

Show HN: Making time tracking for freelancers not suck - Paydirt - nfm
https://paydirtapp.com/

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fbuilesv
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.

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tomjen3
This does seem interesting, but there is no tour available and no way to play
around with it without signing up.

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nfm
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.

~~~
tomjen3
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.

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EwanToo
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?

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doctororange
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.

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aaroneous
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.

~~~
nfm
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!

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aashay
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_time_tracking_software))
would be useful.

~~~
nfm
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?

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

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nfm
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?

~~~
esschul
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?

~~~
nfm
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?

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

~~~
nfm
Great idea :) We'll get onto it

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nfm
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!

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nfm
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!

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

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doctororange
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.

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

He's a pretty cool guy.

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

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timedoctor
Tried to sign up and got this:

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

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nfm
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.

