The idea is: you pick what matters most that week (keeping labor cost down, making schedules fair, matching staffing to projected sales, etc.), and the software automatically builds a full schedule based on who’s available and how productive each person is. No more scheduling by hand.
It would: 1. Generate a weekly schedule for you 2. Respect everyone's availability/time-off 3. Keep an eye on labor cost % 4. Adjust staffing with projected sales 5. Let you compare different “optimized” versions (cheapest, most fair, best sales coverage)
If you’re the one making schedules now, what’s the most annoying part? What would make a tool like this worth using?
Appreciate any honest thoughts!
Back of House: schedules are pretty much set. The only time things change is working around someone being out.
Front of House is famously a giant pot exceptions. Mix of professional waitstaff and folks who are just picking up some shifts to finance their passion/true focus(art, music, non-profits, teachers). So you'll need to work around some fun priorities.
How do you flag special events? This will require extra people on a Monday that is historically forecast-ed to be slow. Large parties is a specialist skill in a lot of restaurants. Pretty much any server can make a large party work, but normally a few of the staff really shine with that kind of work, and you'll want them staffed.
Respect everyone's availability/time-off: FOH usually has a good mix of full-time and part-time. And a lot of people are willing to pick up an extra shift with some head's up. And that's both part-times going full-time for a week, and full-timers working extra shifts. People have preferences around working/not working doubles and clopens. One of your full-timers requests a few shifts off next week because their band is playing the next town over. The human process is just to ask a few people who are working if they want to pick up those shifts. Often the person taking off will have found someone to cover for them before requesting the time off, so you'll need that input. Often the GM/AGM making the schedule has all of the human parts in their head and just works through it.
1. Flagging special events by pulling from the booking system so the schedule doesn’t assume a “normal” Monday.
2. Tagging staff by skillset (large parties, wine, expo, etc.) so the optimizer doesn’t just fill slots but matches people to the right shifts.
3. Flexible availability instead of binary availability — things like “prefer not,” “can pick up if needed,” “no doubles,” “no clopens,” or “I already have a cover lined up.”
4. Transparent fairness — showing why someone got (or didn’t get) a shift, how hours were distributed, and what trade-offs were made so it’s not a black box.
5. Built-in shift-swap handling, since FOH often sorts coverage themselves before the manager ever touches it.
The reality though is that for most businesses, the hard part is customer acquisition, marketing, logistics - for a restaurant, site selection, decor, etc... if you get that right, you can probably solve your staffing problems pretty easily by just being 50% overstaffed, and using a whiteboard and post-it notes. If you _don't_ get that right, then no amount of efficient shift scheduling can save you.
Scheduling is easy when all the availability lines up, but most of the time there are gaps where people's availability simply doesn't match the needed shifts. You need to make some people unhappy. Balancing the human side of spreading the unhappiness fairly is the biggest challenge.
If I pivot the product on shift coverage management instead, would that be more useful? Would you pay monthly for a tool that reliably finds coverage when someone cancels?
Sometimes podcasts like business breakdowns can have insights about what a successful company did early on to get traction. I remember listening to one about a company that was selling to restaurants, it may have been the episode about Toast [1], maybe worth a listen. IIRC there was at least one anecdote in there about something they needed to change early on to start getting a foot in the door and have fruitful conversations with restaurant owners / managers.
You might not have much luck reaching potential customers here - HN users are mostly folks who have day jobs messing with software.
See if you can get a warm introduction to restaurant owners/managers through your existing network - friends of friends or family, etc. Or try knocking on some doors!
[1] https://joincolossus.com/episode/schreiber-toast-the-restaur...
We actually just open-sourced our solution because we realized that while the scheduling interface needs to be simple, the optimization logic (fairness, constraints, sales matching) is where the real complexity lives. Since you're building something similar, you might find our approach interesting—we use a constraint satisfaction AI solver to handle the heavy lifting.
We’re currently looking for beta testers to stress-test the scheduler in real-world hospitality scenarios. Since you're deep in this space, I'd love to hear your take on our approach vs. what you're building.
Best of luck with your tool—the market definitely needs more than just "digital spreadsheets."