Growing a Time Tracking Software to $316,000/Month

https://www.failory.com/mistakes/hubstaff

by nicoserdeir • 8 years ago

71 39 8 years ago

lwhalen2• 8 years ago

They're an opt-in pervasive surveillance company, but instead of sharing the data with advertisers, they share it with your employer. I can't personally imagine ever willingly using their product, but apparently many other people can. Congratulations, I think?

banananana• 8 years ago

Good way to identify which companies you shouldn't work for, I guess.

lwhalen2• 8 years ago

All of my agreements

landryraccoon• 8 years ago

But I wouldn’t mind having a bank account, credit card, health insurance / healthcare or prescription drugs from a place that did this.

mperham• 8 years ago

Is it just me or is failory a blatant copy of indiehackers?

madjam002• 8 years ago

I thought it was Indiehackers until I saw this comment and checked the domain

curuinor• 8 years ago

I mean, the name and everything indicate a much, much stronger emphasis on failures.

The design's definitely a ripoff, true

dx0343• 8 years ago

The design's is one of those standard templates that 90% of new sites appear to use (my estimate). Wouldn't call that a rip off, just not very creative. But then again, hiring designers to come up with something completely new isn't cheap.

nicoserdeir• 8 years ago

Hey there! I am Rich, maker of Failory. I was 100% inspired by IH when building Failory. I love Indie Hacker interviews and I am really active in their community :)

jacob_rezi• 8 years ago

No problem with that!

learc834• 8 years ago

I'm definitely never working for a company that uses this product. Any employer that feels the need to constantly review screenshots of my work is an employer that I don't want to work for.

openmosix• 8 years ago

Instacart seems a customer (from their landing page). I'm wondering it they track their devs this way.

state_less• 8 years ago

There ought to be a site to show whether a company does time tracking or other excessive surveillance techniques. Would be helpful to filter out employers before hand. It'd also be helpful when making purchases. I'd prefer to buy from alternative suppliers when available (e.g. buying from Costco vs. Walmart)

ggg9990• 8 years ago

I would feel better as a customer if I knew that anyone with privileges to access user data ran software like this.

dx0343• 8 years ago

I would assume they track anyone working with customer data or other sensitive data to ensure they don't misuse the access.

benjohnson• 8 years ago

My company tracks our employees - but it's for good reason: We work 7 hour days.

kungito• 8 years ago

Does that mean you have to do 7 hours of pure work?

learc834• 8 years ago

That sounds horrible. There's no way to get real productive output for 7 straight hours. I've always been considered a very productive programmer by coworkers, but it's very rare for me to be at the keyboard banging out code for 7 hours a day (even back when I only had individual contributor tasks).

A huge chunk of my time is spent at the white board.

Mikhail_Edoshin2• 8 years ago

As a freelancer I've been using such products -- they're a part of the package in this market -- and I can testify that it actually motivated and disciplined me. Once I start the tracker, I'm in work mood and I actually do the job without distractions. I even found it harder to attend to my pet projects with the same vigor :)

Also, the version I used took a screenshot every 10 minutes; if it happened that something unintended got there, I had the option to delete that screenshot (losing these 10 minutes, naturally; or having to submit them without a screenshot, which was a separate "manual" category).

learc834• 8 years ago

I can't imagine hiring a freelancer that I felt I needed to micromanage to that extent. What do you do when you need to spend some time working on a white board? I probably spend more time on a whiteboard than I do coding (I'm more of an architect these days, but that was still true when I was only an individual contributor.)

I worked as a freelancer for years, and I would have refused to work for someone that required me to install tracking software.

If it's possible at all, I would work on trying to bill daily or weekly instead of hourly if I were you.

Humdeee• 8 years ago

The entire thing just seems like automated micromanagement

solomatov3• 8 years ago

I wouldn't call it time tracking software.

IMO, what they do is very evil practice, it leaves employees no personal space at their workplace. Imagine receiving a highly personal message via skype or email, and a manager seeing it. It leads to employees hating their job and wanting to leave their workplace as soon as possible.

Rapzid• 8 years ago

Call centers and such. You got a bunch of MBAs "leading" a massive amount of entry-level workers. They pretty much look down on and dehumanize their entire workforce.

I'm not sure what's worse; being on the floor or being the sorta-manager that busted their ass hard enough to scrape a few extra dollars an hour but has to now act as a buffer between the MBAs and the floor workers, of which they used to be, all while being too scared to truly stick up for them due to the risk of losing their job..

bdcravens• 8 years ago

Your personal device is your personal space.

phailhaus• 8 years ago

True, but if your manager is taking screenshots of your screen as you work, then they are micromanaging you. They don't trust you. If my manager doesn't trust me, then I'm not feeling too good about my job.

"Hey I see you're on Stack Overflow a lot, are you having trouble with the work we've given you?"

Why do we think that nontechnical managers would be good judges of what productive behavior looks like? Everyone has their own style.

solomatov3• 8 years ago

I know people who refused to accept otherwise decent job offers just because a company had that policy in the workplace.

For software developers, designers and many other creative workers, work and life are intertwined. They can't, and often don't want to separate one from the other.

People often might fix urgent problems at night, or work extra hours on a weekend from home. But in exchange people want to be able to use company computer to check personal email, read the news, etc, and they don't want that email be available to their boss. That's a creative professional bargain. If employer doesn't accept later he won't get the former. And the value of the former is much higher than the later.

Yes, there're people who slack off, and they should be disciplined and fired if it doesn't help. But, if only people who you can hire are such slackers, may be there's something wrong with your hiring.

newsat13• 8 years ago

Are these revenue claims somehow verified? I know that indiehackers never verified them, is failory any different?

BrentOzar• 8 years ago

I wonder if they don’t have a partnership deal with Upwork. I’ve hired freelancers through Upwork, and you get a series of screenshots of the freelancer’s screens if you want it. (It helped me catch someone trying to defraud me - they had the exact same Microsoft Word screen up for hours on end, billing but not actually doing anything.) A partner deal with Upwork would explain the seemingly crazy high revenues.

ianhawes• 8 years ago

I lost all respect after Hubstaff launched their "Hubstaff Talent" board by copying jobs from Upwork and other freelancer boards. Discovered this when a post I had made on another platform was scraped and posted on Hubstaff Talent. The applicants never reached me.

To make matters worse, Hubstaff themselves started posting their own job ads on the web. When people applied to work remote for Hubstaff, they were instead opted into Hubstaff Talent daily spam.

1123581321• 8 years ago

I’m surprised this doesn’t mention their podcast. I don’t remember how I discovered it, but I really enjoyed the interviews with agency owners and along the way I learned about Hubstaff’s features. Eventually, they shut it down because the employee doing the show either was laid off or got another job.

nodesocket• 8 years ago

I use and recommend Toggl[1]. It's really a nice fit for contractors.

[1] https://toggl.com/

developerdanny• 8 years ago

The company I work for uses this software, only the CTO finds the overarching surveillance super duper creepy, and refused to subject us (the employees) to the screenshots.

Hubstaff should not have included that as a feature, as many others have commented, it's too invasive. I am lucky to have a CTO that considers employees peace of mind and comfort on the job. The time tracking features are great, the surveillance, not so much.

Growing a Time Tracking Software to $316,000/Month

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