Manuel (The profile pic belongs to ©ArminWalcher) of Timeular.
Tell us about yourself?
Former web engineer and time management coach turned CEO of Timeular.com – the only time tracking solution users love to use. Advocate of remote and async work, hence we’ve been working like that since 2016.
What do you think is the single biggest misconception people have when it comes to startups?
Startups are super hard. Starting a company and making money is easier than ever. Achieving unicorn status, that’s the hard part.
Of course. So is becoming a worldwide top chef, athlete, author, and anything similar. And I’d challenge every founder to go and work in a restaurant kitchen, ER, or on a ship.
Those jobs are really stressful. If we would move away from saying, startups are hard more people would dare to try.
If you could go back in time to any moment from your journey, and give yourself one tip, what would it be?
Never stop talking to users. We did very well in the beginning but as soon as success hit we focused on growth prematurely and spent less time talking to users. We should have talked even more to users.
What makes you stand out as an entrepreneur?
I always stay calm and keep a cool head no matter what, which allows me to use the energy for finding solutions instead and sparks confidence in the people around me.
What are some of the best working habits you’ve gained over the past couple of years?
Work remotely and asynchronously hence allowing me to have a lots of uninterrupted time to think things through and finish things faster.
Give us a bit of an insight into the influences behind the company?
Time is the most valuable thing we have. It’s what we want the most but spend the worst. Especially at work. As companies grow more and more time is wasted.
Hence we’ve started Timeular to track, understand, and improve how teams spend their time.
On top of that, many teams bill their time, but only track ~50-80% of their billable time because they don’t track things immediately.
Time tracking immediately with a simple solution like Timeular allows to stop undercharging.
Where do you see your business in five years?
Everyone wants to be #1 and we want to be the most simple to use time tracking solution out there so teams can increase productivity and bill more hours.
What do you think the biggest challenge will be for you in getting there?
Time tracking has a bad notion of “spyware”, “employee monitoring”, or “big brother is watching” and it’s not an easy habit to build.
Everyone who built a time tracking habit using Timeular found some surprising and personally beneficial insights and ended up increasing productivity and profitability.
Talk to us about your biggest success story so far?
One company realised that 32% of their time accounted for only 6% of their revenues.
They ended up closing that revenue stream and allocated time to discover new revenue streams with bigger returns.
How do clients and customers find you? Are you much of a salesperson for yourself?
They can reach out to us on [email protected] and will be helped promptly by our amazing support team who our customers love and in case of any sales inquiries will be put in touch with me.
What one tip would you give to fellow startup founders?
Don’t give up too quickly and find the one thing to focus on.
Talk to your users, go deep, invest a lot of time in research, and find that one thing you need to get right.
It will save you a lot of time, allow to keep complexity low, and hence make your whole journey easier to manage.
And finally, what do you hope the future brings both you personally, and your business?
As cheesy as it sounds, but what keeps us going is happy customers and stories about how we improved their work lives.
Hence we start every all-hands with a customer talk. And hence, what I hope for us is more happy customers.
