7 ms·

I agree with almost all of what you said. But, I can't believe that time tracking is really that lucrative. Before I was on HN, I was on the JoS boards (I kn

I agree with almost all of what you said. But, I can't believe that time tracking is really that lucrative. Before I was on HN, I was on the JoS boards (I know you were also there). I can remember a time when someone would debut a new time tracking app every week. I feel like this market is more than saturated.

patio11 15y ago
Talk to Amy Hoy - her time tracking app grosses more than all three of my businesses combined and is growing like something growing very fast.
- spIrr 15y ago
  And how is that still possible? If there is huge a variety of time-tracking apps, how can you possible acquire a decent amount of customers? Verticals?
  - _neil 15y ago
    I'd guess by having a quality product with good design. Time tracking is definitely over-saturated, but Freckle is a simple, powerful product with great design. That makes it makes it much easier to stand out.
    - y0mbo 15y ago
      _neil is right. Freckle is simple (you can track time without the hassle of creating a project) and powerful (the multiple ways you can see your data is awesome, especially the "pulse" screen) with great design (its very pretty). That said, there's more features I'd love to see, but they are constantly improving the product, so its only a matter of time.
    - ahoyhere 15y ago
      If you (or, okay, I) can create a new product which has certain selling points, and gain quite a lot of customers, how is the market still considered "over-saturated"? I make my living exclusively in "over-saturated" or "nobody will pay for that" markets. Which so far has worked out just fantastically. My first foray into an "over-saturated" market was a Mac news, opinion & tutorial site back in the late 90s. Every single person I talked to said the market was over-saturated, that nobody would read it & more importantly, I wouldn't get any advertisers. They were all wrong.
  - hello_moto 15y ago
    Be the first that supports multiple devices (PITA) and multiple browsers (except IE7 and before?). Beautiful design (niche for those who marvelled at apps by their design). Figure out SEO. I think Amy and her husband are quite popular internet celebrity among bloggers. Turn these into your customers. This is important: if you have quite a few readers, think of how to turn them into money (let's not go into argument about purity, don't be evil, and that kind of bull-shitake). On the flip side: whether her number is for real or not, I cannot say until I see the accounting by my own eyes. When it comes to money, pageviews and whatnot, I don't believe 100% as-presented. I might believe 95%, but definitely not 100%.
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    The other answers to this are good, but miss some fundamentals. Here are a lot of reasons why almost any SaSS idea you can think of will take off if you can find a way to market it for less than you charge for it. 1. New business are opening all the time. Every. Single. Day. 2. Most businesses go looking for solutions only when something is very painful. Convincing them of the need is something a lot of existing SaSS businesses don't do as there's so much low hanging fruit around still. If you can send a salesperson in, you win by default. You'll be amazed at how much you can charge for something. 3. Lots of businesses (the majority) are 5-10 years behind in the computerization of their business compared to any business you find mentioned here or any business you'll ever speak to at networking events for startups. That's pre-SaSS. 4. There are a lot of businesses where the internal IT dept wrote all the 'apps', they usually suck and are broken. More and more businesses are giving up on this model and buying the app off-the-shelf. A little customisability (logo, maybe colours, even name) goes a long way. 5. A lot of businesses still rely on some crappy Sharepoint or even Lotus or [insert unwieldy enterprise system here]. The internal people hate dealing with them and will switch to your system if you find someone with enough clout to sidestep 'the rules'. A 'department trial' is also a handy way in, some companies have very autonomous departments. 6. There's no such thing as an established SaSS businesses outside of the echo chamber of HN. Many businesses will not have heard of Salesforce, let alone basecamp. There's no such thing as an established time tracking tool for example. 7. Some 'great' apps are far too generic. New to do apps still come out every month 8. Marketing and designing your app for a particular market sector can give you a huge advantage over others. Just knowing the right words, phrases and acronyms to use gives you huge credibility with that market. Compare 'Project Management' to 'Project Management for Architects with full support for Drawing Issues and Revision Tracking'. Before you embark on doing anything though, you have to accept that any business app you write is going to be incredibly complicated and you're going to have to fight to keep it simple as everyone wants to use it oh so slightly differently.
    - flomo 15y ago
      Just to add to your excellent list, a lot of verticals have an established software company that's stuck in the desktop world (e.g VB6/Access/etc, CD-ROMs, licence keys, etc) and is often clunky to use or old-fashioned looking. The difficulty with vertical markets is cutting through all the jargon/assumptions and figuring out exactly what the business logic should be. Everyone knows what they want, but very few people can actually explain it to the uninitiated.
  - rmc 15y ago
    You can still strike big even if you're not first. Google and the iPod weren't first. Microsoft & Blackberry had smart phone OSs for years before the iPhone, etc. etc.
  - bdunn 15y ago
    Get 500 people to pay you $30 a month. Now you're making close to $200k a year - most likely a lot more than you would make consulting or playing the startup lotto. That's the basis of Amy's 30x500 course (disclaimer: I gladly paid > $1000 to take it). Think about it: 500 people. That's fucking nothing. My upcoming niche project management tool has more people than that on the pre-release list (granted - only a percentage of them will turn out to be paying customers), but it's a great start. Simply find some pain that needs to be solved, build a product around it, create an offer (give me $X and I'll give you Y) and profit. Take Amy's class if you want a kick in the ass to help realize that.
    - pknerd 15y ago
      Finding a niche might not be an issue these days. I am interested to know how do you opt for certain niche while it's not your main field either.
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    How CAN'T you acquire a decent amount of customers? The world is so much simpler and easier than you think it is. Maybe that sounds like hand-wavy BS to you, but it's simply the facts. Freckle grows even when we ignore it. We don't "do" verticals. You're assuming that variety means people are satisfied. But as a rule, people are never satisfied, and rightfully so since most software is crap.
- paulhauggis 15y ago
  This is one example. There is one example of almost every niche that is really successful.
  - patio11 15y ago
    Amy would know better than I do, but she says Freckle has at least three larger competitors. It is also something like 2.5 years old (i.e. it achieved success way after I though that market was saturated).
    - ahoyhere 15y ago
      Here are some of the companies making much than us: Harvest (look at the size of their team; and for web apps, they are old!) Mite (the last time they posted about revenue, it was more than double ours, presumably that trend has continued) Freshbooks (they do more than just time tracking, but they are a chief "competitor" if you want to call it that… and they make bank) I strongly suspect that RescueTime and Intervals have greater revenue than us as well. …and probably many more… these are just the "cool" ones which I know about. I'm sure there are many tools for specific industries or who are otherwise entrenched who make ridiculous amounts of money. It is the easiest thing in the world to dismiss something by saying "nobody would pay for that" or "they must be unusual if they're making money" or "it must be because they're famous." None of these things are true. But they sure are easy to believe and even easier to say, discouraging yourself and others.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - alexknowshtml 15y ago
    I'm very close friends with Amy. We've collaborated on a number of things related to our businesses. Freckle is not the largest product in it's niche, nor the most successful (monetarily anyway. It creates tons of happiness for Amy, her husband, and their customers and I consider that a huge success). The secret to subscription revenue is that it doesn't need to be the most successful to still be really successful. Harvest might be the largest direct competitor with Freckle, but Amy could speak better to that. Seth Godin said: "Your goal is to be the 'best in the world'. But you get to pick the size of 'the world'." Perhaps he should have omitted the 'size' part and simply suggested that you should pick a world. Ideally a world where you can and will be the best. A big part of why Amy's successful in general is because she doesn't really play the "niche" game, she's very adept at playing the "worldview" game. With this, she's able to build tools that appeal to people who her competition wouldn't appeal to. To hear Amy and her customers talk about Freckle, you realize that the time tracker is a means to an end: Freckle is actually a tools for managing time more than it is for tracking it. This alternative view on the same product has smashed open the doors for potential customers, and I can tell you first hand that most of Freckle's customers absolutely LOVE using Freckle - not many "time trackers" can say that. On the same note, I work on Beanstalk and Postmark (both created by the same company, Wildbit). Both of our products are extremely successful and growing like crazy as well, not just because of our niche decisions, but our worldview-based decisions. [edits for clairty]
- alapshah 15y ago
  In case you don't know who she is (I didn't) - http://unicornfree.com/ http://unicornfree.com/ and the product: http://letsfreckle.com/ http://letsfreckle.com/
- Tichy 15y ago
  Is it possible that things like Freckle or even the 37signals stuff are more "fan based" businesses rather than stuff that people really need? More like "heck, I like these guys, why not pay them 20$/month"? The real work then would be blogging a lot, going to conferences, socializing, to maintain the fan base.
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    It's not. We got a first surge of signups from people who heard about it because they followed us, but the vast majority of our paying customers have no freaking clue "who we are."
    - Tichy 15y ago
      Interesting, thanks!
    - apr 15y ago
      Amy, what is your primary marketing strategy? If you can talk about that of course.
- wyclif 15y ago
  Who? Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but there's no name recognition there...I had to search and found her to be someone pitching herself as a "product crusader."
  - cilurnum 15y ago
    Don't worry, you're not the only one.
hello_moto 15y ago
There are a lot of todos apps out there from Thing to RememberTheMilk to Trello (list of lists? more like todos of todos :)) It's a saturated market so you better have some sort of other advantages before marketing such product.
ThomPete 15y ago
Time tracking is't by any metrics a solved area yet. There will be even more approaches in the coming years. Two things promise to keep the area interesting. 1. Time tracking have to be automated. I think I found an way to do that which is actually going to work. 2. Project need to move away from time based projects and more towards deployment tracking. This one won't be solved anytime soon cause of corporate structures. It's going to be one of the most interesting spaces to watch within the B2B area IMHO
pbj 15y ago
Also worth noting that time tracking has multiple angles. It can also be used in the context of employee time cards for human resources. A while back I was working with a nonprofit trying to find a legitimate timecard web app or downloadable software and found that most were horrible. Most looked like they hadn't been updated since 1997 and had horrific design/clunky UI. Most of them were also pretty expensive and charged per user, when this org had less than 15 employees and couldn't afford to pay $100/month just to track timecards. It seems like there could still be a definite way for someone to get into this and build something really sleek and new, especially when you consider how many ways you could improve on it, like offering nice looking reports to the HR department, exporting of the time data to a variety of HR software, etc.
ahoyhere 15y ago
This is a simple logical error: "It seems like lots of people are doing it, therefore the market must be saturated, therefore nobody will make any money." In the face of credible testimony from somebody you presumably trust (since patio11 has such a sterling reputation), why would you insist that "you can't believe it"? It staggers me how many people when hearing about my success come up with ways to minimize it, to say it's not possible, it's a fluke, they don't believe it, they can't believe it, etc.

patio11 15y ago

Talk to Amy Hoy - her time tracking app grosses more than all three of my businesses combined and is growing like something growing very fast.

spIrr 15y ago
And how is that still possible? If there is huge a variety of time-tracking apps, how can you possible acquire a decent amount of customers? Verticals?
- _neil 15y ago
  I'd guess by having a quality product with good design. Time tracking is definitely over-saturated, but Freckle is a simple, powerful product with great design. That makes it makes it much easier to stand out.
  - y0mbo 15y ago
    _neil is right. Freckle is simple (you can track time without the hassle of creating a project) and powerful (the multiple ways you can see your data is awesome, especially the "pulse" screen) with great design (its very pretty). That said, there's more features I'd love to see, but they are constantly improving the product, so its only a matter of time.
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    If you (or, okay, I) can create a new product which has certain selling points, and gain quite a lot of customers, how is the market still considered "over-saturated"? I make my living exclusively in "over-saturated" or "nobody will pay for that" markets. Which so far has worked out just fantastically. My first foray into an "over-saturated" market was a Mac news, opinion & tutorial site back in the late 90s. Every single person I talked to said the market was over-saturated, that nobody would read it & more importantly, I wouldn't get any advertisers. They were all wrong.
- hello_moto 15y ago
  Be the first that supports multiple devices (PITA) and multiple browsers (except IE7 and before?). Beautiful design (niche for those who marvelled at apps by their design). Figure out SEO. I think Amy and her husband are quite popular internet celebrity among bloggers. Turn these into your customers. This is important: if you have quite a few readers, think of how to turn them into money (let's not go into argument about purity, don't be evil, and that kind of bull-shitake). On the flip side: whether her number is for real or not, I cannot say until I see the accounting by my own eyes. When it comes to money, pageviews and whatnot, I don't believe 100% as-presented. I might believe 95%, but definitely not 100%.
- mattmanser 15y ago
  The other answers to this are good, but miss some fundamentals. Here are a lot of reasons why almost any SaSS idea you can think of will take off if you can find a way to market it for less than you charge for it. 1. New business are opening all the time. Every. Single. Day. 2. Most businesses go looking for solutions only when something is very painful. Convincing them of the need is something a lot of existing SaSS businesses don't do as there's so much low hanging fruit around still. If you can send a salesperson in, you win by default. You'll be amazed at how much you can charge for something. 3. Lots of businesses (the majority) are 5-10 years behind in the computerization of their business compared to any business you find mentioned here or any business you'll ever speak to at networking events for startups. That's pre-SaSS. 4. There are a lot of businesses where the internal IT dept wrote all the 'apps', they usually suck and are broken. More and more businesses are giving up on this model and buying the app off-the-shelf. A little customisability (logo, maybe colours, even name) goes a long way. 5. A lot of businesses still rely on some crappy Sharepoint or even Lotus or [insert unwieldy enterprise system here]. The internal people hate dealing with them and will switch to your system if you find someone with enough clout to sidestep 'the rules'. A 'department trial' is also a handy way in, some companies have very autonomous departments. 6. There's no such thing as an established SaSS businesses outside of the echo chamber of HN. Many businesses will not have heard of Salesforce, let alone basecamp. There's no such thing as an established time tracking tool for example. 7. Some 'great' apps are far too generic. New to do apps still come out every month 8. Marketing and designing your app for a particular market sector can give you a huge advantage over others. Just knowing the right words, phrases and acronyms to use gives you huge credibility with that market. Compare 'Project Management' to 'Project Management for Architects with full support for Drawing Issues and Revision Tracking'. Before you embark on doing anything though, you have to accept that any business app you write is going to be incredibly complicated and you're going to have to fight to keep it simple as everyone wants to use it oh so slightly differently.
  - flomo 15y ago
    Just to add to your excellent list, a lot of verticals have an established software company that's stuck in the desktop world (e.g VB6/Access/etc, CD-ROMs, licence keys, etc) and is often clunky to use or old-fashioned looking. The difficulty with vertical markets is cutting through all the jargon/assumptions and figuring out exactly what the business logic should be. Everyone knows what they want, but very few people can actually explain it to the uninitiated.
- rmc 15y ago
  You can still strike big even if you're not first. Google and the iPod weren't first. Microsoft & Blackberry had smart phone OSs for years before the iPhone, etc. etc.
- bdunn 15y ago
  Get 500 people to pay you $30 a month. Now you're making close to $200k a year - most likely a lot more than you would make consulting or playing the startup lotto. That's the basis of Amy's 30x500 course (disclaimer: I gladly paid > $1000 to take it). Think about it: 500 people. That's fucking nothing. My upcoming niche project management tool has more people than that on the pre-release list (granted - only a percentage of them will turn out to be paying customers), but it's a great start. Simply find some pain that needs to be solved, build a product around it, create an offer (give me $X and I'll give you Y) and profit. Take Amy's class if you want a kick in the ass to help realize that.
  - pknerd 15y ago
    Finding a niche might not be an issue these days. I am interested to know how do you opt for certain niche while it's not your main field either.
- ahoyhere 15y ago
  How CAN'T you acquire a decent amount of customers? The world is so much simpler and easier than you think it is. Maybe that sounds like hand-wavy BS to you, but it's simply the facts. Freckle grows even when we ignore it. We don't "do" verticals. You're assuming that variety means people are satisfied. But as a rule, people are never satisfied, and rightfully so since most software is crap.
paulhauggis 15y ago
This is one example. There is one example of almost every niche that is really successful.
- patio11 15y ago
  Amy would know better than I do, but she says Freckle has at least three larger competitors. It is also something like 2.5 years old (i.e. it achieved success way after I though that market was saturated).
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    Here are some of the companies making much than us: Harvest (look at the size of their team; and for web apps, they are old!) Mite (the last time they posted about revenue, it was more than double ours, presumably that trend has continued) Freshbooks (they do more than just time tracking, but they are a chief "competitor" if you want to call it that… and they make bank) I strongly suspect that RescueTime and Intervals have greater revenue than us as well. …and probably many more… these are just the "cool" ones which I know about. I'm sure there are many tools for specific industries or who are otherwise entrenched who make ridiculous amounts of money. It is the easiest thing in the world to dismiss something by saying "nobody would pay for that" or "they must be unusual if they're making money" or "it must be because they're famous." None of these things are true. But they sure are easy to believe and even easier to say, discouraging yourself and others.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- alexknowshtml 15y ago
  I'm very close friends with Amy. We've collaborated on a number of things related to our businesses. Freckle is not the largest product in it's niche, nor the most successful (monetarily anyway. It creates tons of happiness for Amy, her husband, and their customers and I consider that a huge success). The secret to subscription revenue is that it doesn't need to be the most successful to still be really successful. Harvest might be the largest direct competitor with Freckle, but Amy could speak better to that. Seth Godin said: "Your goal is to be the 'best in the world'. But you get to pick the size of 'the world'." Perhaps he should have omitted the 'size' part and simply suggested that you should pick a world. Ideally a world where you can and will be the best. A big part of why Amy's successful in general is because she doesn't really play the "niche" game, she's very adept at playing the "worldview" game. With this, she's able to build tools that appeal to people who her competition wouldn't appeal to. To hear Amy and her customers talk about Freckle, you realize that the time tracker is a means to an end: Freckle is actually a tools for managing time more than it is for tracking it. This alternative view on the same product has smashed open the doors for potential customers, and I can tell you first hand that most of Freckle's customers absolutely LOVE using Freckle - not many "time trackers" can say that. On the same note, I work on Beanstalk and Postmark (both created by the same company, Wildbit). Both of our products are extremely successful and growing like crazy as well, not just because of our niche decisions, but our worldview-based decisions. [edits for clairty]
alapshah 15y ago
In case you don't know who she is (I didn't) - http://unicornfree.com/ http://unicornfree.com/ and the product: http://letsfreckle.com/ http://letsfreckle.com/
Tichy 15y ago
Is it possible that things like Freckle or even the 37signals stuff are more "fan based" businesses rather than stuff that people really need? More like "heck, I like these guys, why not pay them 20$/month"? The real work then would be blogging a lot, going to conferences, socializing, to maintain the fan base.
- ahoyhere 15y ago
  It's not. We got a first surge of signups from people who heard about it because they followed us, but the vast majority of our paying customers have no freaking clue "who we are."
  - Tichy 15y ago
    Interesting, thanks!
  - apr 15y ago
    Amy, what is your primary marketing strategy? If you can talk about that of course.
wyclif 15y ago
Who? Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but there's no name recognition there...I had to search and found her to be someone pitching herself as a "product crusader."
- cilurnum 15y ago
  Don't worry, you're not the only one.

hello_moto 15y ago

There are a lot of todos apps out there from Thing to RememberTheMilk to Trello (list of lists? more like todos of todos :)) It's a saturated market so you better have some sort of other advantages before marketing such product.

ThomPete 15y ago

Time tracking is't by any metrics a solved area yet. There will be even more approaches in the coming years. Two things promise to keep the area interesting. 1. Time tracking have to be automated. I think I found an way to do that which is actually going to work. 2. Project need to move away from time based projects and more towards deployment tracking. This one won't be solved anytime soon cause of corporate structures. It's going to be one of the most interesting spaces to watch within the B2B area IMHO

pbj 15y ago

Also worth noting that time tracking has multiple angles. It can also be used in the context of employee time cards for human resources. A while back I was working with a nonprofit trying to find a legitimate timecard web app or downloadable software and found that most were horrible. Most looked like they hadn't been updated since 1997 and had horrific design/clunky UI. Most of them were also pretty expensive and charged per user, when this org had less than 15 employees and couldn't afford to pay $100/month just to track timecards. It seems like there could still be a definite way for someone to get into this and build something really sleek and new, especially when you consider how many ways you could improve on it, like offering nice looking reports to the HR department, exporting of the time data to a variety of HR software, etc.

ahoyhere 15y ago

This is a simple logical error: "It seems like lots of people are doing it, therefore the market must be saturated, therefore nobody will make any money." In the face of credible testimony from somebody you presumably trust (since patio11 has such a sterling reputation), why would you insist that "you can't believe it"? It staggers me how many people when hearing about my success come up with ways to minimize it, to say it's not possible, it's a fluke, they don't believe it, they can't believe it, etc.