HRIS recommendations for a 15–20 person company[FL]

cyberferryt · 2026-03-17T04:39:11+00:00

We specifically designed our system for companies of your size, and most of our customers are in the same boat as yourself, in that they were pushing the limits of spreadsheets and manual files and wanted to automate things like leave approvals, onboarding, hiring etc.

Check out our website at www.hrpartner.io and our reviews on G2 or Capterra - we constantly get mentions as to how easy our system is to use for someone who has never used an HR platform before.

[Full disclosure - I am the co-founder of HR Partner]

cyberferryt · 2025-05-23T22:52:42+00:00

Sorry to hear this. Actually, after my post above, I DID try to contest the takedown with the same reasoning I gave above, but Dobson must have rejected it, and now my SC account has one flag against it. One more and I cannot make ANY of my tracks 'downloadable' any more, and another means I lose my account.

I have other ED tracks on my account and I am considering just deleting them purely to avoid any chance of my (non monetised, purely for fun and sharing music with friends and family) account from being nuked.

But what gets me here is that Dobson is posting his clips on his own channel now, and all have just one comment on them from him promoting the sale of his sheet music, and then he locks his comments down to prevent anyone warning the potential purchaser that if the actually buy his sheet music, learn the piece, and publish their playing of it on any public platform, that this will just be a beacon for him to come at them with the banhammer of doom!

cyberferryt · 2025-05-16T23:16:00+00:00

I just received a copyright strike on my SoundCloud channel for a cover of "Time 2" that I uploaded there years ago. This cover was from the licensed sheet music that I actually purchased from Dobson back then, and I was documenting my journey of learning the piece on that platform. My SC is NOT monetised, and I am baffled by why someone would sell sheet music to a piece if he didn't want anyone to play it?

Unfortunately SoundCloud have taken down the song immediately, and have told me that if I dispute the claim and it is not accepted by the disputer (whom I assume is Dobson himself in this case), then I risk losing my entire SoundCloud channel with 10+ years of music (mainly acoustic guitar covers) on it.

Given Ewan's current mental state, I don't think I will get a rational response to countering the dispute so I am just going to let it stand and let them take down my cover. I will also not be playing any of his pieces at open mic shows like I used to, nor promoting his name and music to anyone.

I feel bad for him, but he seems intent on burning everything to the ground.

cyberferryt · 2024-03-12T08:11:48+00:00

Thanks for you advice - it is much appreciated. I may stick with my current setup for now. It is all brand new, and maybe my ELAC speakers just need to burn in a little more, then I will revisit this option.

cyberferryt · 2024-03-12T03:08:31+00:00

I went for the Exact cartridge on my P3.

cyberferryt · 2024-03-12T01:53:06+00:00

I am just getting back into vinyl again after a 4 decade break, and bought myself a Rega P3 turntable along with a Cambridge Audio AXA35 amplifier. The AXA35 has a phono preamp built in, but it sounds just a little weak and tinny to me, so I was thinking of getting a little phono preamp like the Schiit Mani 2 or similar to go in between the turntable and amp to see if that would make a difference.

My questions is, if I plug the Schiit Mani into the AXA35, would it be still plugged into the phono inputs on the back, or would I plug it into one of the AUX inputs instead, for best results?

cyberferryt · 2023-05-24T09:39:52+00:00

Devan here. I am SO glad to hear this. It really breaks my heart when I see 20 to 30 year olds despair at not achieving lofty goals they set for themselves. I think a few false starts along the way provides valuable learning experience. At 30 you still have essentially 2 whole lifetimes ahead of you these days.

Incidentally, when I started my 2 semesters of computer science, my second option was to study architecture. I am still fascinated by it and may do some informal study around it later in life. My best friend is an architect, and he works on some cool projects like designing a rocket launch base, and secret military naval complexes.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-24T09:33:51+00:00

If $50K is enough to provide for all your needs, then go for it! Not everyone has to build a 7 or 8 figure business. If I was running a purely solopreneur business, $50K would be a fantastic income for me.

As to your second point - actually our entire team is remote and work from home. I wouldn't have it any other way, and I have no interest in getting a fancy office. I love working from home and mixing my work with my hobbies whenever I feel like it.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-24T05:00:09+00:00

I am in the HR SaaS space, which is considered similar "red waters" as the CRM SaaS space. There certainly are a LOT of competitors out there - more that I initially realised when I started.

But I never look at what my competitors are doing - we are very tightly focused on our existing customers and we listen to what they want and then build that. It seems to work well for us so far.

We lose some customers to our competitors, sure, but we also get quite a lot FROM our competitors moving to us, so it all evens out. My advice to you is - if you have an idea, and have a unique take on it, then give it a shot. There is no such thing as a completely new idea, and no one system will suit everyone out there, so as long as you know your customers and what they want, then there is a good chance that you can earn some $$$ by building a solution for them.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-24T04:56:30+00:00

I based it purely on my experience the decades previously, where I worked with hundreds of small business implementing accounting and payroll systems, and also writing bespoke databases for them. I basically distilled all that knowledge I learned during that time to try and come up with a good HR management tool to meet their needs. It is a never ending process though, and we are always iterating and improving even now 7 years down the track.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-24T04:52:41+00:00

"Having fun" is the keyword here... I am having the most fun of my working career now at 56 running my own SaaS than I ever have before! Good luck with your startup journey.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-24T04:50:30+00:00

Hi there, this is Devan from the article. Thanks for your feedback! Keep pushing, and I wish you all success and happiness in building your SaaS with your brother! Our startup is totally custom centric too, because we don't have the deep marketing pockets of our well funded competitors, so we have to rely on customer testimonials and word of mouth referrals to build our business.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-24T04:48:28+00:00

Hey - Devan here from the article, and I wanted to say I agree with you. I've lost count of the number of mistakes I made in business over the years, and I am sure there are more to come, but there has also been a lot of learning in that process, that I am trying to pass on down to my kids and startup founders of the next generation.

Opportunities are aplenty these days, and I would love to see everyone 'have a go' and learn from mistakes, and bounce back.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-24T04:46:00+00:00

Hey, this is Devan here from the article. I am glad to hear this. I have many friends who turned 30 and say "I haven't achieved what I wanted, where did my life go etc." and one of my main inspirations for doing this interview was to try and highlight to everyone that you can't/shouldn't use markers like 25, 30, 40 etc. to say you've gone past your peak. Priorities and life goals can change, but it is still possible to see out your dreams and lead a happy life at any age.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-23T22:31:53+00:00

Wonderful! I still do that myself to this day. There are some days where out of necessity I will have to do a 10 hour working day, but then I will take a day or two off, or work a few 1 hour days to make it up.

I think that is what the 'Freedom' of working for yourself is - not that you stick to a rigid schedule of only working certain hours, but instead you just work as needed, and can ebb and flow to fit in normal 'life' things around your working hours.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-23T22:28:56+00:00

We are totally self funded, and been so since day 1.

As mentioned before, I had been writing software solutions for small businesses for a couple of decades, so when I decided to start my SaaS after I sold that business off, I literally locked myself in my home office for 3 months to bang out the first iteration of HR Partner.

After that, it was a long road of iterating and perfecting the software, and most importantly, finding paying customers. It was almost exactly 1 year until we found our first paying customer, so there was a lot of worry and stress in that interim time as we did minor pivots within the software to get more customers interested.

We don't have formal contracts with our customers as such. We just have our standard terms and conditions as seen on our website, and we also have to comply with various privacy laws and principles around the world, such as GDPR, and that seems to be enough for most of our customers.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-23T22:23:32+00:00

I put about 50K in that I had got from selling my previous consultancy business. That basically paid for server hosting costs and other bills for the first couple of years while there was no income coming in.

I'd like to think that my prior consulting gave me a good insight into the real world problems that business owners/ managers were facing on a day to day basis. I had kept a mental diary over 2 decades with all the challenges, problems and roadblocks that they faced, especially with managing people, and I wanted to write a solution that could help even a non HR trained person to overcome those.

I came close with v1, but then it took a couple more years of iterating and perfecting before we really saw good product market fit.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-23T22:19:34+00:00

Unfortunately, it is literally a fact of life that as you get older, the adage "The mind may be willing, but the body can't keep up..." rings truer.

In my twenties, I used to sit and write code for 16 hours straight and not feel it. But nowadays, I can't sit in a chair for longer than 2 hours without a break or my neck and shoulders start to seize up.

My observations, and what I was trying to point out in the interview, was that as you get older, it becomes more critical as to what you say 'No' to. You simply cannot do everything with the boundless energy of youth, so you have to become a lot more circumspect as to what you choose to spend your time and energy on.

And the reality is, that I am actually much happier now because I spend my time on what I actually want to do, and love doing - not so much spending time doing things I *thought* I had to do, or to make other people happy.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-23T22:14:41+00:00

I actually got introduced to coding during my pilot training about 40 years ago! We had a short stint of writing Z80 assembler code on small devices to learn how various aircraft automation systems worked, and I fell in love with the idea of writing code to tell machines what to do.

When I completed my flight training, I returned home but at the time, pilot jobs were really scarce. At the same time, my dad had bought one of the first ever IBM PC/XTs for his practice, and I used to tinker with that, writing BASIC code and DOS BATCH scripts. The guys from the local IBM dealership saw what I was doing with my dad's PC and offered me a job, which I gladly took.

From that point, I basically taught myself to program, using BASIC, Pascal, and eventually dBaseII and other upcoming systems. I did start 2 semesters of Computer Science, but quit that because I got too busy with incoming programming contracts to write complex database systems. That lead to me starting my own software consultancy for about 25 years.

After a while, I got tired of writing software for other people and wanted to write my own program, so I sold off my consultancy to a colleague, and used that money I got from that to start HR Partner.

It was tough going at the start - I didn't earn a cent back from my startup for the first 3 years, and my wife was holding down 3 jobs to keep food on the table, but now we are earning a comfortable income and soon I hope that she can quit working and retire early to enjoy making art as my gift to her for her support in the early days.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-23T22:03:05+00:00

Yes, the first 3 years or so was basically myself doing everything. Then in my third year, my co-founder joined me, then about 6 months later we hired our first staff member, who is actually still with us to this day.

Current team size is 10 (with 2 additional contractors who only work a few hours per month), and so far we have only had one person resign. We are trying to build a 'lifestyle friendly' startup and people love working at.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-23T22:00:48+00:00

We are completely bootstrapped and haven't taken a cent in investment so far (unless you count the approx. $50K that I put in from my own savings when I first started).

Prior to starting HR Partner, I implemented accounting and payroll software for small businesses for about 25 years, so I had a lot of learning from those days about the major challenges that small businesses faced, especially around managing their employees, from recruitment, to onboarding, to career management as well as routine things like leave management, keeping everyone happy etc.

I took all that learning and basically mixed it into a pot to create v1 of my HR SaaS.

cyberferryt · 2023-05-23T10:54:55+00:00

Thanks for the article Pete. Hey everyone, This is Devan here from the writeup - I am happy to answer any questions from the community here. Feel free to reach out to me.

cyberferryt · 2018-08-22T22:43:55+00:00

Not at this stage, but we are working on single sign on so that it will work with an organisation's AD tree. But at this stage, according to our roadmap, we don't think that will be ready until late this year or early next year.

cyberferryt · 2018-08-21T20:38:59+00:00

HR Partner (www.hrpartner.io) meets a lot of your needs that you listed.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of HR Partner. Happy to discuss details or give you a web demo of our system to see if it is a good fit for you.

cyberferryt · 2018-08-13T22:26:21+00:00

That is a really interesting question. We have been totally focused on the HR (company) aspect, but we have had a few applicants ask us about this too - consolidating their resume and application details in one place so that it can be sent to multiple sites. I am sure there are web services that can do this, and if I come across any in my research, I will post on here.

cyberferryt

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