Saint Paul-based
ThisClicks, a mobile technology company in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood that specializes in “workforce solutions” apps, recently received
$4 million in new funding from three venture capital firms. In its sixth year of operations, ThisClicks is hitting its stride.
Founder and CEO Chad Halvorson aims to boost the company’s sales force and press ahead with the rollout of its time-clock app,
WageBase. He’s also planning to move to a larger office in Saint Paul, and double the company’s employee headcount from 15 to 30 by December.
WageBase is ThisClicks’s second product. WageBase is a startlingly simple concept: a remote time-clock app that lets hourly employees clock into and out of work from anywhere. (A GPS tracker ensures that they’re doing so from the workplace, not bed.) The app is especially useful for big diffuse workplaces, such as construction sites.
The building blocks of Halvorson’s company have been in place for a decade and a half. As a part-time grocery jockey in the late 1990s, Halvorson grew sick of making extra trips to the store to check his weekly schedule. He dreamed up an online employee-scheduling program—
WhenIWork—that would eliminate this problem. He shopped a prototype version of the app with a contact at the Mall of America, but it didn’t pan out.
“There were just too many barriers,” he says. “Many people still lacked high-speed Internet and the mobile space didn’t really exist yet.”
Halvorson bided his time with other projects. He founded a Web consulting firm in college. In 2005 he partnered with a video design company to found Meditech, a “full-service development and marketing agency for the medical device industry.” Meditech eventually acquired Boston Scientific, St. Jude’s, and Medtronic as clients.
In 2008, with the mobile revolution in full swing, Halvorson gave his teenage dream another shot. He built a new version of WhenIWork—he’d registered its Internet domain back in 1998—and used his own funds to build an organic business-development campaign driven largely by content marketing and word of mouth. He describes this approach as “consumerized B2B marketing.”
“We don’t want to market directly to the guy in the suit,” says Halvorson. Instead, ThisClicks focuses on scheduling managers and supervisors at small- to medium-size companies, counting on WhenIWork’s obvious benefits to impress upper management and engender long-term contracts.
In fact, WhenIWork has taken off—the app now counts recognizable businesses like 1-800-GOT-JUNK? as clients—without a traditional sales force or seed funding. Halvorson hired his first business development staffers in late 2013, and the recent capital infusion represents ThisClicks’s first debt tranche.
This was deliberate. “Before we could consider raising money, we needed to figure out how to make money,” says Halvorson. “When you raise money first, it’s easier to learn how to spend money.” To ensure that his company would survive if it couldn’t find decent financing terms, he vowed not to raise outside funds until ThisClicks was taking in at least $1 million in annual revenues.
It helps that, unlike many tech entrepreneurs, the Minnesota-raised Halvorson took a low-key approach to success. “We weren’t interested in breakneck growth” to start, he says. Figuring out how to appeal to hourly workers and schedulers was far more important.
What’s the endgame for ThisClicks? On this point, Halvorson sounds a lot more ambitious. “We want our apps to be the most important tools in employees’ and managers’ pockets,” he says. “We’re focused on being the premier provider of cloud-based workforce solutions.”