4 ms·
Lessons of Y Combinator: Things I’d do differently after 2 startups
- augustus 18y agoNot sure I would ever pay for software to tell me where I am spending my time.
- a-priori 18y agoWhile I'm sure a lot of people would be willing to (depending on the price, I may be one of them -- I'm a big fan of RescueTime), my understanding is that they are targeting businesses with their paid version.
- run4yourlives 18y agoRescueTime is probably the most useful yCombinator app out there. I would certainly consider paying for it.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoThat depends on the price. If it saves me one hour per year, it's technically worth $50 or $60 per year, or more. Of course, I'd have to think about that, whereas I'd pay $14.99 without a second thought. ;)
- ardit33 18y ago"Not sure I would ever pay for software to tell me where I am spending my time." --- Maybe not you, but your boss may. Rescuetime needs a function, where it can work in the background, so bosses will see what their employees are doing online. I worked on a big financial company, and they monitor a lot of stuff. I wouldn't be suprised that they will find something like this useful.
- vaksel 18y agothey already have complete access to your system using VNC, and they already have complete stats of all your browsing
- jfarmer 18y agoVNC gives them a very fine-grained view. At any moment I can watch what any individual employee is doing. That information, in and of itself, isn't very actionable. I'd prefer knowing that, on the whole, 10% of my company's man-hours are spent on digg, for example.
- jfarmer 18y agoNo, but your boss would.
- gms 18y agoNot exactly making the world a better place, is it.
- edw519 18y agoThis is a great post with a lot of good data that oughta be very interesting to people here. Possibly the best kind of post we could have. I'd like to see a lot more of these. Thanks, Tony!
- DenisM 18y agoTony writes plenty of good stuff on his blog over here: http://www.tonywright.com/ http://www.tonywright.com/ In terms of amount-of-insight/word his blog is perhaps the most informative I follow.
- coglethorpe 18y agoI loved the landing page design. Great layout, big red call to action buttons, multi-column displays... That alone got me to sign up.
- josefresco 18y agoTheir web designers went to the "let's see how close we can get to a 37signals design" school apparently. I've seen it 100 times and it's always boring.
- jfornear 18y agoI wouldn't blame the designers directly. In my experience designers tend to be pressured into trendy styles. The 37signals look just happens to be what's in right now.
- coglethorpe 18y agoThat's odd you should say that. OtherWeather looks rather 37 Signals. Are you planning on changing the design?
- axod 18y agoI hate to be a downer, but sometimes these things don't sit right with me. "After successfully launching their consumer offering (7% week-over-week growth!)" Why are the traffic charts essentially flat for the last 6 months, or worse on quantcast. I think "3. We didn’t spend enough time on marketing" is probably the most important, but then I'm not convinced the idea is "sticky" enough in the first place. Still an interesting read though :)
- mrtron 18y agoI use their product and haven't visited the site in months. I just look at the weekly summaries to get a decent picture of how productive my week was (hours in work opposed to waste of time). Traffic to their site is not nearly as useful as their signups growth is for statistics.
- axod 18y agoFair point. Might be worth having the application show something from the website, so that website stats are more representative, or at least look more impressive :)
- mrtron 18y agoYou are starting to sound like a lot of the big web portals out there. 'Let's break an article into 10 pages so we get 10 times the hits!' 'Let's turn that AJAX gallery that loads really quick into separate pages so we get way better traffic scores!' In jest to you - but they really have those types of meetings.
- axod 18y agoAgain, fair point :) As long as the subscriber numbers are good, that's cool. I'm used to looking at websites rather than desktop software so it's a whole different game. Also depends on their strategy. I'd expect the summary to display some recommendations from a website, maybe some recommended software (adverts), etc Maybe some social networking - "Here's some people who have similar usage patterns to you. Go chat."
- redorb 18y agoI think the group version could be cool, and might be worth paying for... Think as a project manager you can see how exactly everyone is doing - I.E. the designer spending 30% of each day researching design, and 20% in photoshop... just sounds neat, Im trying the personal version for sure!
- a-priori 18y agoIt does, however, have the potential for being an employee's worst nightmare in the hands of a micromanaging boss. That's my concern with it being used in a corporate environment. "Why did you spend 31 minutes 40 seconds reading 'Hacker News' today?!?" "Gee, boss, because sometimes I need a break..." However, that's not Rescue Time's fault.
- bob_dole 18y agoThings we did right: "didn't focus on internet marketing" - Things we did wrong: "didn't do enough marketing" :/
- mleonhard 18y agoI'm reluctant to have my data stored on their server. If it's software that I run on my PC, why does it need to save its data on their system?