.' That's not a strategy — it's grit.

Jordan also recounted a catastrophic engineering incident: a migration script stopped mid-run when an engineer accidentally hit the space bar. Half the customer base was affected. The team slept at the office, fixed it in shifts, and kept going. These near-failures are part of the 7shifts story — not footnotes.

"I think we had four months of runway left or something. I'm like, this is not fun." — Jordan Boesch

"You can't be scared of fucking up. We screwed up a bunch of stuff while we were building this, but we learned a lot. It wasn't the end of the world." — Jordan Boesch

Building Company Culture Outside Silicon Valley

Jordan moved 7shifts back to Saskatchewan — not Silicon Valley — and built a 250-person company there. His reasoning: prairie-raised talent is hungry, gritty, and free of entitlement. For early-stage companies, missionaries who'll do anything to ship beat experienced hires who've seen it all.

When Jordan left the Bay Area accelerator, he didn't stay. Home was Saskatchewan, and he believed something could be built there that people said was impossible. That contrarian bet paid off. 7shifts now has 250 employees, with hubs in Saskatoon and Toronto and remote workers across Canada.

On culture, Jordan references a framework from Jeff Lawson's article on Twilio's core values exercise — 'draw the owl.' The insight: behavioral core values let everyone identify cultural mismatches early, not just the founder after the fact. When a values mismatch is visible and named, departures feel fair and the team doesn't spiral into fear.

His favorite articulation comes from Danny Meyer — founder of Shake Shack and an investor in 7shifts: 'Culture is the sum of all the behaviors you celebrate minus the ones you tolerate.' Jordan calls this an engineering formula for culture. Get the behaviors right, and the culture takes care of itself.

"Culture is the sum of all the behaviors you celebrate minus the ones you tolerate. As my engineer brain spins on that, I just find it makes so much sense. It's like a calculation." — Jordan Boesch

"Something about building something in a place where no one thought possible — being able to attract hardworking individuals where the only knock against them is that they haven't done it before — that was incredibly exciting to me." — Jordan Boesch

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