Time Tracking Sucks

As a consultant/freelancer/developer/business owner, I hate logging my time. I hate the tools out there. They are too complicated or they are too simple or the design and user experience make you want to punch a hole through the screen.

Without mentioning names, I used a time tracker that worked pretty well but damn it was so overpriced and their customer support sucked. Although it did *most* things I wanted it to do, I swore to never deal with their crappy support again.

I wear many hats.

Business Owner Hat

I want to see all time entered by my team, for specific projects and clients. I want to invoice clients with a simple click. I want my clients to get not just an invoice but the ability to view a report and timesheet entries online. I don’t want them to just get an invoice that says we worked 1200 hundred hours, pay us a million dollars and send us the deed to your home.

Freelancer Hat

I want a free time tracker with simple 1-click invoicing. I want to get in, click a few buttons and get out. Occasionally, I will view reports but I just want to enter time quick and invoice and be done. Some tools have amazing designs but they fail my “get in, get out” test.

Entrepreneur Hat

I want to be able to manage multiple accounts. I want an account for my consulting business, I want an account for another business where I am a partner and I want an account for the consulting company I am sub-contracting under. I want them to be separate and be easy to switch between them.

Geek Hat

I want a chrome extension, a mobile app, a desktop app, automatic time tracking and integration with zapier, asana, jira, quick books and a few others.

My partner — Antonio Chagoury — and I have had the same issues with time tracking. So what do entrepreneurs do when they cannot find the tool they want? That’s right, they build it.

Warning #1 — we are in beta. It’s a pretty polished beta (if I may say so myself) but it is still a beta.

Warning #2 — we don’t have all the features we want yet (see above) but at least you know where we are going with this.

Drum Roll!!!

Take a look at our new creation — www.hyperlogs.com. I hope you like it and I hope you give us feedback.

A Little Bragging

We have a long way to go, I mean we just went live 6 days ago but so far, we have had several hundred signups, got featured on Product Hunt and made it to the front-page. We also made it the front-page of Hacker News.

Info for Geeks

The tech stack is Ember, Rails, Postgres and Docker. I will blog more about some of the decisions we took and how we rapidly built the app using our ASK framework.