No VC: This one-man startup made S$500k profitably in its 1st year

Eleven years ago, En Lerk Law, then a university student, was in Melbourne’s central business district.

He was struggling to find a part-time job. More than two dozen businesses turned down his resume that summer.

Staffie founder En Lerk Law / Photo credit: En Lerk Law

Law finally joined a service crew at a restaurant where he learned to balance two hot bowls of ramen. But his struggle to find a part-time job later inspired him to create Staffie, a one-man army that earned S$500,000 (US$370,000) in revenue in its first year of operations.

“I like building things that help sort problems for people. This is what drives me,” Law tells Tech in Asia. Though he studied biomedical engineering, coding websites and apps has been a hobby since he was a teenager.

While Law worked for corporations after graduation, he later co-founded a web designing consultancy called Gridhaus where he built websites for small businesses. While that company is not active anymore, he still provides maintenance work to its customers.

He then took a break and shifted his focus to creating a startup. “I made it quite clear to myself that it needs to be a profitable business from the start,” he says.

In late 2021, newspapers in Singapore put up job postings for restaurants as the safety measures brought about by Covid-19 were relaxed. The F&B industry opened its doors again and saw a huge staff shortage.

With this, Law realized that restaurants needed permanent staff members to stabilize their businesses. Workers, on the other hand, wanted flexibility to work where they wanted to and earn what they needed.

Prototyping with WhatsApp

His starting point to addressing this gap was to find a way to connect businesses with freelance workers. He sought to understand the process before automating it.

“In most new startups, when you test ideas, you need to do guerilla marketing,” Law says. For Staffie, he advertised on Facebook and Instagram. Once customers signed up, he would welcome them via a text message and ask them to send their requirements via WhatsApp.

Once businesses and workers submitted their requirements, Law would manually match them with each other and create shifts and wages that both sides agreed on.

He did it this way for a few weeks before using his capital and coding experience to automate the entire operation into the Staffie platform.

Solving the no-show problem