ShiftPosts’ pre-seed raise is valued at a $4 million cap with a 20% discount. Even for an early-stage company with an untested product, this valuation is quite low — making it an appealing opportunity for potential investors. The early stage of the company does elicit a word-of-caution. Given its pre-revenue state, it is difficult to predict just how successful its platform could turn out to be in the long term. However, due to its low valuation, ShiftPosts’ price score is quite high.

While nowhere near the size of the American pharmaceutical market, Canada has a robust, government-financed healthcare system, and pharmaceutical sales overall have reached $27 billion as of 2017. As it prepares to break into the much larger American markets, ShiftPosts can certainly compensate for its startup costs by cutting into the Canadian market and presenting a cost-effective alternative to expensive and inefficient staffing agencies. 

Current trends — such as the ongoing digitization of services as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the “graying effect” that will increase demand for healthcare services in the coming decades — could end up expanding ShiftPosts’s addressable market and the market overall. However, an expanding market also means increased competition. It’s still unclear at this time just how much market dominance ShiftPosts could attain, especially if more mature companies try to expand into workforce management software. Thus, the company’s market score is rather low.

While ShiftPosts has its strengths as a potential investment, the credentials of its team are somewhat lackluster compared to other evaluated startups. Elizabeth Cooper and Dave McLean serve as the company president and CEO, respectively. Cooper — who is an advisor for a number of other projects in education and environmental management — holds a B.A.Sc. in Biochemistry and Economics from the University of California. She specializes in working with young companies, of which ShiftPosts certainly is one. McLean holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacy Administration from the University of Minnesota. While he has served in leadership roles with United Resource Networks and other medical companies, he is not a big name in the industry.

ShiftPosts co-founders Bartek Jach and David Beynon are similarly unproven names. Jach is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, earning a Masters in Business Administration. He worked six years as a project manager and interned with McKinsey prior to his involvement with ShiftPosts. Beynon has spent a decade in project management and analysis roles. 

A lack of industry experience and past entrepreneurial endeavors has made ShiftPosts’ team score its lowest across all five metrics.

ShiftPosts, at first glance, doesn’t seem to have much that makes it stand out from its competitors. It holds no patents, and its chosen market is competitive. However, the company has secured a number of strong partnerships with companies like McKesson Canada, PharmaChoice, and the British Columbia Pharmacy Association, representing thousands of stores. The company also has pilot programs in place with WalMart and CostCo, major U.S. pharmaceutical suppliers, and these relationships have the company well-positioned to expand its slowly-growing revenue. Workforce management in the gig economy is also a difficult challenge to address, and early results seem to indicate that ShiftPosts’ program is doing so ably. ShiftPosts’ middle of the road differentiators score is indicative of its early success balanced against the potential for a rival company to create a better solution.

While the company is at a pre-revenue stage, it has seen some early success in 2019, with $37,464 in net sales. The company has a long way to go before it can compensate for its up-front expenses — its net loss last year was $680,297. Still, it is significant for a company at this stage in its development to be taking in revenue at all. The company projects that it has sufficient runway for at least another year. 

ShiftPosts also has significant partnerships and pilot programs already in place, as mentioned in the previous section. This early traction paired with the beginning of sales has netted ShiftPosts an above average performance score.

At this early stage of development, there are a lot of companies that don’t make it, and proven, experienced leadership can make a real difference in which companies succeed and which don’t. ShiftPosts is lacking somewhat in that area. Additionally, its business plan involves cutting out giants in the healthcare staffing industries — companies with significantly more technological and human resources to challenge ShiftPosts’s emergence into the market. ShiftPosts’ chosen field is also a turbulent one, subject to rapid technological innovation and product change. If the company fails to make a splash in its early days — or finds its eventual push into the U.S. market blocked by large competitors in the fierce U.S. healthcare market — it could find its early progress abruptly stalled. Investors should bear in mind the risk in trusting an untested team to deliver results.

Investors should also be aware of potential financial challenges facing the company. As of October 2020, the company had yet to file its 2019 tax return. In addition, the company holds several hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. This is not unusual for a startup, but combined with the late tax filing, indicates a pressing need to perform well in this raise in order to ramp up marketing and development efforts.

There’s no question that healthcare is an expanding industry, and that companies are hungry for digital workflow management. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this trend. By building on its established partnerships and improving its product’s user-friendliness and reliability, ShiftPosts could very well establish itself as a premier workflow management product for pharmaceuticals.

ShiftPosts brings an end-to-end workforce management solution to the pharmaceutical industry. Its website enables pharmacies to schedule shifts, account for employee schedules, and fill gaps with pre-vetted members of the gig economy, all at a lower price point than dominant healthcare staffing agencies. ShiftPosts declares its product to be all-encompassing, including cultural and personality aspects of potential workers, which it believes are not addressed by competing solutions. 

The product is largely untested — but it has started to generate revenue, as the company’s strong partnerships with pharmaceuticals bear early fruit. ShiftPosts hopes to further develop its product offering in the Canadian pharmaceutical market before eventually expanding into the U.S. pharmaceutical and healthcare industries as a whole.

ShiftPosts faces an uphill battle with an untested team. Still, an expanding gig economy and a healthcare industry desperate to reduce costs may prove to be just the opening needed for this early-stage company to grow and thrive. For these reasons, the KingsCrowd investment team gave ShiftPosts a Neutral rating.

For questions regarding the KingsCrowd staff pick or ratings for this company, please reach out to support@kingscrowd.com.

Analysis written by Benjamin Potts.