
Ididwork (YC Summer 08) Launches - sgupta
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/06/keep-your-boss-informed-with-ididwork/
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semerda
"Micromanagement" and "Time Poor" - 2 concerns that scream out when I look at
this product. RescueTime did a fantastic job at removing the "time poor"
component for keeping track of where you spend your time, hence living up to
its name.

Having worked in the corporate world and in start-ups I can tell you now that
most corporate clients already have a time sheet system that is a pain in the
a __. Employees spend at least 30mins or so a day writing everything they did
throughout the day and billing their time where appropriate.

When it comes to getting management feedback for each task you did, again
managers are time poor having to deal with more then 1 person in their team +
their own tasks from higher management. Hence why performance reviews between
you and manager occur every quarter / 6 months / annually and only focus on
the high level picture - the stuff that counts - the outcomes / results.

Micromanagement is another issue; no one likes to jot down every action they
did. What "matters" is always the end result not the bits in the middle. I.e.
taking a client for coffee spending 2 hours out of the office is a step to a
potential sale (building rapport). At the end of the day, the sale is what
will count on your performance agreement not the coffee break. My manager
doesn't want to know that I went to coffee with a client unless I managed to
get a sale.

I'm sure some of you would have heard this before but the best workers are
those where management give them what they need to do their job and let them
do it without micromanaging their time. How and when they do it doesn't
matter, all that matters is the end results (outcomes).

~~~
danw
As a developer I solve this by importing an RSS feed of my subversion commits
and trac tickets. I then only have to manually add other stuff such as any
topic I spent time reading up on or researching.

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dangrover
I have something very similar for a dashboard-like interface I use to figure
out what's going on in my ISV.

Here's what it looks like: <http://files.dangrover.com/wwactivity.png>

That's sales (integrated with the order system), SVN commits, wiki edits, bug
tickets.

There's also a pane that shows yearly/monthly/daily goals for sales.

I'm going to have it keep track of my releases too, just so that I can quickly
update the site, appcasts, etc and have it tell me when a major release is
getting long in the tooth.

Since I use Mint for web stats, I've thought about joining that in just to try
to correlate hits/sales, but haven't gotten around to it. Too meta :)

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gojomo
I like the idea and initial basic implementation. I can see a lot of
potential.

The name has problems, though. First, it seems a bit defensive: "Look, I did
work!" Second, it looks/sounds a little like 'idiotwork'.

There are tons of themes and word fragments to work with for 'team
microblogging of work tasks with metrics', so I think with a little effort you
could have a very memorable, meaningful name.

Good luck!

~~~
arthurk
Good to know I'm not the only one, I actually read "idiotwork" the first time
I skimmed the title.

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mynameishere
Agreed. Name bad. Not just the "first time" for me, either. It continues to
look like "idiotwork". Notice that a 'd' is basically an o and a t jammed
together.

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13ren
Ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing e.g. if all interpretations give
positive phrases. Would be cool if it could be done with 'ot' and 'd'.

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sgupta
I'm Shawn, one of the ididwork.com founders. We'd like to know what you think
about the service. Please leave any feedback here or email us at feedback [at]
ididwork (dot) com.

~~~
bigbang
The only concern I have is, I might not want to give details to somebody on
the tasks Im working(since the projects whatever I do in my company are
confidential). This could be a genunine problem for most company employees but
for personal tracking its great.

EDIT: Same concern over rescuetime which sends all the corporate urls to thier
server?

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remanc
I'm the other cofounder. That's something we're working to alleviate concerns
for - we've added hackersafe and verisign (and truste's on the roadmap) so the
data is secure and the session is encrypted. It's definitely something we want
our users to be comfortable with, and something we're working on.

~~~
tptacek
You probably want to be careful about how you word "we've added HackerSafe" to
corporate customers. I will say the following things:

* "Off-the-shelf" scanner-based certifications are not held in uniformly high esteem by companies with IT security groups.

* HackerSafe just won the Pwnie award at Black Hat for "Lamest Vendor Response".

* Talking about how you have a security SDLC, code reviews, and secure architecture will offer much bigger warm fuzzies to customers.

Also, avoid blanket statements like "so the data is secure". Marketing 101. If
you're going to invite objections, make sure they're objections you want to
deal with, not ones where you'll eventually have to concede.

~~~
olefoo
People buy into Hackersafe for many reasons, including the fact that a
Hackersafe badge and customer link will boost your Google pagerank (this was
the case last year, but google is always improving).

Also the little green badge does slightly improve conversion rates for
marginal and otherwise unknown ecommerce sites.

So Hackersafe can be some good marketing, even if it's rather a joke from the
standpoint of what they check for (if you fail their scan, you really fail;
passing tells you little).

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Tichy
Minor details, but

\- I don't want to watch video at work, so I can not see the demo video. There
is no other information on the website on how it works.

\- I can not sign up instantly either, because I can not access my home email
address from work. I don't want to sign up with my work email address.

Bottom line: my instant curiosity can not be satisfied. If it wasn't an YC
company, I would have forgotten all about it by the time I got home. Since it
is YC, there is a faint chance I might remember it and actually check it out
in the evening.

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vlad
Voted up. The exact idea I hyped to everyone (and wrote on my name tag) at
YCombinator's Startup School and reception in April, so I know it has
potential. And registered at Dynadot 3 days ago, the domain registrar I
introduced News.YC to this Spring. ;) So, at least you got one vote :). And I
know other founders of existing YC companies loved the idea as well.

Good thing that of the two YCombinator founders who were there at the
reception, I only talked to Trevor about the idea, and not PG--otherwise I
would be pretty upset! Oh well, I'm actually going back to college this Fall
per PG's new advice to finish college--after following the old advice to drop
out of college--so that's fine that somebody made this. (Had I applied to the
summer round, I would have probably been rejected, given that an app like this
takes 5 people to make.) The implementation looks good! Good luck!

Obviously, I'm not particularly excited to hear this news, since I was
thinking about this idea every day, but on the other hand, it will make it
easier when my app launches since it would have been previously demonstrated
as a proven idea by somebody else.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Why not let the guys take a look at what you have and hopefully you can come
together and increase the chances at becoming successful.

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aneesh
I like it, but I'm skeptical when TechCrunch says "it will eliminate the need
for status meetings". Face-to-face still offers lots of advantages: you can
ask questions in real time, you can read body language, and you have have
quicker discussions. ididwork is a supplement (a pretty good one too!), but
not a replacement.

~~~
tstegart
Thats just a TC sound bite, and you should be skeptical until you try it. I'm
sure there are a lot of things out there TechCrunch thinks will eliminate the
need for something and it hardly ever does.

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fallentimes
The beloved anti todo list. I've been using it every day.

Loving the video - good job Shawn and Reman.

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falsestprophet
I think it would be helpful if you included the option to input the time that
each task took.

~~~
sgupta
Thanks for the suggestion.

It's something we've been debating about, and it helps to know what a user
would prefer. Right now you can star an entry, so the more important work gets
prominence.

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peakok
so for all the people who upvoted that "tired of Techcrunch, want direct links
instead" story, let's take a new habit :

direct link : <http://www.ididwork.com/>

~~~
aneesh
It's actually nice to read TC's review in 2 minutes rather than spending 20
minutes on the site to discover all that stuff on my own.

~~~
tstegart
yeah, but not making that logo a link to the site was freaking annoying!

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how_gauche
How are you planning on making money, exactly?

~~~
remanc
Later on we're planning on charging managers/companies that want to use this
as a tool to manage multiple teams and employees. We'll never charge the users
that are using it as an individual account.

~~~
tstegart
How does your software fit in with the purpose of timesheet software? I know
they're not the same, but people have to enter this information for timesheets
to bill clients. I know that people put that off all the time, so if they had
to do this as well it would be a nightmare. How would you convince a company
that already uses timesheet software to also use your software? I see one or
the other becoming a repetitive task and the odd thing out that everybody
starts to hate.

~~~
remanc
I did use something like that at the last company I worked for. Something
we're looking into (probably more long term) is building out an API that can
play well with others.

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vegashacker
This may be the workout log I've been looking for. I've been wanting a web app
that will let me easily enter, e.g., "went for a run", and then allow me to
view a graph of my workout history (i.e., how many workouts I've done).

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mtoledo
I read once on 37 Signals that they have a twitter like "what are you doing?"
status page so that the team lead doesn't have to ask this all the time.

I really expceted this to be a "what are you doing" kinda app rather than a
"what have you done" one. To me (I'm sure people will disagree, np) it's
easier to write down a task when you start it, or when you are in the middle
of it, than when you end it. And that way it's easier to track interruptions,
etc.

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omakase
I don't know if this exists in the states, but I know in Canada tech companies
can submit credits for hours their employees log as R&D (it's a pretty loose
definition). At many of the large companies that is the main reason they use
timesheets.

If this exists here in the US and were integrated into ididwork somehow it
might be a great way to get adoption from managers.

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davidw
Vaguely like 'Stuff To Do', which I ended up open sourcing because I just
didn't see the demand in that space. Of course theirs is prettier (lots
prettier), and more professional looking. Still, I wonder about making money
in that space - it's quite crowded, and there is probably a lot of competition
from "good enough" solutions.

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rantfoil
This is the kind of bottom-up stuff that can change an organization from the
inside. Congrats to the ididwork.com team.

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swombat
I'm thinking we might use it on our small, decentralised (across two
continents) agile team, since we always have a bit of a headache keeping each
other up to date on what we've done.

Don't focus too much on the manager-review aspect, imho. This could be very
useful as a simple communication tool, without any management reviews.

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brandonkm
I really like the idea. There is a definitely a need for something like this.
I'm curious to know if you plan on adding any sort of communication aspects
(along the lines of built in chat, messages, possibly video chat, etc.)?

~~~
remanc
I'm not sure (since there are so many alternatives out there for that kind of
thing). Our primary goal is to keep it as lightweight and easy to use as
possible. That being said, it's something we'll think about.

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colinplamondon
Bookmarklet incoming? Or, better yet, a Quicksilver plugin? Looks great but
it's the kind of thing that I'd only use if it's easy to get information into,
ala Twitter.

~~~
remanc
Definitely. One of our top priorities at the moment is adding more (and
quicker) channels of input into the system.

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bkmrkr
Where are the barriers to entry? I could build the same thing in 24 hours.

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maxklein
Do you guys have an API?

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aneesh
Integration with RescueTime would be very interesting!

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jacobbijani
I keep reading the name as "idlework."

