Supp has been a game changer for venues and hospitality staff, with the app enabling them to connect in real time to fill shifts and solve this constant challenge for both, propelling the app toward stellar growth and international expansion.
Supp is a jobs platform for people in hospitality that is reinventing how workers and managers connect, which presents a strong opportunity to improve the lives of people working in the hospitality industry.
Small business owners get reliable access to staff when they are short, reducing the temptation to overwork their core team.
Supp also provides a helping hand with compliance and administration, with an electronic payment method that makes finding and hiring seamless.
The Supp prototype launched in 2019, with constant tinkering and improvement propelling the app toward stellar growth and international expansion.
“Raising with Birchal meant that new investors could be part of our network, or become Supp users. We knew that baristas, business owners and hospitality workers could become a Supp evangelist and an ambassador for our brand.”
JORDON MURRAY – SUPP CEO
Solving the staffing challenge
Supp uses mobile technology to match thousands of under-employed hospitality workers with job vacancies in real time. Its mission is simple – to be the hospitality’s go to platform for all temporary and permanent job leads, knowledge sharing and business intelligence.
On Supp, a worker can decide when to side hustle or secure their next permanent job. It’s completely up to them.
Businesses rely on Supp to find workers for single shifts to fill surprise roster gaps often created by sickness, find replacement staff to give staff a break and for extra staff for unexpected surges in customer demand.
Supp earns revenue by charging 12 per cent service fee on the total shift volume processed, while workers are able to utilise a freemium model.
“Not that long ago, hospitality staff were at times pulled in from the owners’ extended network during busy periods, with independent venues paying cash at the end of the day out of their takings, which exposes hospitality organisations to tax issues, risky for any business,” explains Supp co-founder and CEO Jordan Murray, who co-founded the app with Cam Reid.
“Staffing has always been tough, but it became nearly impossible during the pandemic, but now, Supp helps venues future-proof their organisation so they can deal with the day to day issues of managing staff such as roster gaps, leave requests or unexpected busy periods,” Murray says.
The app includes a rating system, enabling the hospitality worker to gain reviews that ultimately lead on to more shifts and greater bargaining power in other venues. “We want to improve the lives of hospitality workers at any stage of their career,” he says.
Raising with Birchal
Like so many early stage startups, the capital needed to grow can be hard to come by, with banks often reluctant to lend to fledgling businesses.
Keen to forge his own path, Murray bootstrapped the build of the app in the beginning, with loans from family and friends who shared the broader vision happy to stump up to get Supp to market.
But when the time came to seek serious capital, Birchal was an obvious choice. “At the end of the day, technology is worthless without the network, especially for a marketplace like Supp,” he says.
Word spread, and new workers and businesses signed up to Supp. “Raising with Birchal meant that new investors could be part of our network, or become Supp users. We knew that baristas, business owners and hospitality workers could become a Supp evangelist and an ambassador for our brand,” Murray says.
The equity crowdfunding raise was a raging success, which in turn opened the doors to significant growth. Supp raised $450,000 from 316 investors, and has been reporting an eye-watering +2200% growth since October 2020.
The growth has been phenomenal. In 2022, Supp reached the stage where there was $1 million worth of shifts being posted to the platform per week. It has also achieved significant growth in user numbers, ballooning to around 80,000 workers across Australia and the US and 5,000 venues.
The platform now has 30,000 monthly workers and managers relying on the product every day. “We’re become part of these people’s lives,” Murray says.
And on the back of the Birchal raise, Supp has launched into Los Angeles and New York, which represents significant forward growth. “The funding provided us with a bit of the padding that we needed to take the next step in our journey,” Murray says.
Despite such phenomenal growth, he insists that the team is still at the start of the growth curve in many ways, which says a lot about the benefits of remaining humble and level-headed in the cut-throat world of business.
While the jobs platform has been based on a business model for the hospitality sector, the technology could apply to other industry verticals, such as retail, which presents an opportunity for further growth down the track.
Supp's advice & insights
Be prepared to roll up your sleeves
Other brands contemplating an equity crowdfunding raise would be wise to remember that there’s only so much preparation you can do prior to launch, and then you’ve got to send the campaign live and start running it, Murray says.
Other brands contemplating an equity crowdfunding raise would be wise to remember that there’s only so much preparation you can do prior to launch, and then you’ve got to send the campaign live and start running it, Murray says.
Know your customer & keep evolving
Building a business from scratch requires constant iterations and improvements. The Supp team has spent countless hours figuring out the best product market fit so that we aren’t trying to scale a product that isn’t fit for purpose.
“A common trap of founders that raise millions is that they don’t understand what’s wrong with their product. You see it time and time again,” he says.
Set your budget right for your goals
The Supp team tried to save a few bucks by making their own branding video to sit on the Birchal website, but admit it wasn’t anywhere near professional enough. They ended up hiring a professional and were thrilled with the results. “It ended up being a very worthwhile investment,” Murray says.
He recommends that other brands contemplating a raise set aside a small marketing budget to coincide with the capital raise.
“We didn’t have the budget for marketing. We were relying on the community using the app to have a good experience and to tell their friends. From there, we could see the benefit of having a community around our product that truly aligned with our interests,”
But there are marketing activities you can undertake on a shoestring budget, he points outs. “We printed off flyers with QR codes and handed them out in shopping malls and we just tried about everything else we could think of that was affordable to get the word out there that we had launched,” Murray says.
