PayrollHero’s Philippine payroll software platform was featured this month in the Philippines’ Entrepreneur Magazine. Pick up a copy a check out the full article, but here is a sneak preview:
Exciting news! PayrollHero has been chosen by the Singapore Business Review as one of the 20 Hottest Startups in Singapore for 2014. What an honour, thanks SBR! You can see the whole article here in the online edition of the magazine.
I asked Erwin Oliva to write a guest post about how to pitch your story to journalists in Southeast Asia. Erwin was a pioneering member of the team that established operations of the INQUIRER.net (formerly known as INQ7.net) and Yahoo! Philippines. Erwin is currently a contributing writer for Men’s Health Magazine Philippines, a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman and Head of Product Development for Content & Services at Samsung Electronics Philippines Corp.
How to Pitch Your Story to Journalists in Southeast Asia
Guest Post: Erwin Oliva
One of the things that will help you “market” your startup idea is to get the media’s attention. There are a lot of ways of doing this, but we’ve put together this top 10 things that we feel are practical, and yet effective ways to pitch your story to journos.
1. Give them a unique story that is fit for their audience. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all kind of a media release. Once you figure out who their audience is, figure out a way to tell your story that would stand out. Online audience usually want video. They also want to experience the service. They also want to know the juicy details –especially for breaking stories. If you’re talking to business journalists–give them numbers, not just facts and let them make their conclusions. If they ask questions, give them enough information to run a story.
2. Be accessible but don’t be pushy. Provide basic contact information: Person of Contact, mobile number, email and of course, your website address. Throw in your Twitter and Facebook account too, just to make sure you got it all covered. But don’t keep calling them to follow up on a request. Most journalists will respect you for respecting their time–not that they want to be divas. Just make sure you reply to their queries even though it is just a “no comment.”
3. Don’t lie about or manufacture facts you cannot backup. It’s their job to find out if you’re lying to their face. They will know. If they happen to stumble upon leaked information, and cannot make comment, be courteous to answer their call, and explain why you cannot comment. It’s mutual respect–they will also respect you for that. Just don’t lie to them and pretend things will go away.
4. Don’t ignore them too. A simple text message or email reply that, “Yes, we got your message,” would help ease the pain. For startup companies going through a lot of problems, it would be good for you to answer them with questions about how you’re dealing with it. It helps that you know what you’re problems are–but of course, be ready to offer a solution.
5. Show don’t tell. This is a lesson from Steve Jobs who was media-savvy. He made sure when he does product demos, everything’s working well, not just fine. You should be able to eat your own dog food, which means you’re a power user of your own service/product. Journalists could tell if you’re fumbling or if you’re pretending to know what you’re doing.
6. FAQs are very useful. When drafting a media release, anticipate the questions that journos will be asking. So you have to develop a “sixth-sense” to predict what kind of questions they want answered, and how they want it answered. FAQs are very useful not only on websites, but also in releases. You can put in commonly asked questions by users, a bit of history, background of the founders, and your one-sentence business proposition (What is your business all about).
7. Develop good relations with them, always. Don’t disappear after a media conference. Hang out with the journos. Talk to them, but make sure what you say is not going into tomorrow’s news. Just get to know them better and find out what makes them tick. At the end, it is going to be about relationships. Journalists all aim to develop good sources of stories. So if you can, share some industry insights, refer them to other companies you think they can write stories about, or if you’re okay with it–give them some insider information–but not giving away any confidential information or even putting someone or a company in trouble. But they will try to push.
8. Use social media to engage them. Many journalists today–especially the media savvy ones, are starting to ask questions via Facebook or Twitter. Why? You’re busy and if company policy allows, you can use social media as your “real time” blog or channel to update journalists about the status of a project. Use Instagram or other social networking sites (YouTube) to spread word about the company, activities you wish they covered (community projects), and other stuff that gives them enough information to create a story. Be your own media and PR agency.
9. Learn to talk to journalists. Learn their language. Understand them. Don’t talk down on them. Pretend you’re explaining to non-techies (actually assume that you’re talking to people who don’t have any idea about what you’re doing). So avoid acronyms, skip the geek talk. Go straight to the point. Don’t use corporate talk–or rhetoric to explain simple processes or issues. But don’t overdo this to the point that it can be demeaning. Balance is key.
10. Respect deadlines. Don’t waste their time. Know their deadlines. Know that when they’re calling, it may be urgent. If you promise to reply to a certain email, figure out the timelines. Turnovers are often quick especially for online news mediums. Magazines, TV or radio may have different needs–but they all have deadlines. So be ready with all the information that you think they will need. But don’t go beyond what you want to say. Over sharing may do more harm than help.
So there you go. These are practical advice culled over years of covering technology companies. And we at StartUpMachine feel that it’s about time to share our “trade secrets.” –Erwin
PayrollHero.com Secures $1M in Seed Funding To Continue Product Development And Expand Sales/Marketing Efforts In Southeast Asia
PayrollHero’s time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution helps companies manage their workforce through a cloud based, web and mobile solution that is built for today’s employees.
SINGAPORE, Feb. 20th 2013 – PayrollHero, a software company focused on time, attendance, scheduling and payroll for Southeast Asia has announced today that is has closed a $1M CAD seed round of funding from 500Startups, LX Ventures, The Futura Corporation, 8capita Partners, Ryan Holmes (CEO of Hootsuite), Dan Martell (CEO of Clarity), Benjamin Joffe (aka Mr. Asia), Christian Cotichini (Founder of MAKE Technologies) and other angel investors.
With offices in Manila, Philippines and Whistler, Canada, PayrollHero is a subscription based cloud software platform that uses the employees face and GPS location as the metric for clocking in and out to ensure that the right employee is in the right place at the right time. The company enables transparency between employees and management around time, attendance, scheduling and payroll via attendance analytics.
PayrollHero was created out of necessity from company founders Michael Stephenson and Stephen Jagger. They had set up a Philippine outsourcing company and could not find a suitable time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution so ended up building their own. After showing their internal system to other business owners in the Philippines who expressed similar dissatisfaction with the options available they decided to look deeper into the Philippine market and the rest of Southeast Asia.
“There was a really big opportunity in Southeast Asia for a time, attendance, scheduling and payroll solution that was in the cloud and built for web and mobile. We set up PayrollHero and set out to become the market leader in this space,” said PayrollHero CEO Michael Stephenson.
PayrollHero currently supports payroll for companies in the Philippines and plans to expand its payroll capabilities to other countries within Southeast Asia in the near future. The companies time, attendance and scheduling solution works worldwide and currently has users in Canada, USA, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.
“We wanted a payroll solution that was cloud based and built for the Philippine business environment, PayrollHero was exactly what we were looking for and took our payroll processing time for 700 employees from 16 days to 5 minutes” – Walden Chu, CEO, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Philippines
With this injection of funds, PayrollHero can add talent to its “Adventure Engineering” team and continue to add new clients to its expanding client base.
“PayrollHero makes payroll sexy, and they make lots of money doing it! It’s one of those few cloud-based services that every business, from SMB’s to large enterprises, can and should use to increase productivity and save costs. The ability to scale PayrollHero is limited only by the number of businesses that want to improve employee attendance, scheduling, and payroll,” said George Kellerman, Venture Partner, 500 Startups
For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.com
About PayrollHero
PayrollHero.com – Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness
Consumer-friendly Time, Attendance, Scheduling and Payroll in the cloud for web and mobile.
We use your employees face as our primary biometric to avoid buddy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to your companies corollaries between productivity and mood. For more information, visit www.PayrollHero.com – http://www.payrollhero.com/press_kit
Last July 12, 2012, the PayrollHero team participated and pitched at the ON3 Nationals, held at the SMX Convention. Among 12 competitors only 6 were selected as the finalists for the Silicon Valley Immersion which will be finalized in Decemeber.
The PayrollHero team was represented by Client Succes Manager, Tin Sanchez, and Senior Engineer, Nico Suria, both of whom delivered the elevator pitch in front of several judges. Among the judges were Ms Minette Navarete and Christian Bessler of Kickstart.ph, Mr Jay Fajardo of ProudCloud, Mr Kenneth Palacios of Novare, and Mr Federico Gonzales of A.I.M.
The ON3 Judges
The dynamic duo wowed the audience with their smooth pitching and entertaining slides. For the question and answer portion, Business Development Country Manager for the Philippines, Mike Hwang joined the duo onstage and gave his input regarding the judges questions.
Tin Sanchez and Nico Suria of PayrollHero pitching
It was a triumphant day for the team as Plug and Play Co-Founder, Mr Jojo Flores announced the winners, Payrollhero being one of the top 6 companies eligible for the Silicon Valley Immersion. Included in the top 6 are the following companies:
Speed Dial
The PayrollHero team with the finalists
Join the team as they continue on with their exhilarating journey toward success- next step, Silicon Valley!
Watch the PH team’s pitch here!
PayrollHero, along with 5 other ON3 competition finalists, was featured and interviewed at ANC’s Future Perfect “Emerging Filipino Tech Companies headed to Silicon Valley” segment which was aired on July 18, 2012 7:00 PM PHT.
PayrollHero, recently selected as one of the winners of the ON3 Nationals and counted as one of the emerging filipino tech companies headed to Silicon Valley, was represented by company Co-Founder, Stephen Jagger.
The finalists and sponsors were interviewed by Future Perfect host, Tony Velasquez, who eagerly dived into a comfortable discussion about each start-up company’s product or service.
Stephen Jagger of PayrollHero talks about buddy punching
Among the finalists are X2wave, MiiMove, GroupJump and Guestlist.ph, all of whom were present at the guesting. Novare General Manager Kenneth Palacios and Plug and Play Co-Founder Jojo Flores were among the interviewees who gave more in depth insights and a clearer picture of the current tech start up status in the country.
Host Tony Velasquez, expressed his sheer interest in PayrollHero’s functions, especially its facial biometric and mood verification feature. He was interested in the SaaS’ ability to eliminate buddy punching, a costly problem experienced globally.
PayrollHero with the rest of the ON3 Finalists
When Plug and Play Co-Founder Jojo Flores explained the need to immerse themselves with the companies to see if they could gain more traction, Tony candidly stated that he would want to try out PayrollHero.
Join PayrollHero as we continue on this exciting adventure towards success at Silicon Valley!
See more photos of the event here
Find out more by watching the video:
My business partner Michael Stephenson and I stopped by Rackspace’s new San Francisco office a few weeks ago to meet up with Robert Scoble and show him Payroll Hero. He posted the video yesterday to the web for all to see. Check it out, you will get a good idea of what we are up to at Payroll Hero. If you are interested in getting on the beta invite list, drop your email in here.
http://youtu.be/eJfho2aNYRI
Transcription:
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Who are you?
Michael Stephenson: Mike Stephenson with Payroll Hero
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): And welcome to my new studio over here at Rockspace San Francisco… And who are you?
Stephen Jagger: I’m Steve Jagger, Payrollhero.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): And what do you guys do?
Stephen Jagger: Ah… We do payroll softwares.
Stephen Jagger: Oh… I do the business development
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): And How About you?
Michael Stephenson: CEO
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Excellent, so what’s payrollhero?
Michael Stephenson: Payrollhero is a happy human capital management software.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): ah…it’s where you pay your employees, hahaha!
um… I love ??? your entrepreneur crazy enough to enter a very crowded market, that’s almost a… really mature market is in it, because when I paid my bills I start up in a… 2003 I was using the ADP, I’m using Quickbooks right. So why do we need yet another way to pay people?
Michael Stephenson: Currently employees don’t dig the way their paid, they don’t dig the fact that they get the payroll every two weeks and it’s paper and they have to request if they loose it. They want the online equivalent and were do it yourself repository, so were trying to approach with our own findings and our own problems it is how do employees want to interact with HR, how do they want to get paid, so using payroll as the base, a way to engage an employee or it’s workforce on a daily basis
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): This is not right aim huge enterprises like rockspace so were probably small, mid size company, like for about four thousand employees.
Michael Stephenson: Yup.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): who are you aiming at right away?
Michael Stephenson: Our current users are actually alpha client right now, it’s about a thousand employees using our system, so they have this big monstrous HR and payroll administrator back ends, this don’t relate to their current workforce.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): And so… Tell me a little about what the first experience is going to be using… using as an HR person instead of using an ADP or any other kind a… What makes you separate, maybe I have to see it..
Mike: well from a HR person point of view lot less interaction with employees, they could really focus on retention and motivation instead the day to day working more of “i need this payslip from two months ago or need a, this tax form I need to understand how many vacation days I have and a… can I use them”. So a lot of that questions should be naturally answered online then place one answer quickly, and they don’t want to wait a week for response from HR, can get answer immediately, when they want, how they want.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): So, it builds a webpage for them all about their paid life. And it’s not just getting a check anymore. You need ah… If your going get a house you need the paystub right, I wont do that, and that was pain of the ass to get the pay-stub from my employers because I delaying to get them. Now you get everything electronically so fighting out where all that stuff was and who had it was pain in the ass back in a day now. can show you me a little bit of that…
Michael Stephenson: Sure. I’ll show you from a couple of point of view. So this is from the point of view of an employee. Ah.. An employee
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Can you check the screen down just a little bit?
Michael Stephenson: So when they clock in, if they want any of their prior pay-stubs, ah they could just view them all and they can automatically see if they have any missing requirements. So, this is actually for our own company that we ran out in Manila. Ah so, this are all the requirements need from employees they can see if they… have them ready or not. The thing ???? from previous pay-stubs they could self provision them. And then the different factors with us is, a lot of companies, they worry about ghost employees and ah.. body punch in. So some of them use thumb prints others may use key-cards what we used is the face as the biometric. And what we know.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): It’s hard to fake… this right. hahaha
Michael Stephenson: Yah.. So when they clock in, clock out we get a picture of their face and we analyze it. To make sure it’s the employee and some learnings we’ve been finding is, we could actually get the employees like using their face. Like, whether they use daily mugshot, or whatever, they like having a repository or a journal of their face when they clock in, clock out. And a lot of them will get together or they’ll clock in pairs or as group so they’ll take this photos and they’ll upload on Facebook. So that’s one social engagement the employee has. As it They could take their daily photos, clock in, clock out, and oh.. upload them and they’ll like share with them.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Interesting… This is interesting cause.. ah separately I interviewed a Path who just came out with a new journalling software for their iPhone. To be interesting they have this goes straight to Path or go to Facebook or ??? come back in my Path. Because path is gonna be use for exactly that.
Michael Stephenson: Yeah..
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): A great way to journal your life. Or check in ??? that work. I do that when I get to Rackspace like check on Foursquare and I take a picture usually and post it.
Michael Stephenson: Yeah.. See.. We found.. We found is that, beyond this clocking in, and clocking out from work, they wanna check into work. Uhmm, they want to really to engaged their friends and followers…
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Yeah.. You gotta be the Mayor of the headquarters. Ahahahaha
Michael Stephenson: Yeah.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Or should I say you’re really checking in a lot. Ahahaha
Michael Stephenson: And one thing we’re actually doing the photos is kinda interesting we’re very concern with the happiness of our work force. So we’re analyzing the photos beyond is it the right person? or analyzing their mood. Are they happy? or they’re sad? are they bright eyed? Or bushy tailed in the morning and just dead dog tired at the end of the day. So in short, we sort flagging’s some conditions we ?? investigate if they’re really energetic in the beginning of the day and just dead tired in the end of the day. That employee may be over worked. We flag HR automatically and they can investigate. Is this employee over worked will they burn out? Same thing, we kinda call the devil boss scenario. Is if you have a Manager, that super happy everyday and all subordinates are sad. That’s something HR should investigate and converse if an employee is happy on a Monday and sad on a Friday. They might really love their job and you should explore for the corruptions of them. (interviewer laughing in the background) Vice Versa if they’re really sad on a Monday and really happy on a Friday. You have an employee who might hate their job. So we’re starting to think about beyond us..
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): So you better put on a good face when you check in at work. Ahahaha. Your boss will like ahh “Oh you’re not too happy this morning. What’s going on..”
Michael Stephenson: So over the course of the year, ah sometimes people wanna fake photos. But over the course of the year we get really understand of a baseline. And beyond that we’re letting employees rate their moods and we’re letting them curate on how they wanna show their ??? it’s just for a personal self so they can reflect upon. This is a job for me. If they would look at their schedule calendar, and see a ton of sad faces they know they should seek happiness and they need to do something about it. Vice versa if they are happy everyday, they know this is a job for me and how can I certainly look for different corruption. So so.. From the Payrollhero from the mid-point of view, we curate and categorized the moods of employees, and from the employees point of view they could help with that cu-ration and help ah… us understand is the ??? true or not.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Yup. It’s very cool. Uhm.. So give me a tour of what makes you different. and then uh..
Michael Stephenson: So this is, uh employees point of view which allows them to clock in, clock out. Ah… Say they are ???? environment they could see when their schedules are, they could understand, they could like ah, “is my schedule gonna change?”, Or some employees like ??? or get in a coffee shop, they may have morning shift, One week and the next week they have evening or afternoon. They could see upcoming holidays and what.. base on feedback from a place they would also like to see beyond their schedule, they wanna see how much they made each day. They don’t wanna wait 2 weeks and they count on how much they made, they wanna be told when they clock in, and when they clock out is “Congrats John! You made this much.” and from employees point of view, they also want social recognition from their employer. So.. if From John ??? I work from an ex coffee shop and I just hit my 1000hours as a 20yr old kid, thousand hours doing anything is big milestone in my life so from my employer to post to my wall on Facebook, “Congrats John, you just hit 1000 at ex coffee company.” ah.. they feel proud of that. Besides telling their friends now their employers telling them and beyond that the employer gets ah.. more brand awareness amongst their target hiring market.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Now when I was ??? I was paid ah.. partly on a hourly wage and partly on commission kind of thing or a ??? for a incentives right or you sell somebody camera here and get 100 bucks can you mix that kind of payroll in here?
Michael Stephenson: Yeah.. so and then we could also account for…
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): or car dealers are often paid this way right?
Michael Stephenson: Yeah. Those are other things you could look into when you start introducing the productivity measurements, you get even more out of our happy feature. So ah.. Understanding what the corollary between is it sales and happiness? So if in a work force, is Happy on a sunny day vs. a rainy day and if it’s a Friday, has a company know when is.. when your should spike. But conversely when its been raining 5days in a row, ah.. you don’t wanna introduce a stern memo during that week. Cause you know the mood is down. So it allows the company to know, when they need to buy pizza for the company. So I’m just surprised to like the stuff. So if your goal is always constantly making your staffs happy, we believe that the first step is, measuring what is the current state of the fares and ahmm.. that’s aim to do.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Very cool. How do you.. How does the business pay for you guys?
Michael Stephenson: Ah.. They pay per employee.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Ok. And do you discuss that or is that..
Michael Stephenson: Yeah. We’re still playing around it. So one thing we’re thinking about is making access to the software completely free and then when they start want some of the more higher end in terms of HR kind of modules, like happiness or will start charging per employee for that. If the inside proofs is valuable to them. But our goals really is just to shake up and dis-wrap the industry. One of our focus is in small businesses. 52% of employed people in the United States are employed by small businesses and ADPs and paychecks don’t really speak much to them. They really like the laggard big corporate clients. So..
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Now the two of you know where the force is right?
Michael Stephenson: Yeah.. So from a small business point of view, lot of them are struggling. And they finance business and credit cards and now this payrolls providers acknowledge that. So as a small business, why do I have to have money debited for all my staffs 5 days before it’s actually paid to the staff? We know the reasons, because they wanna hold up money, why do I have to have quarterly remittances take every two weeks when you only pay them every 3 months.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Do you pay through Paypal by the way? I don’t know if any employee wants that yeah but? I paid…
Michael Stephenson: We’re looking at..
Stephen Jagger: I paid it…. I pay for it..
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): I paid my employees through Paypals..
Michael Stephenson: Some do, and ahh.. Some wanna be paid for bank accounts. So one thing we’re trying to tackle, with the ??? like ??? Is, can we take the money out of their bank account, Friday and be paid that Friday afternoon. So they no longer have to use bridge financing and if they need to pay by credit card, they don’t have to go to an atm machine and take up money at a service fee that more still than purchasing something and having a daily interest rate, can they just pay there payroll via credit card. and they could can at Paypal.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Oh the employer can I see ah., Like ah the employees sick time over the last year? And that’s more or less based on hammerhead or somebody is taking out.
Michael Stephenson: Yeah.. So.. What we wanna..
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): and wanted to have discussion with somebody “hey you’re sick a lot what’s going on?”
Stephen Jagger: Every third Friday you’re always late.
Michael Stephenson: Yeah or after Football game you’re always late if it’s ah.. So what we wanna start to do is take all that information that is round attendance so whether it be tardiness or absenteeism and we wanna make it transparent. We wanna make whatever reports available from the employer, available from the employee. So time for review and they’re on power. They can show and you know what “I stayed 30minutes late everyday, I come an hour late. I deserve a promotion cause I work my ass off” So whatever kind of reports we’re gonna give to the employers, so they can make easier decisions about who to promote and who to fire. We wanna empower the employee to be owners of that information as well.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Can the employer.. Let’s say working for me in a coffee shop and you had a really busy day and I notice that the cash register had double the number of sale and you guys did great and everybody is happy. Can I put that on you’re day. Like “great day you rang up double the number of sales of average and thanks…
Michael Stephenson: Yep. That’s definitely one thing we’re working on this integration with PO system so they could really calculate. Ahh…. Their staff really needs up to base on sales. So if I have too many baristas and I know sales are down on a rainy Tuesday, I can lower my staffs I need and If I know it’s a sunny Friday, I… the system will tell me you need this many employee hours ready to go. And it’s also ah.. The other thing we try to do is the thing from the employees.. one of the.. If I’m a key holder, and I have to open up the coffee place and I can’t make it in, but there’s 3 other key holders instead of meet or chasing them down, and trying to get them to cover for me, I could.. The system could make a ?? offer and I could add a little something to it. I could say, “Who could cover for me? Cover for me and I’ll thrown in 6 bucks” Or offer them 2 tickets in the next game and have in a.. have in that go out to the SMS.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): thats the thing. Because that way I can ah.. I can auction off my days and see if somebody..
Stephen Jagger: Your shifts..
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): my shifts or my days. Yeah.. And ah re-configured it on the fly..
Stephen Jagger: And the system will be smart enough to tell them which people can’t take certain shifts. Like if you’re the key holder for this location, you know, you can’t give your shift to somebody else that’s not a key holder cause they can’t open the store or whatever it is. SO be smart enough to say, you know showing the shifts to the right people.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Now it makes sense.. Uhm..
Michael Stephenson: The other… One other measures we looking at is, Geo location so when they clock in, clock out, we’re not only looking at their face, we look at where they are. So whether it’s IP white list or its a Geo tagging, so if they clock in.. So let’s say my sales person or savers technician I have to go so many homes, ahmm… I clock in each home and don’t know I’m there, I’m not there. So for the employees… that matter they really want to be recognized, for their good work, ah they can.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): ??? for that employer I could say well you know, “Hey John you’re taking ah.. 30minutes per visit. Your competitor is taking 15..
Michael Stephenson: Yep..
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): What’s going on? You know…. You know you can sort of say have a conversation about why the prior activity is different than with one employer..
Michael Stephenson: Yeah. You can definitely word on ??? in 15 minutes and help coach the one whose doing 30 minutes per session. And then there’s other interesting needs ah.. where I find my restaurant in California, my employees don’t take the 30minutes break and doesn’t ??? upon meeting and sure they take their 30 minutes break. If they don’t I’m in trouble. So.. We automatically if the conditions of the employer sets, So.. it recognizes the break hasn’t been taken by Bill and he’s a server, we’ll IM him or will SMS him like time to take his break and that covers the employer.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Very cool. Uhmm.. How you guys funded with.. with step on the middles of your business?
Stephen Jagger: there you go.. ??? self funded with ???
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Self funded. That’s awesome..
Stephen Jagger: Yeah. We’re the.. We’re.. I guess unique spot. Mike and I got a couple of other businesses that… You know help us. Build out this product.. That’s ???
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): That’s very cool. You’re crazy and you’re using your own money… Ahahahaha….
Stephen Jagger: That’s one of the reason we’re in San Francisco to try and you know.. meet people and meet pc’s and learn more of that side of the world. As well as continue developing the product.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Well.. That’s really really cool. Uhmm… What have you learn so far
by doing this? Cause you know.. This is a different kind of business. Not usually see. You know.. Consumer..
Michael Stephenson: Ah.. ??? our own campaign. We got a hundred employees that we need to deal with ourselves and ah.. among the fundamentals beliefs that if you hire the right person, he really love his job, you really don’t need an HR division.. So ??? you hire a HR team and like you say, why? why? It’s like does it make sense? If they love their job which they do, is their a way we can empower them or they could take care of the daily administration. and I think if you look at small companies, they really happy because HR ??? have face to face contact and they could read moods. Ah… When you start getting bigger HR’s and another building behind ??? they never interact with their employees. So our fundamentals is if you could make the moods a ??? HR or at-least get HR on the floor cause they don’t have to deal with the dealing administration.. Ah.. you could have a happier company. That’s really what really inspire us. Tony Shane delivered happiness.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Yeah..
Michael Stephenson: We did his book camp last year and we brought back his ah.. guidelines for making a happy workforce and it just done amazing change to our culture and our company.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): and we really ??? should see if you ah.. even go as far as ah.. stunning people’s job on ??? you know.. I just heard one side how do you ah… But Mike ??? ring ah.. a job on ??? so that reports ah.. whether he’s exercising or not. and it will be interesting to see when you even get that kind of a data fed into this things uhm.. I don’t know where this all going cause this ah.. It’s really ah.. Stalkering.. Stalker society… that we’re going in. I mean not just you. I mean that was just Facebook talking but open graph on how.. how much stuff they’re gonna be studying about us and feeding back to us. Let’s say hey you’re listening to school all the time on school. ahahaha. Or you what running three times this week and also we are.. Or in the case of you guys, you gonna be studying how well I’m doing at work. You should have work, five times in a row. Ahahaha.
Michael Stephenson: Yeah…
Stephen Jagger: Good job.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Congratulations. Good Job. Ahahaha.
Michael Stephenson: Yeah. And definitely for a certain segment they wanna be congratulated for showing up five days in a row.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): People wanna put on their Facebook page and..
Michael Stephenson: Yeah. They wanna badge.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Yeah. So in new worlds that’s comin’ out us, that’s really interesting. Where can we learn about you guys? Website?
Stephen Jagger: There’s no sign up yet. Payrollhero.com but ah.. We got a blog after the blog Payrollhero.com.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Very cool. You’ll gonna be on Twitter and Google+ and Facebook and stuffs like that.
Stephen Jagger: Yeah. That’s ??? set up. but that’s good the blog is documenting our whole experience in San Francisco. We’re her for four months. So.. Just trying ahh..
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Make it happen..
Stephen Jagger: Yeah..
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Living the dream.
Stephen Jagger: Yeah. Hahaha
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Very cool. Thank you so much for coming up.
Stephen Jagger: Thanks for having us.
Michael Stephenson: Thanks.
Robert Scoble (Interviewer): Great!
-END-
I emailed Robert Scoble a few months ago about meeting up with him while we were in San Francisco to chat about our journey and what we are up to with PayrollHero.com. His schedule is crazy and November 29th 2011 was the first spot he had available. So today, Mike Stephenson and I drove over to the new Rackspace offices in downtown San Francisco to meet with Robert.
Their new offices are really new. They were still setting things up when we got there and Robert was even attaching lights to the interview area that they dedicated to his program.
It was an interesting meeting, we chatted briefly before Robert turned the camera on, and then he went right into asking questions about PayrollHero and doing a live demo. Mike did a great job of showcasing the system, talking about where we are going and the market that we are in.
It was a great experience and I look forward to seeing the video. (sounds like it will be online in the next few days)
Note the signatures on the post – these are the people that he has interviewed thus far in this new location
(L – R) Robert Scoble, Michael Stephenson, Stephen Jagger
Techvibes.com, the Canadian technology blog that covers startups all across Canada wrote a post about PayrollHero and our unique story as to how we arrived in San Francisco. You can see their coverage over at Techvibes.