About PreShifter: Restaurant People, Building for the Shift
About PreShifter

Not a tech company that found restaurants.Restaurant people who built the tech.

PreShifter began on the floor: server stations, expo lines, the ten minutes before doors. We watched good nights leak away through missed 86s, buried allergen notes, and briefs nobody could find. So we built the tool we wish we'd had when we were in your shoes.

✶ Made on the line in NYC ✓ Operator-built ✓ Staff-first, always
A restaurant crew mid pre-shift huddle, tense before service
4:45 PM · Somewhere in NYC

The huddle half the team missed, and a plan that was wrong by six.

Where it started

Born between services, not between funding rounds.

Every one of us has stood in that huddle. The specials recited from memory, the allergen note scribbled in a margin, the whiteboard that was right at 4 PM and wrong by 6. We've been the server who learned a special was sold out from the guest who ordered it, and the expo who found out about a recipe change one plate too late.

For years the industry called these people problems. They never were. Restaurants bought serious software for payroll, purchasing, and the point of sale, and left the shift itself, the hours that decide everything, to paper and shouting. That's a systems problem. And systems problems can be fixed.

So we fixed the one we knew best. PreShifter is the layer we kept sketching after close: the brief in every pocket, the 86 that reaches the whole floor in seconds, the menu answer two taps away. Before, during, and after: the whole life of a shift, finally in one place.

What we believe

"Hospitality doesn't have a talent problem. It has a timing problem."

01
The shift is the atomic unit.

Revenue, reviews, retention: every number this industry tracks is won or lost one service at a time. Build for the shift and everything upstream improves.

02
Information should move at service speed.

If the floor learns it after the guest does, the software already failed. Real-time isn't a feature of PreShifter. It's the premise.

03
Frontline talent deserves front-office tools.

The people carrying the night are skilled professionals. Their tools should treat them like it: sharp, fast, and free for every one of them.

How we build

Values with skin in the game.

Six rules, written on the floor. Every release is measured against them.

01 · FLOOR-FIRST

Lived, then built.

No hypothetical features.

Everything we ship starts as a problem we've personally eaten on a real floor, not a hypothesis in a pitch deck.

02 · STAFF FREE, FOREVER

No seat taxes.

Adoption can't hit a paywall.

Every server, cook, barback, and host rides free. A tool for the whole team that only some of the team can open isn't a tool.

03 · LIVE BY DEFAULT

4:50 PM–proof.

A brief is a living document.

Menus change after print. Plans change after lineup. If it can't update in real time, it was never really true.

04 · FRIDAY-RUSH SIMPLE

Five minutes or it's too heavy.

Your busiest night is our benchmark.

If it needs a training manual, it doesn't ship. Setup in minutes, mastery in a shift. That's the bar.

05 · ONE ROOM, ONE TRUTH

Real teamwork.

FOH, BOH, bar, office.

Information flows freely and everyone contributes. One thread, shared context, zero "nobody told me."

06 · QUIET SOFTWARE

Signal over noise.

Calm services, sharp handoffs.

We optimize for fewer, better pings, not screen time. The best shift is one where the app disappears into the work.

The road so far

From a napkin sketch to every pocket.

The napkin era

The same failures, night after night, become a spec.

Briefs drafted after close. Notes on the pass. A growing conviction that the industry's most important hours deserved real software.

First service

The first real pre-shift runs on PreShifter, in NYC.

One restaurant, one team code, one published brief. The whiteboard stays blank, and stays blank the next night, too.

iOS launch

PreShifter lands on the App Store.

PreShift Builder, Team Chat, and push notifications: the daily game plan, distributed to every phone before doors.

The layer grows

Menu Intelligence and the Live 86 Board join the stack.

Every dish deconstructed and two taps away. Every 86 on every phone in seconds. The binder retires.

Android launch NOW

Every pocket covered.

Mixed-platform crews, one live picture of tonight. iOS and Android, both native, both real-time.

Next ON THE ROADMAP

SmartShift: briefs that draft themselves.

Every shift you run builds your restaurant's operating memory. SmartShift turns it into auto-drafted briefs and per-person focus cards.

0min
From download to live
No onboarding calls, no hardware, no IT ticket.
0sec
86 to every phone
Flip a switch in the kitchen; the whole floor knows.
$0
Per staff seat, forever
Admins subscribe. The team rides free, all of them.
0days
To prove it, free
One service is usually enough. Fourteen makes it certain.
A note from the founders
To everyone who runs a shift,

We didn't set out to start a software company. We set out to stop losing the same night twice. The promise we made ourselves is the one we'll make you: build the tool we wish we'd had when we were in your shoes, and keep it simple enough to survive a Friday rush.

We still measure every release the same way. Does the brief get read before lineup? Does the 86 land before the order does? Does the new hire sound like a three-year veteran by Thursday? When the answers are yes, the guest at table 14 never knows why the night felt effortless. That's the job.

If that sounds like your kind of place, pull up a chair.

The PreShifter founders
Written between services · New York City

P.S. We still run our own pre-shifts on PreShifter. Every feature earns its place on a real floor before it ships.

Who’s on tonight

The operator and the engineer.

Shift experience decides what we build. Serious engineering makes sure it survives the rush. Nothing ships until it clears both.

Front of house

Jazek Creacy

Founder & CEO

Fifteen years on New York floors, from FOH to bar to management. Jazek ran pre-shift the old way at every stop: the whiteboard nobody read, the huddle half the room missed, the group chat that buried the allergy note. So he learned software development after close and spent six years building the tool he kept wishing someone would hand him. He’s still active in the NYC hospitality scene, and he still runs every demo himself. The fastest way to keep a product honest is to stay close to the floor.

“If it can’t survive a Friday rush, it doesn’t ship.”

LINE CHECK · CREACYPRESHIFTER · NYC
NYC HOSPITALITY
15 YRS
FOH / BAR / MGMT
ALL OF IT
SOFTWARE DEV
6 YRS
PRESHIFTER V1
BUILT SOLO
DEMOS
RUNS EVERY ONE
STATUS
ACTIVE IN NYC
PRINTED BETWEEN SERVICES
Back of house

Collin Watts

Co-founder & CTO

Collin came up through restaurant tech at Square and security engineering at CrowdStrike. One taught him what a Saturday rush does to software; the other taught him to build like failure isn’t an option. At PreShifter he leads engineering across the board: both apps, the real-time core, and the infrastructure that keeps it all moving at service speed. Every release clears the same bar. It has to hold up in a real service, on a real night, with real covers on the books.

“The floor doesn’t file bug reports. It just stops using you.”

LINE CHECK · WATTSPRESHIFTER · NYC
SQUARE
RESTAURANT PLATFORM
CROWDSTRIKE
SECURITY ENG
SCOPE
FULL STACK, BOTH APPS
RELEASE BAR
LIVE-SERVICE TESTED
STATUS
ON DURING SERVICE
PRINTED BETWEEN SERVICES

Between the two of us, there’s no part of the shift, or the stack, we haven’t run ourselves.

Join the service

Help us run the industry's most important hours.

Put PreShifter on your floor tonight, or book fifteen minutes and tell us what your shift needs next.

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