1. What is the innovation?
Staybil is an award-winning platform that creates employee stability by unlocking human mobility. Our proprietary SaaS allows businesses in retail, hospitality, and mobile services to optimise their staff distribution by ensuring employees work as close to home as possible.
The idea: A woman works at McDonald’s and rides the train past not one or two, but three other McDonald’s restaurants on her commute. This story is incredibly common, and since we have entered this space, almost every person I speak with has a similar story to share from their own or a loved-one’s life. And since then, we’ve validated the problem by executing large case studies on hundreds of employees from McDonalds and Coles.
2. What benefits does the innovation bring?
Commuting is terrible. For humans, the planet, and also businesses. By optimising staff distribution and ensuring employees work closest to home, Staybil addresses the root causes of commuter congestion. Our software uses transport network data, Google maps API, and smart HR data to create huge network optimisations for services companies, reducing up to 17% of employee turnover and associated costs.
For decades, academic and media publications have reported the impact of commuting on society, business, and the individual worker. Unsurprisingly, they unanimously find that commuting is bad for all three, leading to lost productivity, negative health effects, and increases in worker turnover. Unfortunately, there is little practical recourse aside from encouraging telecommuting and aggressively expanding our infrastructure, which provides limited relief for the vast segment of the workforce that still must use the roads and public transport systems every day to deliver important services from retail to healthcare, maintenance, police and emergency services.
Recent published studies also prove that shorter commutes translate to lower job turnover and associated economic and social benefits. Staybil proposes a dramatic solution to these challenges.
Businesses benefit by:
- reducing turnover-related costs by up to 17%,
- increasing employee engagement and
- positive social policy, good PR.
Employees benefit because working closer to home allows shorter commute times. This has a host of associated benefits such as more time for family, education, recreation, and reduced spending on transportation. Further, society and government benefit by reduced traffic congestion, lower strain on the transport system, and reduced
health care costs.
3. What commercial success and/or benefit to society has it achieved?
We won the Academy Xi Pitch X competition, placed in the semi finals of the StartCon Pitch competition, earned grants from Jobs for NSW MVP program and the NRIP, and were offered a spot in one of Australia’s most competitive accelerator programs.
StayBil is currently being trialled by beta customer, with two pilot partners already signed on.
4. What lessons learnt can you share?
Winston Churchill said it best, “If you are going through hell, keep going”.
The most critical skills a startup founder can possess are persistence, clear communication, clarity of vision, and willingness to take feedback and advice. Learn to communicate and pitch your vision effectively, and ensure that it consistently evolves as your view of reality becomes more detailed. And don’t forget to network and offer help to anyone that needs it. You’ll be surprised how it all comes back around in the end.
5. How many new jobs has this innovation created?
3…so far!