Questions about building a solution to track time spent on a project as a freelancer
Hello IH. I'm a freelancer and I'm frustrated with tracking my time. It's tedious and boring.
At first I was using Toggl. Then I got bored and I neglected it. Then I started adding start and end time in a Google sheet (I still do this and it's consuming my soul).
Then I thought about building a slack bot. I use slash-commands to clock in and out. I've been testing it for a few days and it kinda feels natural.
I thought about building a product around it and sell it on the slack marketplace. However, there are a couple of issues:
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If the target customer were to be the single freelancer. It would require the person to create/use a slack team for personal use. Not sure how feasible this could be
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I thought about targeting companies who work with freelancers. Companies would be able to track their spend and freelancers would be able to track their time. This seemed to be the way to go, however, the more I thought about it, the more I thought of how this could be a free pass to micromanagement.
What do you guys think about these two "possibilities"? Am I missing anything?
I'm a freelancer too! And I'm working on another tool for freelancers. It's time tracking but task management for clients and freelancers to provide clients timely updates about what's happening in their project.
Hey @ilrock
I used to run a design agency for four years. Personally I don't like when potential clients want me to track time and I don't enforce it onto to other freelancers I work with as well purely for the reason which you stated as micromanagement. Some companies understand it while others are more glued to the time and keep asking questions about the time.
Have you tried Hubstaff? I used to work for an agency before starting mine and our devs were required to use Hubstaff for two projects before it was gently requested by the client and they had a valid reason too.
When I checked out Hubstaff, it had other features such as invoicing and analytics which I thought was great and could see why it was so popular.
I'm sorry I have just talked about my experience and haven't really given a solution today for your question.
Thanks for your input, man. I definitely don't like when clients want me to track my time, that is why I was mainly looking at a friction-less solution for the single freelancer. The reason why I was thinking about a slack app is that it's an easy way to interact with a "tool" without actually using any new tool. I already use slack and thus the barrier to start using it is very low, whereas for tools like Hubstaff or And.co (my bookkeeping app) I need to actually go on their app and add add the tracking.
In this first version of the app that I built I can simply type /clockin and /clockout in slack to start and stop the timer.
At the same time, however, if this solution would be offered directly to the freelancer then creating a new slack team just to track your time may add even more overhead.
Quite the loop here!
Interesting. I don't want to sound too negative just want to see the downsides so that we are aware of the holes and see if there is a viable solution that can be built.
If it's a slack solution then you would be limiting your market to slack using companies only. Having said that, I've heard some slack add-on listed in Slack's marketplace have done well.
Let's say a dev or designer might only use slack to communicate but spend more time on their dev or design tools so, before and after work, they would need to go back to slack to start and stop the time. This wouldn't be any different to doing it with Toggl or Hubstaff. The only upside is that, rather than using two tools, there would just be one tool which is slack.
It's been a good one year or so since I used slack. Rather than typing commands, how about there was a time tracking bot channel which displayed two buttons (start and stop) so the freelancer/contractor would just click the relevant button?
No worries, mate! You are not being negative at all. Have you used slack and created your own "team" or have you joined your clients' teams?
Just throwing in my $0.02.
Thanks for the input, Connor! As I mentioned above also, the main reason why I was looking into a slack app is so that there would be no need to add another tool as slack is something I (and other freelancers) already use.
The main doubt at this point is who should this Slack app be for? Can't quite come up with a proper answer just yet