This is a solid take on task management. We've got some similar features in https://hourstack.com with dragging and dropping tasks from other platforms into a calendar (team or personal). However, our focus is on tracking time against those tasks once scheduled and then reporting, invoicing, etc. against the work completed. So different end goals.
Best of luck to you as it looks like you've got a great start.
We have one (or more) people posting ads impersonating us hiring translators on Upwork and in Facebook groups. The scam seems to be they "hire" the person, give them work, and then never pay them.
Having zero cost of goods sold makes it possible to undercut on prices and pay for all your acquisition and still make a buck. Doesn't seem scalable or sustainable, but it has been a real nuisance for us. Translators are contacting us for their payment...
Upwork has not been willing to help us at all. They pull the ads quickly so by the time support clicks the link, the ad is down. They act as if it didn't happen if the link doesn't still work. Crazy.
There is a lot of fraud out there. Anything you can imagine and then quite a bit you can't if you don't spend your time thinking about how to screw others.
It definitely confuses our customers. We fairly regularly receive unpleasant tickets asking where their order is. Once we dig in we often find they did not order with us, but with a competitor who they thought was us.
So still an LLC, but it is taxed like an S-Corp when this election is made. This allows an owner working in the business to be an employee and take a reasonable salary. W2 income is subject to FICA taxes, but all the other profits in the business pass through to the owner as usual for an LLC, but aren't subject self employment tax or FICA. You still pay regular income tax though. This is all at a federal level.
The team and I are building HourStack - https://hourstack.com. We are focused on scheduling and tracking time at the task level, which works well with billable hours. We also integrate with task, event, and issue platforms so you can drag existing tasks onto your calendar to schedule and track time against them.
This can be quite nice when working with clients across different platforms like Asana, Trello, and GitHub.
As for downsides, we are a young company and don’t have the full feature set built yet. We are working hard though and making great progress.
HourStack | Remote | USA | Full-time | Fullstack Engineer | $85-125k
HourStack helps teams of all sizes with a holistic, visual approach to both time tracking and scheduling — easily connect favorite applications with zero disruption to workflow or use HourStack on its own. The all-in-one visual calendar helps you see, plan, and track your team's time across tasks and projects in a complete view. Easily schedule tasks, accurately track time, pull actionable reports, and customize your workspace and permissions.
As a small team, we all have our areas of focus and ownership, but contribute to many aspects of the business to ensure product and marketing are fully synced. From designing, building, and testing, to documenting, hosting, and supporting, you will own the API as your primary responsibility.
This is a backend heavy fullstack engineering role, but you will have some secondary responsibilities such as technical support for the marketing team, internal tooling, and browser extensions where you'll need solid frontend experience.
Our API is built on a LEMP stack hosted with DigitalOcean. Our framework of choice is Laravel and we utilize many tools from that ecosystem, such as Forge for server management, Envoyer for zero downtime deployments, Cashier for managing subscriptions with Stripe, Passport for OAuth, Horizon for queue management, etc.
Our web client utilizes React, TypeScript, Next.js, etc. You'll need familiarity with standard testing and development tools and technologies such as Git, Yarn, Babel, PHPUnit, etc.
Many more details about the role, team, offer, and hiring process are available here: https://hourstack.com/careers. Email jobs@hourstack.com if you'd like to apply.
In case it is helpful to anyone, we've recently started a post series in the HourStack blog about this topic. A lot of focus goes into time management strategies, but often prioritization is ignored. It's quite powerful if you can put the two together in a way that works for you as doing the right work is preferable to just doing work.
There are many prioritization and time management strategies out there, but we intro some of the popular ones [0] and we'll be expanding each of those into detailed posts over the coming weeks. The first one about using the Ivy Lee method to prioritize tasks [1].
It's definitely tough to articulate. It's basically the same concept as progressive taxation in the US as your rate increases on a per dollar basis when moving through the brackets. Though you are going the other direction and discounting deeper as you move through the brackets!
It seems to be a subject that trips a lot of people up. It's really common to see people talk about their marginal tax rate as if it is their effective tax rate. "I pay 24% in taxes and make $175K/year" - Not really though, you paid 24% on ~$4K of income, but 10% on the first $19,750, 12% on the income from $19,751 to $80,250, etc. Your marginal tax rate is 24% as that's what you'll pay on the next dollar, but your effective tax rate on all income earned was actually 14% (or whatever it actually is, just a loose example).
In your case, the discount is so significant that I'd think you'd want to showcase that. Maybe a slider to adjust the number of users and show the dollar amount of the discount as well as the total percent saved, which will continually grow as you increase the bucket of users in that lowest bracket?
Or in that FAQ you could give an example of a 300 person workspace and show how the calculation pencils out. Having to do math to figure out the ballpark cost of the product isn't great though, so if the info is public (ie you don't have to contact sales) then you should probably make it super easy to get to.
Just some ideas. You never know, everyone else might get it right away and I could have just been slow on it. My brain definitely went to doing rough math and thinking about how weird the pricing is at different user counts though!
No I think it's super valid what you shared. After all, we really approach things with the mindset that if something is ever unclear be it within the product or marketing, it's always on us and not the customer. I.e. if a flow (or copy) that seems super obvious to us and power users doesn't make sense to new faces, that's an us problem, not them.
But yeah we've certainly had a slider in the past with a calculator so could certainly build that back into the page! I'm 100% with you on not making people do the math, especially with the pricing plan/tiered approach we've taken.
Pre-business plan it was super neat to test out what user number was most effective to show on the initial calculator view. Plus it was a great edition for the CS team when sending potential customers ball parks of plan costs.
But this was incredibly helpful feedback so thank you so much. :) If we get the calculator up and running soon I'll be sure to send it your way!
I use email validation via MailGun for exactly this purpose with a productized service business. If we don't have a good email, then we can't deliver the service once complete. That leads to angry customers, even if the issue was a typo when they created the account. Easier to try and catch it during signup rather than at the time of delivery when emails start bouncing and you have no way to get ahold of the person.
Best of luck to you as it looks like you've got a great start.