The RotaCloud Story: Interview with the Founders

Our three founders hit The Big Green Button™ on 6th June 2014, launching RotaCloud. Here we are interviewing them on how far we've come, 11 years, 70 employees, and over 250,000 users later.

Let’s set the scene.

It’s 2013. David’s in York, running a bespoke software engineering business from his bedroom. Joel and James are fresh out of university and fresh in student debt, both living with their parents. Then, Joel’s sister, Annie, drives in for a shift that she wasn’t told had changed...

What sparked it all

Joel and David were working together on another tech idea before RotaCloud’s conception. But Annie, rightfully disgruntled (to put it lightly) and expressing her frustrations about her changed shift to her family, left Joel thinking, “Huh. It’d be quite good if you could see that online…”

With the idea sparked, the more Joel and David thought about it, the more the idea grew. It started but didn’t stop at just building rotas. Managing annual leave. Tracking attendance. Prepping payroll. It just kept growing.

“We just cracked on building it, didn’t we?” said David.

The first steps

With James on board, the three met weekly to work on it and, after six to nine months of Orange Wednesdays, Pizza Express, and a lot of trial and error with building RotaCloud, they scrapped their first version.

“We went down a rabbit hole trying to reinvent the wheel,” David said. “But then we realised we just needed to make something simple, something that worked.”

They decided to focus on simplicity, and it wasn’t long until they had something to launch – and to be noticed.

Hitting GO and crossing the street from their shared house to fetch a celebratory meal deal from the garage was one thing. It was receiving an enquiry from PeopleHR, a major HR software provider, about a partnership (less than two weeks after launching!) that truly showed them how real this side project had become. 

With an established business seeing RotaCloud’s value so early on, being picked out over other systems, and sending more customers their way… Well, our founders couldn’t believe their luck. There was no better signal to them that they were doing something right. 

Riding that wave

The three sat at their computers in amazement as they watched email notifications for each free trial, and when card details were entered. Free trials kept ticking up, and so did subscribers. It was exhilarating. People were actually paying for something they’d built – and the demand was even bigger than they thought it’d be.

All of a sudden, the scale of the opportunity became apparent. What first felt like a niche tool became something that millions of businesses could really benefit from.

This part-time side project swapped with their full-time, and the lives of living on their overdrafts (“Living the dream,” as Joel put it) and 50p Asda pizzas would soon be in the past. 

Eight months in, a true turning point came: RotaCloud began to cover their rent and bills.

A LOT of trial and error

Joel, David, and James did every single job, learning (a lot) as they went.

They’d built a company almost by accident. They figured out how to conduct a demo when customers asked for one. They needed to start interviewing people (from their living room, no less) when none of them had conducted an interview before. 

The more years that ticked by, the more the RotaCloud team grew and the more customers they’d see out in the wild. Gone were the days of building for fun and driving between the office and their shared house in their shared Citroen C1. They hit their first million in ARR–

(David: I know exactly when it was.)

(Joel: When was it?)

(David: The 2nd of July, 2018, 4 PM-ish. I've got it written down because it sent an email when we went over it.)

–And won Employer of the Year in both 2021 and 2022, having built not only a product people love to use but a company people love working at.

“From our very first hire,” James said. “I really wanted to make RotaCloud a place that people would enjoy working. I've had a few jobs in the past where I would turn up in the morning and be watching the clock until the end of the day, and I didn’t want people to feel like that here.”

Welcome meals for new hires, a relaxed office environment, flexibility in hours, paid breaks and development – these merely scratch the surface. They’ve cemented a culture to be proud of.

Proudest moments

Other than the workplace they’ve built, seeing their product out in the wild over the years is one of their biggest ‘pinch me’ moments. Whether it’s seeing the customers’ companies on the high street, people opening the app in front of them, or even the reviews on the App Store – they couldn’t be prouder of where RotaCloud is today.

Another moment was during the COVID-19 pandemic. While a particularly challenging time, they managed to keep everyone employed and even helped with the vaccine centres and AstraZeneca trials, with the practices using RotaCloud for their scheduling.

They made this, and people are using it. It’s helping people. That’ll be the proudest moment of all.

Now?

From accidentally making a business from a fun side project to hitting milestone after milestone, neither Joel, David, nor James could have predicted RotaCloud’s journey. 

James added, “I think the original goal was for us all to pay ourselves a reasonable salary, be able to work from home, and just do our own thing. But it went past that.”

Now, over a decade later, RotaCloud continues to grow. Over 70 people work here. More than 250K people use our product every week. Annie, Joel’s sister, whose shift mishap helped them spark RotaCloud, now works as RotaCloud’s Operations Executive. 

Another decade, who knows? “Hitting a million users would be nice,” Joel admitted. 

Aside from adapting to changing work attitudes and legislations, all in all, their goal for RotaCloud is the same as it was back in 2013: to make work simple.

Eleven years in, RotaCloud is doing just that for thousands of growing businesses.

They couldn’t have predicted where RotaCloud could have gone, but we like where we’re going.