Everhour
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"Whether you’re a business owner or a freelancer, you know that working effectively is hardly possible without time management. Time is literally money: a certain job is expected to take a certain amount of time, and that amount of time will determine how much your client will pay."
It’s equally important to know how quickly you can accomplish a job to make viable plans within your own company or team and never let down those relying on you. Besides, you won’t advance in your field of activity and expertise without optimizing time needed to get things done, which is achieved exactly with tracking and analyzing your hours.
Everhour is designed to help you monitor each and every task or activity, be professional and able to provide precise time data instead of ballpark figures.
You can track your and your team’s time, analyze the results, evaluate time needed for a task based on previous entries as well as generate detailed time reports for chosen tasks, projects, team members and date ranges.
For your convenience, Everhour is integrated with the leading business management services such as:
Moreover, the handy, intuitive and maximally user-friendly interface provides experience so pleasant that you’ll be looking forward to doing your timesheets.
The Story
After founding our web development company, we were in quest for a perfect time tracking and reporting tool for almost 3 years. We had tried everything from non-tracking time (but understood we couldn’t just dream up numbers) to using spreadsheets and lots of popular time and project management systems. Unfortunately, none was good enough for us which urged us to come up with our own solution.
Our ideal tool was supposed to:
- Solve needs of small teams of up to 20 people, just like us;
- Be truly intuitive and even geeky to be loved by developers who aren’t big fans of reporting;
- Help us provide clients with actual hours spent and be completely transparent with them;
- Give the basis for analysis of initial estimates vs actual time spent;
- Feature an opportunity for quick and easy reporting;
- Be equally applicable for both personal and office usage.
All these ideas came alive in Everhour that we’ve been happily using with the team ever since its launch. Inspired by our experience and seeing benefits that come with the tool, most of our clients have also implemented geeky time tracking within their own companies and become religious Everhour users.
We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how positively the app affects our productivity. The whole team has become much more organized, stopped forgetting about any important issues, started providing clearly more accurate estimates for tasks.
It feels incredible to see users who can’t do without it anymore as well as those discovering the world of productivity thanks to our work
At the earliest stage, we haven’t spent a cent on promoting the product and still watched how Everhour has quickly transformed from an internal tool to the app used and loved by lots of businesses and people worldwide.
Future Plans
Everhour team is never done with refining the product and is always open to our dear customers’ feedback and valuable suggestions. It’s vital that we not only promote our vision of a perfect time management app but also do it in line with the users’ needs and expectations.
We are going to devote more and more of our time and resources to Everhour to eventually make it fit every single person or company caring about their efficiency and time spent. As one of the possible scenarios, we might as well completely switch to product development to bring all our ideas to life. Because honestly, we have tons of them.
However, we never tend to get down to whatever comes to mind or is suggested right away.
Keeping the app easy and intuitive is held as the major principle and too many features may destroy the balance.
Every idea is thoroughly thought out for us to see if it will bring actual value to customers.
One of the other things on our roadmap is changing the pricing scheme. Everhour is currently free for all users since we’ll be ready to sell our product only after we make sure it’s impeccable. For now, we are still in the process of working on important features and collecting feedback from the customers.
But as soon as we ensure excellent functionality, we’re planning to add paid business accounts. So far we can’t provide full details about the future subscriptions plans but we can certainly guarantee you free trial and no overcharging, trust us on this one.
What lessons we have learned
Prototype, prototype, prototype
We’ve made sure one more time - prototyping is a must. When creating a product, you don’t know 100% if a certain feature will work as expected if at all and prototypes help you test and figure out any issues. You get more flexibility and space for experiments which eventually will bring you to the perfect functionality combination in the app.
If you have a clear picture of a product in your head, mockups or on paper, prepare to be surprised at how different it will feel when brought to life. With Everhour, we faced the same: absolutely sure about a solution we’d come up with, we had to change it after seeing the real-life prototype.
That’s why we believe in
working in cycles:
generating idea > prototyping > testing > releasing
... to save you from devoting too much time to useless design or functional features.
Don’t rush to every new feature suggested
Once again, no matter how tempting it might be to pack the product with all the features possible, try to evaluate really well the benefits new functionality will bring. If an idea is really worth your effort and will boost your karma, go for it. Otherwise, stay consistent with your roadmap and don’t overload the app with tricky interface not so much favored by users.
The desire to satisfy the first users of your newly launched product is totally understandable. But keep in mind that if you try to please all you will please none and, even worse, you can give up the main principles and guidelines you’ve wanted to build the product on.
With Everhour, we get dozens of feature suggestions from our users every other week. For the sake of keeping the app really simple and easy to use, we approach every idea very carefully. And even if we wanted to bring to life all of them, we’d simply have not enough time and people for it.
Don’t run after traffic
I suggest that you don’t choose gaining traffic to your product site/blog as the biggest goal. No one says that visitors are irrelevant to an app success and popularity, just try not to get crazy about them.
And by no means it’s professional to refer to your product for a thousandth time at the same place or interact with people just to sell them the app.
Focus on quality and even those few users you have will spread the word about what they truly love.
Using the product yourself is creating a successful product
It’s usually easy to spot an app that has been designed purely for sale and isn’t clearly a go-to tool for the developers themselves. How can you see that? By issues that would certainly be fixed if the team used the product on a daily basis.
You’ll never understand how the product works and feels unless you use it yourself. Just deal with it.
Split responsibilities
If you want each aspect of your product development process handled perfectly, let people with corresponding expertise work on it. I know that currently lots of software developers have multiple-field knowledge and are able to get several app functionality elements covered. But as they say, "Jack of all trades, master of none".
Splitting a big chunk of work among several team members dedicated to what they know and do best is a guarantee of much higher product quality. Besides, such an approach will save your time.
It happens that product owners prefer all-in-one-package specialists in the team as it’s cheaper to hire fewer people for the project. The budget is definitely something to consider but potential time and efforts spent on fixing things is disproportionate to the potential cost of employees.
Track your stats
Even if you hate analytics, prepare to deal with it a lot. How else can you understand strong and weak points of the product except monitoring how people use it?
You may find out that things you consider the most helpful/used/required in your app will turn out to be different for actual users. This data is priceless as this is what should guide you the most when preparing new product releases.
We’ve personally been using Google Event Tracking as one of the easiest ways to get real-time stats. What we see might be sometimes even confusing but it’s a great chance to understand how our users think and act.
Priceless marketing & promotion experience
As a consulting company, we’ve hardly dealt with the marketing side of the projects we’ve been involved in. We keep the focus on providing impeccable functionality and fully understanding the client’s preferences and needs to offer the most suitable solution.
With our own tool, things have changed. Of course, achieving excellent performance is still a priority, but ever since the launch, we’ve been mastering the art of catching attention of potential users, connecting to existing customers and anticipating what they’ll want, telling the world who we are and how our great tool can help them.
We keep on discovering new hacks and tips on social and content marketing, polishing our writing skills on Everhour blog and getting in touch with outstanding media people. Thanks to Everhour, we’ve got an exclusive opportunity to be engaged in both the consulting field and product promotion which allows us to look at any project from a broader perspective.