[Shannan Gove] Look. I think that the moment you worked so hard to win some of these big clients and almost a bit of a blind naivety to say that you can win these clients and to put it out there to say that you wanna be the best in the world and and to have that expectation that we are as well. I think that's there's 2 really important points there. It's around, like, there's one thing saying it, but then the second thing which is harder is to set the expectation that you are, right, and to and to behave like you are and and manage your clients like you are. Like, we we really internally talk about, like, well, what would what would Microsoft be doing in this situation? How would they handle this? Like, we need to set our styles at these levels, right, because, that's who we're now competing with at this level is is these big, big organizations. And so we need to hold ourselves to these account [Kamal Datta] Hey, listeners. Welcome to the next episode on Tech in 26.2 pod, where I chat with Shannon Gove, cofounder of Rosterfy. Rosterfy is a volunteer management platform which supports different events. For example, from charities events to non profits or local or government events to large scale events for colleges or sports federations. They have some very big flagship, customers and events that supported over the years. For example, EuroCup recently or the Super Bowl, as such. And then they support a lot of nonprofits that, are organizing different endurance events as well. In my discussion with Shannon, we focused on the founding journey of RosterFy. Why did they decided to support only volunteer, or how did they focus on volunteers and then build a platform around supporting the volunteer for different events? Where the industry is heading, especially in terms of volunteerism, and also how AI is playing a role, to solve internal as well as helping, Rosterfy customers. I'm sure you'll enjoy the story and this episode. And if you do, don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. Thanks for listening. Welcome, Shannon, to the pod. I'm really excited to have you here. [Shannan Gove] Yeah. Thanks for having me. Great. [Kamal Datta] So Shannon Gove is the cofounder of Rosterfy based in Australia. You started Rosterfy back in 2010, and it's a volunteer management, software that supports a wide range of customers. What did I miss about your introduction? And I know we're gonna talk a lot about Rosterfy. Yeah. [Shannan Gove] Yeah. No worries. It's fine. Look, yeah, it's so our journey started probably even a touch before Rosterfy. So when we're actually at university, Bennett, my cousin actually, and I was studying sports management in Melbourne. And so, again, different to Rosterfy, Fyb, but this is noticing as students studying in sports, there was it really difficult to find a job in sports and you needed to gain experience while you're at university, but that experience is next to impossible to gain unless you knew someone, whatever. People are emailing info at Cricket Australia, You you know it, from back home as well. So that that's where I see when we're at university, we're like, well, we can try and do something about this, and and we ourselves needed experience. So we decided to get a lot of casual work and do a bit of volunteering, this sort of thing. And we realized, hey. There's lots of students like us that need this work. And so I guess through that process, no deliberate, you know, from the outset wanting to start a business, but we just naturally evolved into starting to link motivated students into the events industry and and work and casual and volunteering. And that was from 2010 to 2015 that we we then grew what was Australia's largest event staffing business event workforce where we had 25,000 young Australians on our database from every key university around the country staffing 1500 events a year. But, I guess how this connects into Rastafly is then we we had spreadsheets going everywhere. We're trying to track who was in Queensland, who was in Perth. Australia is a big country. You can't just go and see them, you know, every day. And so we needed to a better way to manage our own mass workforce. And that's where our friend Chris Grant, was sort of doing a sort of software and engineering at university at the time, and we said to him, hey. Come in and build us our first sort of reg form for our own workforce. And then as things go, you're like, oh, hey. That reg form works well. Could you then maybe send a reminder about a shift coming? Oh, cool. Let's do and and how the it then evolved over a couple of years to then be, oh, wow. We've actually built a system here for our own self. And then we had lots of people in the industry saying, can we use that system? We then said no for, like, 12 months, 18 months, and then we realized, hey. Like, the impact we wanna make around the world is helping to connect communities. How do you help good people do good work at scale? And that's where we decided to go all in on Rosterfy from about 2015, 2016 [Kamal Datta] It's a fascinating story. Chris is in NYC, so all all 3 of you, are you based in Australia, or you are cross geographically distributed? No. [Shannan Gove] We're, Bennett and I are based in Melbourne in Australia, and then Chris, has been in New York for probably 7 years. Oh, wow. So you are almost, cofounders in a different continent altogether. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. Absolutely. And it works well given, our revenue across the world is is and customer base is split pretty evenly across the US, the UK, and and Australia as well. So Oh, nice. Or Asia Pacific. So yeah. Oh, that's that's excellent. [Kamal Datta] I know, the the different customers. You you support a very wide range of customers from nonprofits Yeah. To cities, to local governments, to sport federations. How you scale Rastafly to a point that you can actually support those use cases? Because I would think every, vertical of customer that you look at, they probably have their own unique use cases. Right? [Shannan Gove] Yep. Yeah. I think, it's a good question, and focus is so important for a small and scaling business, especially the early days from 2015, 2016 till 2019, we probably only focused on really sports and events. That was the foundation of what we were and volunteering is the biggest number of volunteers are typically found in that area, right, with the FIFA World Cup that we just delivered recently having over 750,000 applicants and the next FIFA World Cup expecting potentially up to 2,000,000 volunteer applications. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's where we were solving a big problem. We signed our 1st Super Bowl back in 2015 or 16, so it's like that's when we focused and that's what we did when we had a very small team. And then in 2019, that's when we got some investment out of the UK and we did a full global analysis of the volunteer market and said what's our biggest TAM, our total addressable market, and where's our biggest areas we can make an impact around the world. And and nonprofits was and and cities and local governments probably sat in 2nd, but nonprofits was one of the largest areas to focus on. And that's where I guess we still cover all of these different diverse, array of customers, but Yeah. Nonprofits at the time was an area that we really wanted to double down on and I guess it's a beauty of where the product is now is that we've taken so much insight and learning from different verticals and industries that it's quite a unique product that it's not just focused on one area and therefore there's no other benefits. Like I'll give you an example, like, cities and local governments, reward recognition is a good example. Reward recognition. Not many cities and governments really do reward recognition. Yeah. Yet for South by Southwest Super Bowl, Champions League, these big events, they invest heavily in reward and recognizing volunteers and making sure when you have 10,000 volunteers, it's really important they come back the next day and the next day and the next day. So that's what you need returning rewards on incentives and coming back. Right? And so we've built out these big modules to help with that automation of rewards. The cities and local governments wouldn't get that experience if we just stayed in our lane and just did cities and local governments. Right. Right. Can you expand a little bit that? [Kamal Datta] Because that's very interesting aspect because I do personally volunteer for a lot of endurance events or other nonprofits too. I do see the lot of times when you volunteer, you do not get that, feel. Like, you just volunteered. Okay. You're done. And Yeah. Move on. How do you actually work make or baked it into the product? [Shannan Gove] Yeah. It's a configurable module, so each customer does it differently. Oh, okay. I'll give you a good example. In the NFL, we work with Miami Dolphins, special teams. In my opinion, every professional team has a a duty to really do this, and that's to help their community via volunteerism. So the Miami Dolphins, I think, at some point had around 20,000 volunteers that volunteered wearing their shirts to help with soup kitchens and all these sorts of things around Miami. And in order to do so, they incentivize volunteers with things like merchandise or tickets or these sorts of things. Right? And because that's an NFL team, then reward recognition that connects very closely with their fans. Right? Right. Right. But a different organization like a Tough Mudder or Spartan Race might be, for every 3rd event you do or every event you do, maybe you get a a race entry. So instead of paying for whatever it might be, a $150, you get a race entry, and you can claim that via maybe a QR code on the checkout of your shift. So reward recognition is very personal to the organization that does it, and so we've built it in a way that's configurable. Oh, nice. [Kamal Datta] Nice. That's great to know. Yeah. I have not volunteered for Dolphins. Maybe I should actually, if I get a Yes. A ticket for the game or if it's a Super Bowl game, that's it's awesome. Yeah. Place to volunteer for sure. Yeah. As I, this podcast, we'll focus quite a bit on endurance sports, Shannon, and and specifically on on the running side. One thing I was curious as you work with wide area of customers, and I think you support lot of run profits who are actually for endurance events, but maybe in running too, what are the different frictions that you see, especially in the volunteer management? Because they're so critical of the success of that events. And and you're playing a very critical piece to make that part successful to make sure that the events are successful itself. What are the frictions that you have seen from your experience and that you are solving to Rosterfy? The frictions of what the volunteer journey? Yeah. From the volunteer journey, challenges that nonprofit face that over the period of time you you have seen. [Shannan Gove] There's lots of different areas. As a platform, we probably have there'd be 20 plus different modules, 25 modules that we help with from recruitment, screening, scheduling, reporting, time and attendance, even payroll for some customers. Oh, okay. Impact reporting, rule and recognition. Like there's so many different modules, right, and each of them serve their own purpose. But if there's one I believe for non profit industry is that I see a lot of organizations crying out saying they don't have enough volunteers and it's not to say they don't, right, everyone always needs more volunteers. What I believe in is that a lot of organizations actually get enough applications, but they don't treat their volunteers well enough, and they don't have the personal one to 1, I guess in terms of automation and response times and personalizing that journey for that volunteer, that they then see a drastic drop off of volunteer applications because that volunteer hasn't been engaged instantaneously and personalized in a way that, you know, if you've signed up, for a specific role, that you make sure that you go on a journey to complete that role compared to a sort of investing the recruitment process in a way. It's about personalizing from the outset so that when that volunteer ends up in that role, they know exactly what they've signed up for in the first place compared to maybe maybe in your experience with other organizations, it's about saying, hey. Come and volunteer for us. And you go through the whole process, and then they end up putting you in a car park. You go, well, I'm just not gonna turn up for that because that's not I don't I wanted to work in the stadium and help volunteers, and that's that's sort of how we help. Interesting. Interesting. [Kamal Datta] One of the things I know I'm personally actually going through this process with New York Road Runners to, you know, run next year's New York City marathon. So they have the 9 plus one programs. So one of them is volunteer. One of the things I have seen, the races that I volunteered or races I participated, is that the volunteers are kinda rushed toward the last moment because probably the use case you mentioned that they struggle to recruit ahead of time before, but it is always the last week is kind of the mad rush that comes in. Is this something that Rosterfy helps the organizers, that that friction point? [Shannan Gove] Yeah. I think, look. Every organization is different. I know New York did a brilliant job as well. But if I look at if I look at, like, a a Super Bowl, if we stay in the events world, that's a 12 month recruitment process. As part of that 12 month recruitment process, there's probably 10 milestones you need to go through to ensure that you are ready come the time the event is there. You know, from, interviews to screening to background checks to to all the way down to shift selection, role preferences, uniform selection, pick up, into, accreditation, all these modules. Right? And so I guess the point I'm trying to get to is around the horses for courses. For each program, you need to go through the necessary, checkpoints, is that we sort of define them, in order to become a qualified volunteer for them to be confident that they're gonna be turning up. But I think now the Super Bowl gets something like a 98, 99% attendance rate from all of their shifts. We just delivered the Euros recently where they had a something very similar. They did over a 1000000 hours of volunteering across Germany over a month, and that it's a similar level of attendance rates as well. So I guess we help drastically with that preparation where you the client builds in the automations of that preparation, okay, compared to them needing to manually do these things and risk something slipping through the cracks, where if you or I were just managing a program with a 1000 volunteers Right. You and I, we are certainly going to miss something. Right? And then you're gonna just that that's an incredibly poor experience to someone that might have given up 6 months of their, you know, life to go through a recruitment process, attend interviews, drive out there, go and do something for them to be forgotten or because it's all manual that it slipped through the cracks. That's not a great experience for volunteers. That is true. That is true. [Kamal Datta] Another area I noticed at Rosterfy is the integration piece, which I think Mhmm. Probably is also very integral part of your success because any organization that is managing volunteer, they need to probably connect it with other aspects of the race or the event. Yeah. How does Rosterfy play that? Because I think it's probably can be very complicated because every organization may have their own set of tools and processes they follow. Is that a challenge for you to solve, or it has become seamless for you now? No. [Shannan Gove] It is. Absolutely. And it's in this day and age, you need to have a center of truth of old data. You can't have different systems all doing different things. It doesn't the the the what does that look like in 2 or 3 years is often the question you ask, and you go, that doesn't look good if everything's different. Right? So Yeah. We actually rebuilt our entire platform about 2 or 3 years ago, to be have an open API, so we plug in very nicely with other platforms for that reason. And and for more context is because we had all of these clients actually asking us to build these modules, right, so they were like go build entries, build ticketing, build accreditation, do all these things and I guess when you're young and sort of growing that business and being like, well what is our, you know, identity, these sorts of things, and we kept coming back to saying we wanted to be the best in the world at mass workforce management. And any second that we spent trying to look at accreditation or something else was a second that we were not spending on being the best at what we wanted to be at. And so that's why we said we need to rebuild our platform to have one focus and that's to be that, and we will integrate to these other platforms very easily. And that's where now we have, I think, 50 plus integrations in the platform. And to your question, a lot of the time now with these nonprofits in particular, it's integrating, you know, two way integration with Salesforce and Microsoft, these sorts of platforms Mhmm. So that, there's a central source of data is often the key that everyone needs. Very very interesting. A related question on the volunteer. I know you are focused on volunteers. Is it the end goal? Because now you can expand into kinda because volunteer is part of a workforce. Right? Mhmm. And why you're focusing on or why volunteers only? Or is it a a transition state for for Rosterfy? No. It's not a transition state. There is a massive problem to solve all around the world, and we are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the volunteering space. It's a we're really passionate about volunteering and the impact it has for the world too. And when you spend time with our customers and our whole team, we have such an I think we've got around 50 employees now around the world who spend time with our customers. You understand why we work in the space that we do. Yes, it can be challenging at times, slower pace than other organizations or other industries, but once you're in, you're in there for for life with these customers because these organizations don't open their doors without volunteers. I see. And so they really have to invest in the volunteer journey. And those organizations, if you put 2 and through your volunteering experience, right, if you put 2 organizations against each other in a sense of saying, well, one organization has a manual way like, you might be doing configuring HubSpot or something like that to manage your volunteers versus Rosterfy, which we had volunteer portals, automated comms, all of these, the better experience mobile app for volunteers, the experience that you are going to get as a volunteer will always be better in Rosterfy. And so that's where the the conversation with our clients again, fast forward 3 years, where do you want to be? How do you want to future proof your volunteer program? I see. So that these volunteers are not leaving or getting a poor experience because it often only takes one moment, Kamal, like if if you're a volunteer and you get lost in that volunteer recruitment because someone forgot about you or you've applied and you spend all this time registering, right, and then you end up at a wanting to help your local retail outlet for, like, a Salvation Army, and they don't call you back because it's all run on whiteboards, you're not gonna go back. But no one's looking at that data to say, where's Kamal gone? They just then try and refill you with the next. And that's where I think that if you're now capturing all that data, essentially, you have automations to remind Kamal to to say where are you at. You're empowering Kamal to know the reason why you haven't got a call is because you haven't done your work in with Children's Check. That's a big problem to solve in volunteerism, and, we are, again, the tip of the iceberg, in that space. I know. [Kamal Datta] Thank you for sharing that. It's it's great to learn a lot about Rosterfy. One question. I know you had talked about some of the flagship customers you have, like, from the Euro to Super Bowl. You just, you know, talk about a lot of organizations, event organization or events that you, support today. I'm sure there was the journey was, not as smooth as it anyone could imagine to it than those customers and all. I'm just curious some, I call it, ocean moments. It's like, okay. Yeah. Where did you miss, and how did you get to where do you get to? [Shannan Gove] Some of the, you know, successes, some of the failures that you want to share along the way that you you captured. I'm very curious to learn. Yeah. I mean, look, there's so many. Right? I don't know. What are some key ones? Look. I think that the moment you worked so hard to win some of these big clients it almost a bit of a blind naivety to say that you can win these clients and to put it out there to say that you want to be the best in the world and and to have that expectation that we are as well. I think that's there's two really important points there. It's around, like, there's one thing saying it, but then the second thing which is harder is to set the expectation that you are, right, and to and to behave like you are and and manage your clients like you are. Like, we we really internally talk about, like, well, what would what would Microsoft be doing in this situation? How would they handle this? Like, we need to set our styles at these levels, right, because, that's who we're now competing with at this level is is these big, big organizations. And so we need to hold ourselves to these accounts. So I think to answer your question, it's around winning some of these really large accounts has been a really large moments. I think seeing the team grow in scale, we have so many team members here from the very beginning that have been here from day 1. Yeah. Seeing the enjoyment they get still in all these meetings we have where we might do a a story about a customer and to see the smiles that the team have and the celebrations when, you know, a client comes back saying how happy they are or the change that Rosterfy has had for their organization. That's what's the sort of stuff that puts a smile on your face, and you just know the exciting thing for our business is that there's so much more ahead of us in that space That there's for everyone that we speak to, there's another 1,000 of them out there that we can still work with. And so that's why we need to stay laser focused. Oh, nice. No. That that that's that's definitely so true. And and if you have folks, you know, with, that long, I'm sure they're getting a lot of value out of it, and it has become part of them also. [Kamal Datta] Yeah. Obviously, you are the founder, so you are steering the ship to the direction you're taking it. So what's next for Rosterfy, Shannon? [Shannan Gove] Yeah. Honestly, just head down, bum up, stay focused on what we're trying to deliver. Like, that's it might be a boring answer, but that's what we're doing. We set ourselves aggressive targets as a business, and we we work hard to hit them. Like, that's that's it. And I think as long as at the at the core of everything we do, we just keep our customers and the human beings in mind too. Like Yeah. We can't get ahead of ourselves looking at metrics, all these sort of things. Like, you have to remember about the human being you're speaking to and how are they feeling as a customer and all these sorts of things. They're really doubling down on that, and and invest we'd continue with probably doing another investment raise shortly just to continue to double down on our growth, especially overseas and in Europe and other other markets, with team members, really smart, people that know a lot more than we do. So as a founder, you can't pretend you have all the answers. And if you do, you you reach a cap that you can never grow any further than your own imagination, I think. And that's where through this investment raise, that we're gonna do is around hiring some we already have amazing people, but to continue to grow and add more, great minds to our team to help us continue to grow, solidify where we are in the market, continue to innovate. That's so important in our market. I think we're really proud of the innovation that we've driven in volunteerism. Like, you know, in 10 years' time, I I think we'll be really proud when we look back and say, like, we have we have single handedly moved volunteering forward because of the impact we've had on the world. And I think that's what our team in our office here and and around the world, they look at, and they it they truly believe that. Yeah. Yeah. No. I think I I I like the word that he used, volunteerism. I think you're you're Yeah. Saying that Rosterfy did something to move that volunteerism forward. One topic probably I could not wrap our conversation without that. As you are a technologist or a Rastafise a technology company as such, I can't wrap up the conversation without talking about AI. How you're Yeah. Thinking AI is actually helping Rusterphi with its goal. [Kamal Datta] As you said, what's next for Rosterfy? Or maybe you can time a little bit all on the industry as well as you're looking at supporting your customers. I guess there's 2 main reasons of AI for our organization. 1 is internal, and 1 is external. So for internal, how do we reduce the amount of time an admin spends in tasks that can AI can assist with? [Shannan Gove] Just this week, helping with things like tender responses, and we have, you know, central document repository where we can then AI can help, pull a lot of, for example, lots of technical information, like, are you compliant and x, y, and zed. AI tools really help to automate this work that, you know, you'd maybe a team member spending a day doing. AI can produce a document that's 75% complete in a matter of minutes, and then you're then spending the time to personalize and work on it. So that's that's one example of many in our business where we use AI note taking other areas. So that's internal, and then external is around the product and how does how do we use AI to help our clients get a better outcome in their volunteer program quite simply. And there's so many different ways you can look at it. We have a, like, a a team here focused on AI and and how we can continue to innovate and roll it into each sort of product release, little elements of it to test and learn. You've got to keep trying something. I see. Right. And and one example might be, in dashboarding and reporting of volunteer impact. So, having an AI overlay with that, reporting and impact so that you can start to get real intelligence out of your program, that might be an another example of how AI could be used. Oh, nice. So you're already on top of it, looks like, internal as well as helping your customers. You're you're leveraging AI. No. No. No. No. There's there's no way you're on top of it. I don't think, and I think you can't have the attitude to say you're ever on top of anything. Like, you always need to not a chip on your shoulder. That's the wrong word, but you always need to there's always so much more to learn and continue to try and test and do. Right? And and AI is such an evolving beast that, yeah, that's why we just need to stay keep the finger on the pulse. We're spending a lot of time with Google and Microsoft right now to continue to learn. Like, our whole dev team, we flew them all up, and and we had a big conference and focused on AI. Like, we are investing in learning is probably what I'd say. Oh, nice. Oh, actually, that's a great approach. What I mean by on top of it means you are already started to think about it to to Yes. Leverage how it can help you and your customers, so from from that point of view. As you see a lot of data, Shannon, across all the volunteers, across market, across event categories, are there any trends that kinda have have you noticed, especially in the volunteer, market as such, or as as you support wide variety of customers that you can call out? There's lots of different ones. I guess if I focus specifically on Rosterfy the trends that we see is is around automation of tasks And that's where we we're seeing, like, a 50 to sometimes 75 percent reduction of time that our clients were spending manually, emailing, checking things. Has that person done a work in with children's sake? That time is now, nonexistent because the the, the the platform with rules and automations takes control of that. So that I mean, that's one trend that I guess I see when I focus specifically on Rosterfy. The more industry wide trends that people keep talking about post COVID volunteer numbers dropping. I'm I get a little bored hearing that, I suppose, because all I ever hear is people talk about problems and no one no one really talking about solutions. And so we're very much focused on solutions and working with our clients to solve them. So that's that's where my head's at. No. That that that's a very good way of looking at, for sure. Well, it is great chatting with you, Shannon. [Kamal Datta] Thank you so much for your time and sharing, the story of Rosterfy and where it's heading, and also some glimpse into the industry as well. [Shannan Gove] Thank you so much. No. Thanks for having me, and and well done on the pod, mate. It's great. Keep it up, and, yeah, thanks for having us along.