Setting Yourself Apart (and Time Tracking!) with Liam Martin

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 102 of How I Built It. On today’s episode, I talk to Liam Martin, the founder of an app called Time Doctor. I tried Time Doctor out in preparation for this episode, and I’ve got to say it’s great if you are trying to manage the time and reporting for big teams. Liam will talk all about how he built this, how he was fulfilling a need that he saw in the market, and how he grew Time Doctor to be what it is today. The growth stuff is especially interesting to me, and the information that he provides about things like remote teams. I know a bunch of us are working on remote teams now. It’s a great all-around episode. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. We will get to that in a minute, but first I do want to tell you that today’s episode is brought to you by Pantheon, you’ll hear all about Pantheon later in the episode, and I want to tell you about a few courses that I’ve been working on over the past year. It’s all coming to a head. WordPress 5.O is either, as you listen to this, coming out or is already out.

There are big changes in WordPress 5.0, specifically around the editor. If you are interested in getting educated about those changes, maybe you’ve heard of Gutenberg, that is the new type of editor that is in WordPress 5.0. I’ve got four offerings for you if you are interested in learning about Gutenberg. If you go to CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg, you will see those offerings. There’s a user course if you are a content editor curious about how the new editor works, there is a course for freelancers where if you are working with clients you will not only learn how the new editor works but also how to navigate those waters with your client. It has workbooks and email scripts and checklists, and things like that. There is a theming course as well, and if you are a theme developer and you need to prepare your theme for Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0, there is a course that will help you out.

Finally the fourth offering is licensing, so  if you work at an agency or if you manage a ton of clients and you want to get them trained quickly, if you work at an organization where everybody uses WordPress, and you want to get them trained quickly, you can license the introduction to WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg course. There is a flat fee you can host the videos on your own website, and they’ll automatically get updated. It’s a single lifetime price, so you can check that out. Once again that link is CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg. That’s it for the housekeeping stuff, why don’t we get on with the show?

Joe Casabona: Liam, how are you today?

Liam Martin: I’m pretty good. How are you, Joe?

Joe: I am fantastic. The weather’s finally getting nice here on the East Coast, and I love being outside. Thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate you taking the time. We’re going to be talking about Time Doctor which looks cool. I know a lot of my listeners are developers or business owners, and they’re interested in keeping things and making sure that they’re spending their time wisely. It looks like your product does that, but why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Liam: Sure. My name is Liam. I live in Canada, and I travel three to four months out of the year, and we have two companies. We have Time Doctor, and Staff.com, both of them, in essence, do the same thing but one is for enterprise, and one is for SMBs. What the software does is it measures the efficiency of remote teams. We have employees in 28 different countries in our company, and I’m currently tracking a task of “Podcast with Joe,” and I’m measuring exactly how long that particular task is taking. Then I can compare that to the other Podcasts that I’ve done and figure out how efficiently I’m completing that task, like how much time I’m spending on Skype and on Gmail and then comparing that to other podcasts that I’m doing. It is focusing you on becoming more efficient. Most other tools on the market measure how long you’ve worked, and we think that that’s stupid. We tell you what you did while you were working.

Joe: That’s great. One of the things about time tracking, I’m so bad at time tracking because there are some things that I haven’t built properly into my workflow. Sometimes I’ll move from task to task, and I’ll forget to do something and hit the right button, or whatever. That’s cool. How did you come up with the idea for Time Doctor? I’m especially interested in this because tracking remote teams is becoming more and more important as more and more companies are going remote. It seems like it could be difficult. The last time I was on a remote team we had to be sticklers to make sure people were putting their time in, especially because a lot of our time was billable to the client.

Liam: For sure. The way that we came up with the idea was I was running an online tutoring company at the time, and one of the big problems inside of the business was I would bill the student for 10 hours and then the student would come to me saying, “I didn’t work with my tutor for 10 hours. I worked with them for 5.” I’d have to go to the tutor and say, “Did you work with Jimmy for 10 hours?” And the tutor would say, “Of course I did.” I’d end up having to refund the student for 5 hours and pay the tutor for the full 10 hours, and that was destroying the business.

Joe: Sure.

Liam: I was speaking at this conference in Austin, Texas called South by Southwest. If anyone has heard of it before it’s basically spring break for nerds. It’s super fun, lots of different technology companies that show up in Austin and eat barbecue and talk about technology. I met my co-founder Rob, and he was running a remote team as well. He said, “I’m starting this little alpha product which can measure precisely exactly what’s going on with your remote workers, and more specifically, the breakdown of where they’re spending their time.” So I could then go to that student and say, “Jimmy. He did work with you for 10 hours. He worked with you for 10 hours seven minutes and thirty-two seconds, and here’s everything that he did.” To very clearly make sure that’s locked in. So that was a huge “Aha” for me, and I thought to myself, “Man this is going to blow up my tutoring company if I had this product.” But it hadn’t been built yet, so I joined up with Rob and made my focus on that. Sold off the other business and six years later we’re here.

Joe: That’s incredible. It sounds like with a lot of good businesses, and there was the need and there was the timing, and then there was the universe bringing you and Rob together to do this.

Liam: I personally believe that if your product isn’t scratching your own itch, you’re at a real serious disadvantage. You can build a product that you don’t necessarily use like I was talking to somebody last week who I’ve been mentoring, and they are building software for salons to be able to schedule when someone gets their haircut. And I said, “Have you ever been a hairdresser?” “No.” “Have you ever run a hair salon?” “No.” “OK. Then you’re at a real disadvantage because you’re not living and breathing that every single day, and you can do it, but I would suggest you don’t. Focus on something that is important to you, because you’ve got to put in five to ten years of your life before you start to get traction. There are the Slacks of the world that explode, but fundamentally you’re putting in five to ten years of your life into this, so you’d better be pretty passionate about it because it’s going to suck around year one, two, three. And if you’re really bad, year four, five and six of the product.

Joe: Absolutely. Having that passion is important. I recently read a quote from Walt Disney that was, it was something to the effect of “We don’t make cartoons to make money. We make money to make more cartoons.” And I like that. If you’re in it just for the money, then you’re either some savant that’s good at that stuff, or you’re not going to make it. You’re not going to survive. Aside from that, I have a software engineering background, and we always talk about bringing domain knowledge to the project that you’re developing and knowing how the product and knowing how the business runs is important.

Because like you said,  if you’ve never run a salon before how do know what people who run a salon need? I love that about scratching your own itch. It’s apparent I’m an online teacher, and it’s clear that the people who developed the online software that we use at the college are not teachers, because everything is difficult to use. But that’s cool. As you were working with Rob to develop out Time Doctor and come up with more features, did you do any research? Because time tracking apps are a dime a dozen. They’re the ones that people who want to build an iOS app, that’s one of the first ones that they can build because it’s relatively simple. But you’ve got some heavy duty features here.

Liam: We focused on the one core feature which was website and application tracking, which at that point we were the first company that ever did that in the space. We realized that was a major differentiator. I generally feel you need to be exponentially better or exponentially cheaper than your competitors. If you want to enter a market, you should do one of two things. You should either be ten times cheaper or 10 times better. If you can’t do either of those things, don’t enter the market. You could, and maybe you’re going to be a number two or a number three or number five in the market, and there’s probably a lot of money there if it’s a multi-billion dollar market. But fundamentally you’re not going to be number one because there’s no huge strategic advantage. For us, we put all our chips down on that metric, saying “People don’t just want to track time.

They want to see what websites and applications and mouse movements and keyboard movements are associated with that activity,  that you can build deeper data analysis and figure out what people are doing. Not just how long they’re working, but what they’re doing, and how efficiently they’re working. That paid off for us. I would say anyone else entering the market, really focus on that. That was– By the way, that was not easy. That cost millions of dollars to develop just the beta to be able to get that up and running, and the first one through the door is always ten times more expensive than the second or third or fourth person through the door. The innovators are always the one that end up paying more to be able to push that, but you also get 6 to 12 to 18 months of free open, clear market, where you’re like “Shit. You’re the only thing that’s doing this, and everyone else is not doing that particular feature, and that’s a game changer for me.”.

Joe: That’s incredible. You mentioned either blow the doors off the features or be a lot cheaper. I’m looking at your pricing page, and you’re not obnoxiously expensive either. $9.999 per user per month, that’s reasonable enough for me to say, “If this thing could show me that I can save even one hour per month, that’s like my hourly rate in a year.” It’s absolutely justifiable costs for a tool that not enough people use.

Liam: We had a client  recently that had 22,000 employees, and their analysis came back saying, “We increased phone call efficiency,” because they’re a call center, “By 6%.”  Our software increased the amount of phone calls they were making by 6%, which was their core metric. And I said, “How much money does that work out for you?” “It’s like $22 million dollars.” I was  like, “Cool I’ll take half of that.” Forget the cost of the software, and I’ll take the $10 million dollars. So that’s the other part too, is create value and document that value. If you can quantify value people, then it’s easy, because you’re like “I increased your dollars by 6%. Do you not want to increase your dollars by 6%? Because if not, I’ll go. But if you do, then let’s do a deal.” And that’s what you’ve got to get to.

Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Pantheon. WordPress 5.0 and the new editor Gutenberg are coming. Are you prepared? Do you want to learn about the changes in advance? Pantheon has gathered resources to help you prepare, including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon also has made it easy and free to try Gutenberg with your site before the official launch. Visit Pantheon.io/Gutenberg. Let them know that How I Built It sent you. Now, back to the show.

Joe: When you’re doing an e-commerce website it’s easy to create value. You say, “I’m building you a thing that will maybe make you $2,000 a month, so if you pay me $10,000 for it it’s paid for in five months.” If you can relate it somehow to that and say, “This is going to save you time,” Or “Make you $22 million dollars.” It’s an easy sell, which is fantastic. For me, if I were to look at the data, I’d see a lot of me doing a thing and then I see Facebook. I do a thing, and then I see Facebook. That would absolutely shame me into being more productive. The Facebook icon showing up all the time, or whatever.

Liam: Right.

Joe: We’re about halfway through, which is when I like to ask the title question which is how did you build it? You hooked up with Rob who said he was working on a prototype. Did you do any development, or were you driving more of the user requirements sort of thing?

Liam: No. Rob was managing the development side of the business, and then I was managing the marketing and sales side of the business. How we built it, I went out into the market. I understood the market quite well, and so did my co-founder Rob, we both had remote teams, which as we said before is critical in trying to figure out how to build a product like this. If you’ve never built a remote team or been in a remote team, I highly suggest you do not build a product like this because you are not going to succeed. We were able to understand that market, and honestly, the first part of the business was me calling up all of my friends that were looking for this solution that I’ve had conversations with in the past saying “Man, I wish that this solution, I wish that this thing did that.” That’s the core of where all of our first customers came from.

Then it was just going into grinding. The core product was Built at this point, we had only had websites and applications in time and a little task manager. All these other features weren’t Built but then it just came into, “OK. We’re getting traction.” I remember our very first month we did about $6,000 a month which was awesome for us. We were like, “Holy crap people are paying us for this thing,” which was amazing. Then we said “OK. We’ve got something. Now let’s build it out.” It was blogging, it was paid ads, it was social media, and it was all the stuff that people do to be able to get there.

Joe: Nice. The first thing that you said, you talked to your friends about things that they wanted. Completely rings true to a previous episode in this season with Chris Lema where he said, “Don’t build the thing that you think people want, find out what people want and build that. Build to the user’s story or to the user’s problem,” and it sounds like– First of all you experienced the problem firsthand, which is what you’ve been saying this whole time, but it sounds like you went the same route. You were like, “What are the pain points and how can I make them better with this project?”

Liam: I also took another little extra step. If people go down that route and they talk to their friends about a product and say “I’m thinking about building this product. Do you think that’s a good idea?” Your friends will be like “That’s a great idea, you should totally do it. It’s amazing.” I’ll have that conversation, and they’ll say, “This is amazing. This is great. How much do you think that I should charge for something like this?” “You could charge $50 a month per user. It’s amazing.” “OK. How much would you pay?” “I would pay $50 per user per month.” “Cool. You want to give me that money now, and I’ll build it?” That’s where it gets tense. Because everyone wants to be supportive of you, but until you get some money that’s when things completely change. That’s important for people to understand if people say  “You should build it,” but yet they’re not going to pay you, and you’ve identified that there’s a problem, you have a problem. They’re not telling you the truth.

Joe: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s easy to yes ideas to death. “Do you think this is a good idea?” “Yeah” “You think it’s a good idea, so why is it a bad idea?” But asking people to put money where their mouth is different.

Liam: Open up your wallet. If you can’t open up your wallet, consider that they’re saying “Yeah, it’s a great idea.” but in reality, it’s not good enough for them to buy it. Therefore you should mark that down on your survey as that person doesn’t want that product. Or at least, the pain isn’t deep enough that they’re willing to pay you now.

Joe: Absolutely. And going back to timing, it could be that eventually, they’ll figure it out, but if you don’t get enough of those “I’ll give you money right now,” then it’s hard to make a viable product.

Liam: Absolutely.

Joe: I want to call back to something that you said earlier, which was you mentioned that it took millions to build. I’m curious about this. I talk to people mostly in the WordPress space and feel free to answer as much as or as little as you’d like. But did you go for any venture capital or angel investments?

Liam: No. My co-founder and myself had previous exits before that point, so we did self-funded. I wouldn’t say– it was technically bootstrapped, but it’s quite disingenuous to say it was bootstrapped when we had put about half a million dollars into the business to get to that beta in which we were generating income. We put in about half a million dollars into the business, and that came back to us, and I believe we were break even by the end of that year.

Joe: Gotcha. Cool, that’s super interesting. People here bootstrap, and they assume sleeping on couches and eating ramen until you’re profitable or whatever, but–

Liam: I went from a six-figure personal salary to $28,000 a year, and that was my own money by the way. I didn’t pay myself out of the business for 2.5 years. I cut myself down to $28,000 a year because I understood that to build this asset I needed to take all of my money and put it into this business, and then have what’s left over to deploy into staying alive for 2.5 years. That to me is something that a lot of people are not willing to do. They’ve got golden handcuffs. They say, “Man I’m making $180 as a dev. I don’t want to be paying myself $25,000 a year.” Then you’re not cut out for entrepreneurship.

Joe: Right, absolutely. Yes.

Liam: It’s just not going to happen, and it’s not going to work out for you. If you wanted me to go back to $25,000 right now, and  you said “You’re going to increase the speed and you’re going to double the growth rate of your business.” Done. Because I know that 5-10 years later when we’re doing $100 million a year, I can sell that thing for half a billion dollars, and I’m good. It’s discipline. It’s all connected to discipline. There’s a lot of guys that want to do it, but they don’t want to leave their $180,000 job which is super frustrating.

Joe: Totally, and I don’t know. Maybe enough people don’t care to know about how it’s the hockey stick graph for entrepreneurs. You’re low for a while and then eventually you can rise quickly when the rise happens, but there’s going to be a long time where you’re low on that graph.

Liam: Everything is like that. I’m right across the street from Shopify’s headquarters here in Canada.

Joe: Nice.

Liam: Shopify is 18 years old, as a company. They’re an overnight success, in quotes. That’s what Toby the CEO always talks about is, “We were as we were a total 18-year overnight success.”

Joe: Absolutely. I had no idea that Shopify was around for 18 years.

Liam: Who knew Shopify 10 years ago? Nobody knew about it, but they were eight years old as a company. Think about that and know that everyone goes towards the Slacks of the world, and honestly the Slacks the world are just Slack. They defy– there’s a couple other products in the SaaS space. Even ClickFunnels as an example is doing incredible numbers, that’s in the marketing space but something like a Slack. It’s very unique, and it’s very rare, and in reality what happens to most businesses is that most businesses on average that are successful grow 40-60% year over year if you’re in the top tenth percentile of growth above $10 million dollars. Just telling you the hard truth. That’s great growth, and you should be happy of that, and don’t get distracted. Keep going on that trajectory. Even right now if you’re doing $10-20,000 dollars a month in monthly recurring revenue, and next year you do. $30,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue. You’re alive, man. You’re able to eat off of that and keep going because that’s going to turn into $100,000 in a blink of an eye. You have to sit down and work for thirty-six months to get it to where it needs to go.

Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Pantheon. WordPress 5.0 and the new editor Gutenberg are coming. Are you prepared? Do you want to learn about the changes in advance? Pantheon has gathered resources to help you prepare, including webinars and tutorials. Pantheon also has made it easy and free to try Gutenberg with your site before the official launch. Visit Pantheon.io/Gutenberg. Let them know that How I Built It sent you. Now, back to the show.

Joe: Early in Season 1 I talked about the Olympics were happening, and we talked about how we see the gold medalist Olympian, but we don’t see their entire life of working towards becoming that gold medalist. Michael Phelps– Well, Michael Phelps is maybe a bad example because he seems like he was built to swim. But Shaun White, he wasn’t just born an Olympic gold medalist. He worked hard to be an Olympic gold medalist, and I see a lot of similarities there, which is cool. A great nugget for people out there, Shopify is 18 years old. It’s a legal adult here in the United States.

Liam: It’s got a driver’s license, it can fight.

Joe: It’s ready to go.

Liam: It’s a big boy.

Joe: Awesome. We talked about where Time Doctor has been and a little bit about the origin story and the initial features. What are your plans for the future?

Liam: For us, it is the majority. Where we’re putting our chips down, to be honest with you is artificial intelligence, so we can predict with about an 89% accuracy rate whether someone is going to quit their job six months before they do. Based off of all of our website application mouse movement and keyboard movement data, because it creates a whole bunch of metadata connected to you, and then our machine learning algorithms can take that data and tell you, “This person isn’t happy with their job, and it’s because their manager is not nice, and you need to replace that manager. Or you need to move that person.” That’s where we’re moving, and it connects back to the exponentially better or exponentially cheaper.

Don’t do a “Me too” feature, even if it fails, don’t do the “Me too” features because those won’t result in exponential growth. Only a new feature that has not entered the market, that’s the only thing that you can do to 10-20x your growth as a business. So that’s what we’re putting our resources. We have the largest second by second work database on planet earth, which is why we can do this. For us, it’s been interesting. I’m a sociologist by training, all of my degrees are in sociology, and I feel like we’re doing sociology at a completely different level because I can very quickly analyze a million people’s work hours and figure out what’s going on and why. How do people in the US work in comparison to Canadians? What’s the difference between those two groups? That kind of thing, we can see that type of data, which is exciting to me.

Joe: That’s incredible. I think about when I was ready to quit, not my most recent job but the job before that. My most recent job was like I had a kid and I was working the agency life, and I was like “I can’t do agency life with a newborn.” But the job before that, it was a six-month grind. I realized one day I was unhappy with my job and my productivity noticeably dropped for the same reasons that you cited. It’s interesting, and I’m going to keep an eye on that because AI is the new hotness or whatever. But there are a lot of cool applications, like this–

Liam: Crypto. Crypto was the new hotness a year ago, and now it’s crashed. There’s always the new hotness. But artificial intelligence is something that’s here to stay. I honestly believe that it will completely change everything that we do both in our personal and our work lives, and people that are not investing heavily in it are going to be left behind. Even if we put all of our future of the business and it completely fails, and the business fails, what I would have personally learned about it will set me up personally to build the next company and understand that company and understand that problem perfectly. For us, we’re at an interesting crossroads where the cost of a AI is going down. The cost of building AI this year is going to be 50% cheaper next year. It’s going to be a continuous process like that. That’s going to be a huge movement for us moving forward. We’re very bullish on artificial intelligence.

Joe: Absolutely. I should say that the video for this is not going to be released, but I used pretty heavy quote fingers on “The new hotness” there. Ten years ago when I was doing my master’s thesis, I did my master’s thesis on predicting traffic patterns with a small subset of data before Google Maps was doing it. The first Android phone had just came out at the time, so I was using that phone and going on trips and seeing if I could reasonably predict when there would be traffic. That was me as a student with a limited data set, but I was able to do it for the roads that I knew properly. I was able to do it fairly successfully. With more resources, and like you said the cost of AI going down, it’s going to be an interesting few years where we see an explosion. I’m excited to see where all of this goes. As we close out the show, you have already given us a ton, but I do like to ask if you have any trade secrets for us?

Liam: For you guys? I don’t know. I have trade secrets that I could give away, but at the end of the day work. Work hard at whatever you’re doing, and whatever you’re doing today. If you’re working on a business, do this. You’re either listening to this podcast, or you’re listening to it on the bus, or you’re listening to it at work. Just work an extra hour today. Just do that. That’s all I ask for, one extra hour of work. That will get you farther than any trade secret you could possibly think of because if you do that tomorrow and you do it the day after that, and you do it the day after that, you’re going to succeed. Even if you work twice as hard you will never go backwards, the worst you can do is stay in the same position you are now. Whereas thinking about how to get forward is smart, working smart is great, but I work super smart, and I also work hard, and I’m coming for you. So, do that. Just work harder.

Joe: That’s fantastic for two reasons. It’s much better than the advice that you get from the Gary V’s of the world, which is “Work 16 hours a day and sleep for 2 hours a day.”

Liam: It’s going to kill you.

Joe: It’s going to kill you, right. Work one extra hour.

Liam: Yeah. See how it feels.

Joe: You could easily do that, and if you use Time Doctor you’ll see that you blow an hour on social media anyway.

Liam: Absolutely.

Joe: Liam, thanks so much for joining me. I know that there’s a couple of things going on. Where can people find you?

Liam: If you want to try a trial of Time Doctor you can go to TimeDoctor.com, it’s a free 14-day trial. If you want to find me then, to be honest with you, Instagram is a place where I’ve been spending more and more time, so if you type in my name, you’ll find me. We’ll probably have that in the show notes. I’m interested. I’m very interested in that. Also too, if you want to see me and you’re very excited about seeing me, I’m going to be in Bali. Usually once a year I’m down for our conference called Running Remote. If you’re serious about building remote teams, it is a treehouse made out of bamboo that holds about 400 people, and this here we have Joel from Buffer. We have Amir from Doist, and we have GitHub we have GitLab, we have Atlassian. They’re all coming together because they all run massive remote teams, and it’s something that I’ve wanted to put together for the last five years, and now we’ve finally got to do it, and it’s my passion project as well. So, if you want to see me in person, you can fly down there, and we can hang out. If you say, “Joe sent me,” then we’ll definitely have lunch together.

Joe: Awesome. Man, in a treehouse in Bali. That sounds fantastic. And you mentioned Amir. Amir was a guest on the show, so I’ll be sure to link his episode in the show notes. A lot of really good advice there too if you want a little preview. Liam, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.

Liam: No worries, Joe.

Outro: Thanks so much for joining me today, and thank you to Liam for his time and fantastic advice. There is a lot for a lot of different people in this episode especially if you’re trying to manage remote teams. Or if you are trying to get a handle on where you spend your time.

The question of the week is, how are you tracking your time? Are you using a tool or are you not tracking your time? Are you eyeballing it? Do you sweat where you spend your time each week? Let me know by emailing Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona.

This episode once again was brought to you by Pantheon, and I appreciate them and their support for this entire season.

They are helping you prepare for Gutenberg, so if you go to Pantheon.io/Gutenberg let them know How I Built It sent you. If you want to prepare for Gutenberg, again, you can go to all of the resources that I have available over at CreatorCourses.com/Gutenberg. All the courses, the site licensing, and things like that. That’s it for this episode. If you want to find those resources or any of the show notes that we talked about, you can go to HowIBuilt.it/102. If you liked this episode, head over to Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a rating and review. It helps people discover the show, and I’m appreciative to those who rate and review the show, and for everybody listening. Thanks again, I appreciate you. Until next time, get out there and build something.