

Time tracking app Mite reveals numbers for first 20 months - nordgren
http://blog.yo.lk/en/2010/03/08/facts-and-figures-the-first-20-months-of-our-small-saas-start-up-going-for-premium-only-instead-of-freemium

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buro9
I really like this. Hadn't seen it before.

But it appears to be missing what I would regard as being a key piece of
functionality: Expenses.

We tend to bill time and expenses. Indeed the standard contract we operate
under is T&M, time and materials.

Materials being travel, accommodation, and stuff like that as well as material
in more real terms.

Your time UI looks great, but we already have a really ugly time UI that we'll
be sticking with. Why? Because the system that stores the expenses is more
critical than the system that stores time.

We can accept a margin of error and a overhead on submission of time reports,
but for invoicing and billing we cannot accept such things when it comes to
expenses. One of these things goes into the company filings, one does not.

I would love to be able to utilise your time UI, but to do so necessitates
some way of extending it to also track expenses.

Expenses relate to time because they occur in a moment of time and are nearly
always directly attributable to what you were working on at that time.

i.e. a taxi for a meeting with client X. Verisign Code Certificate for a piece
of code for client Y. Hotel whilst visiting client Z.

So it makes sense to record your expense when you incur it... or to enter your
expenses at the end of the month (when you get your credit card statement) and
then for the date to imply the client.

Perhaps you should be looking at partnering on this front? Maybe pick out
someone like Buxfer and see if they're keen to work towards owning the books
for small and medium companies?

Doing this stuff would allow you to also build profitability reports. If you
know 3 people work for client X, that you invoiced amount A and that your
expenses are amount B... then you know how profitable 3 people are for the
time allocated. Important stuff for freelancers and those offering services
where time tracking and invoicing matters.

Just some ideas. Very much like what I see.

~~~
julias
Thanks for your great input! We'd love to keep the tool easy, therefore we'll
keep focusing on tracking and analyzing time only.

That said, you're totally right: partnering makes sense. Therefore, we do
offer an API. Three invoicing apps already integrated mite to realize exactly
the combination you mentioned. We hope some others will follow, it's so great
to see tools working together, each focusing on its very own strenghs!

~~~
nico
I was wondering... is it really worth it to have an API? Do you have many
customers who use it? would those customers not be your customers if it
weren't for the API?

Thanks!

~~~
julias
I can't prove that with numbers, but oh yes, we think the API is one of our
key "success" points!

One, the API helped us a great deal in terms of features / suporting different
plattforms. Have a look: <http://mite.yo.lk/en/platform/> – this is only
possible because of our API, we couldn't have done that by ourselves, with a
tiny team.

Two, integrating 3rd party products helps to spread the word about your
service, especially, when the customer base is a pretty different one.

Customer wise: a pretty decent part of our customers makes use of our API to
integrate intranet tools and the like. And it's a plus to highlight that we
don't lock the data of our customers in. But if they hadn't become customers
if we didn't have an API? Not sure about that.

~~~
sunir
Hey Julias, you should join <http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com> if you're
looking to find a good group of people building the market through
integrations. We'll be working on time tracking data standards later this year
in fact.

P.S. You should integrate with FreshBooks. (Guess where I work :)

~~~
fjabre
Great site to research for anyone doing a web startup btw. Plenty of great
examples to be found in their directory.

------
wheels
Go team Kreuzberg. :-)

(For non-Berliners, one of the boroughs of Berlin which has a handful of
startups.)

~~~
illumen
I loved Kreuzberg when I stayed in Berlin for a month. Seriously considered
moving to Berlin then. Hopefully will get to live there again for a summer
month and decide.

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laktek
Can someone from the Mite explain what are the factors involved for varying
the expenses?

~~~
julias
Yes, of course: the biggest factor are our salaries – we're raising them
steadily as we're making more money. The second (minor) factor is that some
costs are rising depending on the number of customers/users, such as payment
or server costs.

~~~
bmelton
Did you start with Ramen salaries and are working up to hamburger? Or did you
start with hamburger and working up to steak? It's none of my business of
course, I'm just always curious where one puts the line between a reasonable
salary and something gratuitous.

~~~
julias
Hamburger, I assume ;)

We started with monthly €1,300/founder. Today, we're paying us €2.500/founder.

~~~
JarekS
Great work guys! We have started with premium also ( <http://smartupz.com> ) -
but it's a very soft launch. We will go fully to market in about a month. We
probably will share some figures after first quarter :)

~~~
sga
I dropped by <http://smartupz.com> to find out more about your premium app. I
found that the grammar was not correct in quite a few spots and would highly
recommend you have someone proofread your copy. Not improving the copy will
definitely impact your full launch in a very negative way. Having a crystal
clear, engaging and gramatically correct message will go a long way to helping
you extract people's hard earned money. Good luck with the launch!

~~~
JarekS
Thank you very much for this point. We certainly will correct our pages!

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oneplusone
Tried out the app, but like all time tracking apps out there it fails to meet
my extremely simple needs. Here is what a time tracking app should do to be
fun to use (I would build one myself if I didn't sign a non-compete):

1) Don't require me to have clients, project, or tasks. Just allow freeform
entry. If I don't want to assign time to a project, but just a client I should
be able to.

2) Let me mark hours as billed! I don't want to have a project list that looks
like, "Project 1a, Project 1b, Project 1c). It makes reporting messy.

3) Don't have New Project, New Client, etc. screens. Just create them when I
enter it into the form.

4) Must have a good time tracker that I can start, close, and come back to
later to submit.

Doesn't seem that hard to me. Freckle is the one that come closest, and their
UI is subpar and they don't allow you to mark hours as billed.

~~~
julias
2) + 3) + 4): possible with mite. 1) client only isn't possible, but project
only or service only. Sorry to hear you missed those existing features.

~~~
oneplusone
How do you do #2? Interface needs work because it is not clear at all.

edit: Took another look. Even knowing it exists I still can't find it.

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nader
great to see some real numbers behind a startup!

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Dejen45
Question for the thread -

    
    
      What are your thoughts on already having a product that people will pay for (and charging appropriately, direct selling to b2b markets) verses giving it away for free and monetize later?
    

Would this tactic impair because it confuses the value proposition, or benefit
by spreading the business virally.

For example: <https://www.yammer.com/about/pricing>

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hello_moto
What was not mentioned in the blog post (but in the comments) is that Mite has
been there since December 2006 and the service starts as free (no freemium, no
premium, just plain simple free).

I'd like to know if a company can pull this out by starting out immediately as
"premium" with 30-days trial period, no kick-start no nothing.

~~~
tsally
Both your claims are factually incorrect and it took me about 30 seconds to
verify that you are indeed incorrect. It doesn't start at free, the first user
costs 5 euros. Also, mite did in fact relaunch as a paid service in 2008.
True, it would have been nice if they had mentioned the users they retained
from the initial launch in 2006, but the picture you paint is not accurate.

<http://www.crunchbase.com/product/mite>

~~~
julias
The user charts do not include any users from before July 2008. But we should
have mentioned our history more clearly, at least in the English blog posts,
that's right.

~~~
tsally
It's not really a major objection. I definitely appreciate you sharing the
data in the first place. :)

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revorad
Thanks guys, those are interesting numbers. I'm surprised how little you
charge for your app though. Have you considered increasing the price or
offering more expensive options?

~~~
julias
Interesting comment, thanks revorad. Did you realize the price is per user,
not per account? We feel the price is in the higher middle-range, feels
adequate to us. We're not cosidering to increase it at the moment.

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awolf
I'm surprised the conversion rate fluctuates so much.

Why such a drastic drop in conversion rate jn early January 09?

~~~
julias
The drop corresponds to December '08. We think this occured simply because of
the holiday season. When the trial expired, people weren't working => didn't
read the email => didn't convert.

Another point: our numbers are so low, in general, please keep that in mind.
Every little fluctuation looks like a big deal. But isn't, really.

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swah
So, they can't live from its profit yet. :(

~~~
julias
Why yes, we can, from the very beginning. The expenses do include our
salaries.

~~~
swah
OH COOL! Congratulations!

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gibsonf1
How do you guys like 2checkout.com?

~~~
spencerfry
I used them about 6-7 years ago and didn't like them. However, that was 6-7
years ago.

~~~
bjplink
I use them for a paid membership site I own and haven't had any problems for
several years now. I'm pretty low volume though so that might have something
to do with it.

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fjabre
Wow.. Inspirational. Thanks to the Mite team for providing these numbers.
Simply awesome.

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datums
thank you for sharing. slow and steady is great. +1 transparency

