Rostrefi

Shannon Gove and Bennett Merriman launched Event Workforce in 2010 as university students looking to give other students practical work experience in the events and sports industry. By 2015, the company had grown into one of Australia's largest event staffing operations, managing 300+ staff daily at events like the Australian Open. But managing volunteers at scale was a nightmare—everything ran on spreadsheets and email.

In 2015, with technical co-founder Chris Grant, they built their own internal scheduling and communication platform to solve their own problem. It was a university project initially, approached with classic startup scrappiness: all sweat equity, no hard costs tracked, no outside capital. The realization came quickly—by mid-2015, they signed their first external clients and knew they had something worth commercializing.

Their first dollar came in mid-2015, with a few signed clients by year-end. Word of mouth became their primary growth engine. They never aggressively marketed early on, relying instead on organic demand from the volunteer management space. The platform worked for mega-events (Super Bowl, Dubai World Expo) and smaller charities alike—anyone managing volunteer schedules, screening, and communication.

For three years (2015-2018), Event Workforce's profitability funded Rostrefi's growth, allowing them to prove product-market fit without external pressure. By 2018-2019, they were hitting $50,000 in monthly SaaS revenue. But scaling required more than bootstrapping could provide. They discovered customer acquisition cost was roughly $3,000-$4,000 per $1,000/month customer—a healthy 3-4 month payback. Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads complemented their sales team, though word of mouth remained dominant. The real challenge: balancing high-touch enterprise deals ($50k-$500k/year for mega-events) with scalable SaaS ($10k-$30k/year for nonprofits and universities). They realized they couldn't ignore the fact that different customer types had fundamentally different needs.

By late 2019, Rostrefi had 100-150 SaaS customers generating roughly $100,000 in monthly SaaS revenue (about $1.2M ARR), with year-over-year SaaS growth of roughly 100%. They raised $2 million AUD to accelerate. The team grew from under 10 to 20 people across Melbourne, San Francisco, Colorado, New York, Manchester, London, and Dubai—7 engineers, 2 quota-carrying sales reps, and teams focused on partnerships and customer success. They're pushing SaaS from 40% of total revenue (2018) toward 60%+ (2019+), with ambitions to hit $200,000/month SaaS revenue. Monthly burn sits around $100,000 with 12+ months of runway. Shannon, now 31 and married with a newborn, continues running both Event Workforce and Rostrefi, focused on riding the momentum without chasing the highs and lows too hard.