Media Coverage

• Forbes Korea 2020-02 [2030 Power Leader | IT-TECH] Seungwon Shin, CEO of Shiftee

* Excerpts from the interview

Seungwon Shin, CEO of Shiftee, a company that has developed a workforce management solution used by 50,000 businesses worldwide, has yet to graduate from university. Having dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur from a young age, he founded Shiftee after an initial startup failure during his college years and is now rapidly growing into a successful young business leader.

With significant shifts in corporate culture and the introduction of the 52-hour workweek, various work arrangements have emerged beyond traditional fixed-hour and fixed-location jobs. Companies now embrace flexible work, remote work, fieldwork, and shift-based work, necessitating more advanced workforce management and approval processes.

Despite lacking traditional work experience, 27-year-old Seungwon Shin identified the needs of corporate clients. He developed Shiftee, a cloud-based workforce management software, and successfully supplied it to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) globally through a B2B model. Within just three years, Shiftee had expanded to 50,000 businesses. The demand for workforce management software was high, yet surprisingly, few providers existed in the domestic market. Taekkyung Lee, CEO of Mashup Angels, remarked, “Despite his young age, Seungwon Shin has an exceptional ability to analyze the market and execute plans. By engaging with hundreds of domestic companies, he thoroughly assessed industry-specific needs and market potential, setting the right direction for his business.”

Shin also had a stroke of luck—the enforcement of the 52-hour workweek accelerated the adoption of his solution, driving an extraordinary 1,000% revenue growth in 2019 compared to the previous year. What makes him even more noteworthy is that he taught himself to develop Shiftee's server, web app, mobile app, and website from scratch.

To understand Shin’s trajectory, it is essential to look at the period before and after he founded Shiftee in July 2016. His father, a businessman, had a profound influence on him. Watching his father frequently travel abroad for work, Shin harbored an early but vague aspiration to start his own business. This led him to constantly explore potential ventures.

In 2008, when he was in middle school, he immigrated to Canada with his parents. He later became an ordinary university student majoring in economics at McGill University.

“Economics wasn’t really my passion. I considered a fitness business because of my love for sports, but as a student, I had no capital. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg inspired me. I realized that software development was something I could start without any external help. It was the only field where I could build something from nothing. So, I bought coding books, taught myself, and started small projects. My first creation was a website introducing weight training techniques.”

Shin, an avid football player and weightlifting enthusiast, often received training inquiries from friends. This inspired him to compile workout information into a website.

His second challenge was developing a real-time translation app. As an exchange student at National Taiwan University, he faced language barriers and sought to solve them with software. He built an app that provided automated voice translations for phone and video calls in Chinese, English, and Korean using the Scala programming language. He extensively studied research papers and machine learning books, spending a year and a half on development before launching the app, named “Globl,” on the App Store.

“I realized that translation services must handle linguistic complexity, and my app wasn’t perfect. A business can only succeed if people are willing to pay for it, and I learned that an imperfect product wouldn't attract paying users. That experience taught me that a successful business should address actual market needs rather than personal ambitions.”

When it was time to return to Canada after 18 months in Taiwan, Shin didn’t want to give up his entrepreneurial dream. Determined to try again, he moved to Korea in June 2016 and founded Shiftee the following month.

Shiftee wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment idea. It stemmed from his experience working as a chef at a Japanese restaurant in Canada to pay for his tuition. He noticed that small businesses and SMEs struggled with employee scheduling and time management.

“Workforce management is necessary everywhere. In North America, many companies were already using IT solutions for this purpose, and I was closely observing the growth of the B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) market. However, in Korea, labor hours were not as strictly regulated, and despite a clear demand for workforce management software, there were virtually no local providers. That’s when I decided to step in.”

Developing Shiftee was easier than the translation app. Within three months, he released a web version, followed by a mobile version three months later. Initially, the service was designed for small businesses based on his own experiences.

“The first six months in Korea, developing and launching Shiftee alone, were tough and lonely. I had to constantly tackle unexpected challenges. But my previous development experience gave me the resilience to push through.”

One of his biggest influences was The Lean Startup, a book that emphasizes learning from market responses rather than building a perfect product from the start.

“Reflecting on my failure with Globl, I read The Lean Startup. I realized that spending too much time on product development wasn’t necessary. The key was to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly and refine it based on market feedback. That insight allowed me to release Shiftee in record time.”

However, launching a product didn’t guarantee revenue. He needed market validation. To test demand, he personally visited restaurants and convenience stores near Seoul National University of Education’s subway station, pitching Shiftee to business owners. By day, he conducted sales and marketing; by night, he incorporated feedback into product improvements. Six months later, he pivoted from targeting small business owners to enterprises. “Initially, we charged 1,000 KRW per managed employee, generating about 10,000 KRW per business per month. However, small business owners found even this cost burdensome.”

Then, in July 2018, the 52-hour workweek was implemented, opening up opportunities to serve larger enterprises. Shiftee’s first corporate client, a staffing agency in Busan, reached out after discovering the company’s blog. This unexpected breakthrough helped Shiftee transition into a B2B enterprise solution. By the end of 2017, investment offers started coming in. Despite struggling financially—with office rent overdue for two months and only 130,000 KRW left in the bank—Shiftee secured 100 million KRW in seed funding from Mashup Angels.

In 2018, the company received an additional 1 billion KRW investment from international venture capital firms Big Basin Capital and Walden International. In June 2019, Shiftee was selected for the TIPS program by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups. Today, over 50,000 companies, including major corporations like Kakao, WeWork, SK Networks, Mirae Asset, YTN, Daewoong Pharmaceutical, Siemens, and EY Han Young, use Shiftee. About 15% of its customers are international.

Shiftee plans to scale up in 2020, increasing its workforce to 40 employees by year-end.

Shin recognizes the profound impact workforce management solutions can have on corporate culture. He hopes Shiftee will not only benefit managers but also improve employees’ quality of life and work efficiency. He wants to be known as “a young entrepreneur striving for better corporate culture.”

Shiftee provides schedule management, leave management, time tracking, workflow, report and payroll through its website and mobile app. Employees can clock in and out via location or Wi-Fi, with a one-device-per-user system preventing proxy check-ins. Location data is collected only when the employee clocks in.

The IT-Tech sector’s promising leaders for 2030 were selected with the help of eight judges, including venture capitalists and executives, over two weeks from December 30, 2019, to January 13, 2020. Each judge nominated up to five candidates, and the final selection was based on the highest number of repeated recommendations.

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