Show HN: Making time tracking for freelancers not suck - Paydirt | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Making time tracking for freelancers not suck - Paydirt

paydirtapp.com

14 pointsnfm25 comments

Just a recommendation: You should tell me why I'd want to your application instead of something like Freckle (http://letsfreckle.com, what I'm currently using). Freckle's design is gorgeous, the workflow and UX is retarded good (including the popup tracker) and multiple project handling is awesome. It's also cheaper. I think a small section with text including an answer to "Why is this better than X?" goes a long way to increment the signup rate.

This does seem interesting, but there is no tour available and no way to play around with it without signing up.

Feedback noted!

We've made the signup process as easy as possible (name, email and password only, no email confirmation) but it's definitely more of a barrier to entry than we'd like. We're keen to make a product video soon, and maybe pre-populate new accounts with some sample data too.

Thing is that I am not your ideal target market for this, but if I had to sign up to evaluate every potential webapp, I would get far too much email.

You've got a nice design, and the functionality might be about right for someone with limited requirements, but I think your price seems a bit high.

For example, FreeAgent Central provides all you do and much more for $20 per month

http://www.freeagentcentral.com/pricing

If you want to just provide a very simple and easy time tracking system with limited invoicing that's great for people with limited needs, but I don't think you've quite hit the right price.

Also, you don't mention multi-currency, is this limited to just US $, with no support of sales taxes (either manually or automatically calculated), etc?

It's funny how when you're working on something every day you can miss such gaping oversights. Yes - foreign currencies (including Bitcoin) are supported, and you can create multiple customized taxes which are automatically calculated and totaled for the invoice - but there's no indication of that on the home page. An important point.

Regarding price, you may well be right. I'd be lying if I said we weren't testing the waters on price, so it's good to hear some explicit thoughts on the matter.

Which is tougher: pricing higher now for the future features or starting low and having to raise prices (which nobody likes) later?

Thanks for your input.

Looks nice, although there's nothing compelling enough to switch from my current (Billings).

If you're looking for feedback, you should allow invoices to be emailed from within the app. This workflow would drive me mad: download pdf -> new email -> type address & subject -> attach pdf -> send.

Thanks for your thoughts.

We've held off emailing invoices through the app so far as we want to come up with a very good interface for it. Something that doesn't require lots of customization and mail merge handling, but is flexible as well.

But it's great to hear there's demand for this feature!

A comparison chart of features against competition (both web and non) like Billings, Harvest, Ballpark, and other services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_time_tracking_sof...) would be useful.

Thanks for the feedback :)

We're very light in the marketing part of the site at the moment. Would you rather see a feature comparison or a short product demonstration video?

I'd kind of need a reason to switch over from Freshbooks, which works pretty well at the moment.

Our goal is to be simpler to use, to focus on time tracking using a timer (rather than logging time after the fact), and to have an aesthetically pleasing application.

We've got some ideas up our sleeve for mobile and desktop innovation, but thought we'd build the web side first as (we hope) it's useful as a standalone product.

What do you love most about Freshbooks?

Harvestapp has a timer and manually doing it.

What would be a cool feature, is if you could use the gps as the timetracker. You were at the location 10 hours, how many do you want to bill etc.

Just an idea :) Simplicity is nice, but lots of your competitors have that already. What sets you aside?

GPS location tracking is one of the features we have in mind! Great to hear someone else is keen for it.

Something else that we haven't seen is better browser integration - some kind of bookmarklet that gives you a timer whatever site you're on in your browser. This would be good for web developers and other users that spend a lot of time working in the browser. What do you think of that idea?

Have bigger screenshots (more than 1) of your app, instead of selling me the macbook and iphone :-D

Great idea :) We'll get onto it

We've been working on Paydirt for about four months while juggling our regular consulting work. It's been in open beta since it was even close to MVP and we had useful feedback from the users so far.

Now we'd love the feedback of the HN community. Thanks!

Some interesting stats from this post so far. We've had 945 visits to the home page, 69 to the signup page, and 13 accounts created.

Quantitative data to back up a number of comments about our marketing site being lightweight!

We've been using Harvest for years for this. What is your advantage over them?

Currently, in terms of features, Harvest are obviously way ahead. Our goal is to improve on the time tracking process, which is what we feel is lacking for serious multi tasking freelancers. At the moment this means a sweet interface, and in the future, predictive tracking based on your work/location/history. It was a struggle to launch this base product knowing that there is currently no 'killer feature', but we're hoping that getting feedback early will help us nail it.

Did @Koodoz do your logo as per this dribbble shot? http://dribbble.com/shots/148611-Paydirt-4

He's a pretty cool guy.

Thanks Koodoz. They did a great job and wrote a little about it here: http://www.koodoz.com.au/portfolio/logos-branding/paydirt/

Yep, Marc did our logo for us. We love it!

Tried to sign up and got this:

THERE'S BEEN A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX – (500 ERROR)

Thanks for letting us know. On first inspection this looks like an irregular response from Gmail's SMTP servers that our app didn't catch. I'll get this fixed ASAP :)

In the meantime, if you'd like to try to sign up again it will almost certainly work. I think you just lucked out.

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