Trackly

The biggest mistake I made while talking to potential customers

When I first started speaking with founders, I thought my job was to explain my product.

I quickly realized that wasn't what people wanted.

The best conversations happened when I spent most of the call asking questions instead of giving answers.

Sometimes a 30-minute call would end without a demo because I learned something that completely changed how I thought about the problem.

One founder even told me:

"Don't solve the problem I describe. Solve the reason the problem exists."

That advice changed how I approach customer interviews.

Now I try to understand:

• What process breaks first as a business grows?

• What work is still being done manually?

• What frustrates people every week that they've simply accepted as "normal"?

Those conversations have been far more valuable than any feature request I've received.

I'm curious how other makers approach this.

What's the single best question you've asked a customer that changed the direction of your product?

When we started building Trackly, we thought the hardest part would be designing features.

It turned out to be understanding how teams actually work.

In almost every conversation with founders, HR professionals, and operations managers, we heard similar questions:

• Who's working today?

• How do we accurately track work hours and overtime?

• Why is payroll preparation still so manual?

• Why is workforce information scattered across different tools?

Our first instinct was to build more features.

Instead, we spent more time understanding the workflow behind those questions.

That changed how we approached the product.

Today, Trackly brings together attendance, work hours, leave management, payroll support, GPS check-ins for field teams, and workforce reporting in one place. But the biggest lesson wasn't about combining features.

It was realizing that people don't necessarily want another tool. They want clarity. They want to spend less time chasing information and more time making decisions.

I'm curious how other makers approach this.

When building your product, what insight from talking to users completely changed your roadmap?

Ran a small experiment on myself: for two weeks, every time I noticed my focus slipping (checking phone, re-reading the same line, opening a new tab for no reason), I logged the time. No app, just a notes file.

Expected the drop-off to happen after lunch. It didn't. My focus was sharpest almost exactly 90 minutes after I started working, then fell off a cliff, way earlier than the classic "afternoon slump" advice everyone repeats. Mornings weren't actually my peak, minute 90 of deep work was.

Made me question how much of the standard productivity advice (morning person vs night owl, post-lunch dip, etc.) is actually generic and not personal at all.

If you've ever tracked your own focus patterns instead of assuming the general advice applies to you, what did you actually find? Anyone else's "peak hour" turn out to be somewhere unexpected?

Had an honest realization recently: I've built dashboards that are supposed to save people from manually checking things, but I still catch myself manually verifying what the dashboard already told me. Not because the data's wrong, just because trusting a summary over raw reality takes longer to build than I expected.

Made me wonder if this is a universal builder problem or just me being paranoid about my own product.

Curious what others here think:

• Do you trust the tools/dashboards you use daily, or do you still spot-check manually out of habit?

• As a builder, have you ever shipped a feature meant to save time, only to notice users (or yourself) still doing the manual version alongside it?

• What actually made you start trusting a tool's output instead of double-checking it?

Been thinking about this after a few good conversations here lately: there's a real tension between building something that flags "this looks off" for you automatically, versus just surfacing the raw signal and trusting the human to interpret it.

Too much automation and you risk false confidence, the tool says everything's fine, so nobody looks closer. Too little, and you're back to relying entirely on someone's attention, which doesn't scale past a certain team size or number of ventures.

With Trackly, I've mostly leaned toward showing the raw signal (check-ins, timing, patterns) rather than making a judgment call for the manager. Partly because I don't fully trust automated judgment yet, and partly because I think the "is this actually a problem" call still needs a human who knows the context.

But I'm genuinely unsure that's the right call long-term. Curious what this community thinks:

• Do you prefer tools that flag problems for you, or ones that just show you the data and let you decide?

• Has an automated "everything's fine" signal ever given you false confidence about something that wasn't actually fine?

Controversial take, but hear me out: most companies don't actually have a "how do I know my team is working" problem. They have a "I never defined what working even means for this role" problem, and they're buying software to avoid having that harder conversation.

Building Trackly has made this uncomfortably obvious. Every time someone asks for "more tracking," what they're really missing isn't data, it's a clear definition of what success looks like for that specific role. GPS check-ins can tell you someone showed up. They can't tell you the job was even scoped properly in the first place.

So here's my actual question for this community, and I want the honest answer, not the polite one:

If you've ever felt the urge to add more tracking/monitoring to your team, was it really a visibility problem, or was it secretly a "I don't actually know what I expect from this role" problem?

Willing to be told I'm wrong here.

I've been building a workforce/attendance tool for the past few months, and the more I talk to other founders and operators, the more I realize this is a genuinely unsolved problem for a lot of small teams.

The core tension: too much oversight (screenshots, constant check-ins) makes good people feel like suspects and quit. Too little oversight means you find out something's wrong months later, usually during a payroll or client audit.

I ended up building something (Trackly) to sit in the middle, GPS-verified check-ins visible to both employee and manager, no hidden tracking. But I'm genuinely unsure if this is the right model, or if there's a better approach other builders here have found.

A few real questions I'd love this community's take on:

• If you manage remote or field teams, how do you currently verify attendance or output?

• Where do you personally draw the line between accountability and surveillance?

• Has anyone here built something similar and found a different approach that worked better?

Been having some great conversations here lately, and one thing keeps coming up: most tools that try to answer "is my team working" actually only answer "was my team present." Those aren't the same question, but we treat them like they are.

For field and delivery roles, presence often is the job, showing up at the right place at the right time matters. But for remote knowledge work, presence tells you almost nothing. Someone can be "checked in" for 8 hours and get nothing meaningful done, or be checked in for 2 hours and ship something great.

Building Trackly has forced me to actually separate these two problems instead of bundling them. GPS/check-in solves presence for field teams. But productivity, the "what actually got done" side, needs a completely different signal: milestones, outcomes, client acknowledgments, not location data.

Curious how this community thinks about it:

• Do you track presence and productivity separately, or does one tool try to do both for you?

• For remote/knowledge workers specifically, what's actually told you someone's doing good work, if not visible activity?

• Has anyone found a clean way to combine both signals without it turning into micromanagement?

Attendance should not depend on memory.

Trackly helps businesses track check ins, working hours, leave, payroll, and employee records from one place.

Still early, still improving, and I'd genuinely love your feedback.

What is the biggest headache you face with managing your team?

https://trackly.net/

I'll be upfront: this one's a direct pitch, not a story post. I've shared the backstory a few times already, so this time I just want real eyes and real feedback on the product itself.

Trackly is a GPS-based attendance and workforce tool for remote, office, and field teams. It handles:

• GPS-verified check-in/check-out

• Leave requests and approvals

• Payroll support and reporting

• Employee document management

• Real-time dashboards, visible to both managers and employees

The core idea: replace guesswork and hidden monitoring with a shared, transparent record both sides can see.

If you manage a remote, hybrid, or field team, I'd genuinely appreciate you taking a look and telling me what's missing, what's confusing, or what would make you actually pay for something like this: [trackly.net]

Brutal feedback welcome, that's more useful to me right now than compliments.