We are Comparakeet. Comparakeet is a startup building a website which can catalog, review, and rank every product and service in the world. Currently, we're manually creating all of the reviews and content on the site. We intend to automate the process in the future. For now, it's easier to build up revenue without having to spend a huge investment in developing algorithms and creating user-generated content.
When it comes to my role, I'm one of the three founders and I manage most of the team. I focus more on business development like setting up our affiliate programs, revenue streams and figuring out how to bring in traffic.
Time Doctor acts as a productive force for any remote team.
We primarily use it for tracking time to track the remote content writers who contribute to our site. Without Time Doctor, it would be hard for us to track how many hours they're working. Time Doctor helps us make sure that the content writers are working the full 40 hours.
In addition to helping us track time, we ran into another issue with one particular content writer. We noticed through the screen recording feature that one of our writers was using Facebook quite a bit. That was obviously a problem for us. We also noticed that this worker was manually editing his hours which lead us to believe that he wasn't working legitimate hours. We would see him change his time worked from 20 hours to 40 hours. This happened on multiple occasions and we couldn't account for the additional 20 hours. Time Doctor really helped us to track what this person was doing. In the end, we found out that he was doing the job, he simply wasn't responsible for managing his time. Now, he's using Time Doctor more effectively and spends a lot less time on Facebook.
It's useful for the founders, as well. We're actually not working full-time on this project because we all have our own jobs. We also monitor each other with Time Doctor to ensure everyone is contributing an equal amount of time. We operate our business remotely. Of the founders, one is in San Francisco and one is in Israel. It's very cool and Time Doctor acts as a productive force for any remote team.
There are three founders and we have three content writers who are using it right now. Our fourth employee starts in about a week. We're growing our team at a rate of one employee every month. This means we're adding a new user every single month on Time Doctor.
I would highly recommend Asana for content-heavy businesses like ours. We have Filipino writers who write about 10 reviews per week.
It's our goal to write the title on a couple of the content pieces they should write. After we write the title, we create a task in Asana. This let the writers know which articles and reviews they should complete. Asan allows you to store all drafts and finalized content, making the transition from development to publishing very easy.
Trello is another fantastic tool for productivity. Trello is different from Asana in that it is more process-driven than task-driven. It's about creating pipelines. It's used to move more projects around rather than tasks. That's phenomenal!
One of my favorites is also Spotify - I just have to listen to music while I work!
For several other products that I'm working on, I use Trello. For Comparakeet I use Asana.
It's all about discipline. Discipline comes out of belief in the business that you're building. This belief should be instilled in all of your employees and founders. If you believe in what you're doing, it makes it much easier to be motivated and get the work done. Team members are more willing to clock in their time in Time Doctor every day and add the extra hours.
When we first started using Time Doctor, our employees were only clocking in at 40 hours per week. However, as time went on (six to seven months), many are now clocking in more than 40 hours. They're not getting paid for that extra time. Time Doctor helped me see that the extra hour users were putting in were not just task-oriented. It's really cool - like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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