Another Y Combinator startup, ididwork, announced its launch yesterday. In short, the web-based service lets employees keep record of work they have completed. Employees can then submit a weekly or monthly report to their manager in the form of a chart, graph, or simple summary, and receive feedback through the system. The service is designed to drive performance reviews, eliminating the need for status meetings, and allowing employees to be evaluated based on concrete information rather than a manager’s impressions.
What differentiates the service from the many performance monitoring platforms out there is that the managers don’t have to participate. It is designed to be useful solely from the employee’s perspective, letting them track their own progress and analyze trends over time. The service does not have to serve the enterprise, but rather can spread amongst individual users. Employees can decide to forward performance breakdowns to managers, who then have the option of joining the network. There is clearly a viral aspect to the service that could make it work, but it is dependent on how necessary employees find it to record their own progress, and how informative it can really be.
The idea seems simple but it tackles a big problem: it is difficult to judge productivity in big companies. In employee reviews managers often have very little idea of what an employee has done, which leads them to make judgments based on behavior that seems productive; like staying late everyday, or sending out company wide emails at three in morning. It also gives employees an idea of what their associates are working on with a news feed, eliminating the need for status meetings.
As far as competition goes, there are many similar services but not many that follow the same model. There are work logging services, but they focus on billable hours, and there are many performance review platforms, but these target HR departments rather than individual employees. 37 Signals‘ BackPack has some similarities, but it is more suited for coordinating operations within a group rather than tracking individual performance.
The founders plan on eventually charging employers after the service takes off, allowing early adopters to continue using it free of charge. To expand, the service plans on integrating desktop widgets and customizing performance breakdown charts in the distant future.
The founders of ididwork previously started Expensr, which was bought by MyStrands. Prior to that, they worked in large consulting companies where they derived the idea for their newest project.
deadpool - FAST!
Super-fast deadpool.
Interesting…someone named DaveS said that Omnisio was going to straight to the deadpool also….interesting how that turned out…
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....nt-2055479
Companies that would use some sort of site like this, would probably have already developed their own system of logging work, I believe.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
6 months to a year fast. LOL.
stupid. i have been doing pSFT timesheet and SAP timesheet all my life, plus other consulting time sheets. I hate such things. like today, i spent 3 hours submitting my expensives.
@ sd - a simple and easy way to manage those timesheets can be found at TSheets.com
TSheets.com
i dont think so. combine this with resucetime, its perfect productivity measurement tool. i guess u dont care abt productivity
Work required + lazy people = nobody uses it.
Nobody using it + no financial model = dead pool.
You have to be open and assume that they will open to other fields. It can be a time tacking for Students or People who work from home or even a fitness junky.
What will make it more open is adding input methods. Twitter and SMS. So while one works he can simply send a tweet instead of login in. Another user can send an SMS <> to report his door-to-door selling activity.
This will certainly be helpful for our team. As this technology improves, it may eventually cut out the need for lower level Supervisors.
Thus, potentially saving a substantial sum.
Also, it in theory it could provide an objective way to monitor performance for salary reviews without the politics.
Okay, TechCrunch. I’ve had about enough of this.
Could someone clue me in as to why exactly you guys document every last YC startup that launches?
Before feeding me platitudes, please note that every time I’ve brought this up on other forums (reddit, “hacker” news, ad. nauseum), I’ve been shot down by YC fanboys who are all too eager to inform me that “YC startups are (or tend to be) better than non-YC startups” and that “TechCrunch is lazy and chooses the YC startups because they’re obviously better than whatever else they’re sorting through.”
Frankly, I don’t buy it. Not for a second.
So please– someone who is actually involved in the process: why do (often subpar) YC startups get so much attention on TechCrunch? Is Mike friends with Paul? Do you have some sort of agreement?
Finally, as a fairly frequent reader (and someone who doesn’t think YC is god’s gift to entrepreneurship) I am compelled to inform you that this sort of blind coverage is causing me to visit TC less and less often.
Thanks.
Do you need a diagram or something? This isn’t rocket science. It’s who you know; learn it, love it, live it.
Yes, Paul and Michael know each other and are probably on good terms.
TC coverage doesn’t guarantee success, nor lack of coverage failure (look at plurk). This is an incestuous biz.
Suck it up and quit whining like a douche bag.
That’s OK - no one wants you here anyway.
You mean connections actually matter? Who would have thought!
TC is trendy. Get over it.
Holy cow! There are more sore losers on TC than at a Star Trek-themed butt plug convention. Having fun, trolls?
Business is all about “who you know,” eh? With attitudes as fetching as yours, it’s virtually guaranteed that not a one of you would be able to muster up a “connection,” let alone get off your twenty ton McDonalds ass and jiggle your way over to the front door of your mother’s house to peer outside. So, perhaps you ought to take your own advice and acquire a few social skills before trying to play.
But you’re totally right. Launching successful computer-related businesses is ALL about being social. Just like getting into an Ivy League college is ALL about having the most friends in high school. Oh, wait– it’s not. So bug off and quit trying to turn entrepreneurship into a grade school dance party.
–
Back to the real question:
Why does YC get so many stories? Why should I continue to visit this site when you fail to cover interesting startups in deference to your buddies?
Anyone care to respond in a way that doesn’t make you look like an absolute moron?
A majority of the companies that TC covers are funded (or looking for funding) startups. Since TC is in the business of scooping stories about new companies, VCs who fund early-stage startups would be a good source for somewhat-vetted companies that no one has written stories about yet. So, as an early-stage investor (with a pretty-good reputation), YC companies are perfectly suited to the types of stories TC writes.
TC probably doesn’t write about every move from the big VC firms because a majority of those companies are getting B&C rounds and have already been written about.
Crunchbase footer ought to include “www.mojohelpdesk.com”. They’ve got a great “ticket tracking” work thing with feedback I’ve been using, which is also pretty smooth. Shows people what you’re up to, what you’ve done, what took place, etc. Besides that, positioning your monitors within clear view of door traffic also helps.
Ycombinator is from Pretty Intelligent People. How come they fund such ridiculous stupid ideas which as no business.
Where is the web going ?
i really hope my company picks this up; i hate having no idea why i miss out on the bonuses each quarter. but maybe i’m an idiot or maybe i work for idiots. probably both! good job guys, identifying my life’s frustration.
I’m with you here - have you ever had annual bonuses? It sucks to work your ass off and then learn that you’re getting a measly “above satisfactory” 3% bonus.
Some people hate on simple tools, but I’m a fan. (Is this even that simple?) Productivity and communication are huge these days; this could be a super useful piece of the puzzle.
If your company exhibits the following trait:
“In employee reviews managers often have very little idea of what an employee has done”
Then you have bad management. Dust off that resume.
I have no idea how something like this, designed to replace the single most important function of management (knowing what’s going on), gets praise. Maybe someone will come up with a webapp that keeps track of what managers are doing while ignoring their reports.
Reminds me a lot of Marc Andreesen’s anti to do list:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06....._guid.html
i watch porn half the day so i not a fan of this
Browsed techcrunch for 4 hours a day
Sweet site, I need something to keep the guys on task.
That’s because a large chunk of YC startups (80%ish), unlike most startups, receive additional funding (Angel and VC) after the Y combinator program is over.
People care about YC startups whether you do or not.
Love the name, too. You could probably get Rob Drydek to throw some cash in the pot - do work, kids.
Such activity definitely violates security and privacy policy of almost all companies. Isn’t hard to understand that you should not publish your internal activities to outside world in any cooperate environment? Employees doing so surely risk of being fired.
I agree it will go to dead pool soon.
Uhm, have you ever heard of companies using 3rd party web-based resources for things like Time and Expense tracking? Through these services, you could identify information such as company clients and internal projects, and yet corporations across the world follow this practice. Having spent years writing security and privacy policies for some of the largest corporations in the country, and working with divisions within these companies who utilize 3rd party services while still complying with posted guidelines, I’d have to say you really have no idea what you’re talking about.
Trolls, please at least have some sort of compelling argument when leaving comments instead of these blatantly inaccurate assertions.
You and I were talking about different things.
Companies do outsourcing business information processing as you mentioned, but only to those well established businesses, not to those funded by VC. Security and privacy are just part of the issues, more important to business are liability and reliability etc.
Why do you think that ididwork content is public? It’s for you, your team, and your boss - not the “outside world.”
Watchu talkin bout, Willis?
If you have ever worked in cooperate environment, rather than a small cool team, you would know there are guidelines and restrictions in electronic info processing: Email, web browsing, IM, and Twitter etc. It doesn’t matter what the site was designed for you, your team, and your boss. At least, the admin of the site, who is an outsider, can view all content for the boss. There are many other security and privacy issues associated.
If this does not concern Luke or ididwork, you can judge how serious they will take care of security and privacy when developing the application.
Hm, that’s awfully too bad if that’s the case. Perhaps 37signals should go out of business too, because they’re making Basecamp which is filled with proprietary information. Oops. Probably not. Basecamp is delivering value to their customers, as ididwork.com will for theirs.
It’s Twitter. For work.
>It also gives employees an idea of what their associates are
>working on with a news feed, eliminating the need for status meetings.
Hmm, interesting….that comment makes me think that a Twitter-style app designed specifically for tracking and following work progress would be very useful for teams. For work purposes, I wouldn’t want all the other twitter junk, just status-y things.
A twitter-like app would be especially nice for flagging interruptions in your work stream, like when you switch from your main task to something stoopid like “HR sensitivity training”. It might even be useful to have multiple status fields like “currently working on” and “next task” so your manager can pre-emptively verify that priorities are aligned with each other.
You could argue that task management systems with RSS feeds do this already, but they lose track of random things that come up to suck your time.
When I was at my last big company, I would have loved the ability to show my manager a graph of “real work” I get done versus “useless work” caused by stoopid organizational overhead. Those kinds of charts alone could help convince upper management that its time to wipe away some of the day-to-day BS to improve productivity.
It now depends on whether you think Twitter is a legitimate business or a feature. 37Signals has feeds in Basecamp as does many other web apps, considering the engineering hours and cost of implementing such a feature is really really low. Heck, Mark Bao, a 15 year old, wrote a feed feature for his application in 18 hours: http://weblog.markbao.com/2008.....s-for-699/.
I also wouldn’t it past Evan Williams to have been thinking about “Twitter Pro” for quite some time, both as a new product but also as a monetization means.
Who cares about work. It’s all about RESULTS. If there are no results then you did no work.
wat about researchers? 80% of them dont do work then
I agree with Spike. I thought about making a “twitter-for-work” app for use at our company, but it looks like ididwork beat me to it.
We’ve been craving this.. went through a bunch of options looking for a good answer. Very excited to try it out. But then, we’re a YC company, so maybe our opinions don’t count ;-).
This *so* depends on where you work. I worked at a place where I kept a daily work blog - I put meeting notes, notes about stuff I’d done, roadblocks I was hitting, etc. I kept this pretty much daily for almost 2 years - I had more than 400 entries.
It was searchable, so I could find notes on stuff that had happened weeks or months earlier. I did a weekly wrapup on it, but my boss (and later the guy who came in after he quit) didn’t want to know. They wanted it it via an email formatted a certain way. But rarely was anything ever done with them (I certainly never remember any followup based on anything in my weekly status report). Friday at 4:30 people would be scratching their head asking “what did I do all week”, but I didn’t have that problem cause I could just read what I’d done the week before, as could everyone else. Only one person on the team - a colleague on the other coast - bothered to read my blog, and it helped keep her up to date as to what my roadblocks and statuses were much better than weekly email status reports.
Not saying this system won’t work - perhaps it’s streamlined the process some over what I was using. That’d definitely be cool, but, as with most tools, it’s only really useful if *everyone* uses it.
Funniest line in story: “Prior to that, they worked in large consulting companies where they derived the idea for their newest project.”
So what you’re saying is, they were using time billed to a client of their employer to work on an idea for tracking what employees do when they are supposed to be working on time being billed to a client of their employer.
what he’s saying is they derived the IDEA, probably based on their circumstances. No where in that quote does it say they WORKED on it you moron.
Idea: “Let’s make a fancy timecard”
It doesn’t say exactly that they derived the idea during working hours. Could’ve been lunchtime or weekends.
idontgetit
It just tracks random stupid tasks that I could submit, but provides no information to a manager really that things are actually being completed and on time. So requires me to spend the same amount of time reporting as the employee but sends less information to the manager about anything. If the manager didn’t want information like that and I had the freedom they probably wouldn’t want general stupid time of the day productivity charts on me.
The exact idea I hyped to everyone as a visitor at YCombinator Startup School 2008, so I know it has potential. Good luck!
This is a great idea. It’s increased The Newsbreak Times’ productivity by 14% already! Here’s our report: http://www.newsbreaktimes.com
Seems pretty nice. I understand Joe’s Goals is quite popular, and that’s just a simpler version of this… ergo, this has potential.
However, they’ve got NO privacy policy. It is quite literally a 404 page: http://www.ididwork.com/privacy
Isn’t one of the main selling points of working with an incubator like YCombinator that you can crib notes from others who’ve covered the same ground before?
Missing a privacy policy on a site that aims to collect a ton of private and potentially sensitive information is a major gaffe.
Unaware of this app, we released a similar, scaled-down version of ididwork last week at http://finisht.com.
finisht.com? Is that for people who are constipated?
Good effing no thank you with a hot curling iron up your bumm! Seriously this is just begging for micromanagement.
I get the idea - Take your Facebook and Twitter status updates and apply them to your work related duties.
The good of this is you’d have one hell of a database documenting everything that you (maybe) did for when it’s time to exit a company and write that resume.
The bad is once this gets implemented at your office and is expected your quality of updates drops because it’s something you’re required to do. Since you know it’s going to be used to judge your performance you’re obviously going to take quite a few liberties with what you write. Perhaps more bluntly - bullshit will flow like Montezuma’s Revenge.
Perhaps there can be some additional modules for TPS reports upon submission?
Hmm yeah… I’m going to need you to update your statuses in more detail thaaaanks…
this is pretty cool… but it is also pretty funny
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Pretty cool for a gay porn site.
measuring skilled knowledge workers isn’t as closely linked to the transactions (i.e., tasks) they worked on.
a smart manager should really be focused on other things like directing / leading / mentoring their reports, not wondering what they worked on all week.
“measuring skilled knowledge workers isn’t as closely linked to the transactions (i.e., tasks) they worked on. ”
-bingo
Are you a completely retarded team leader and or manager? This is teh app for you!
Wow, great way to kill the morale of your team. I’m a developer on a ~15 person size team, and we have morning standup meetings to keep track of whatever we are doing. We try to communicate as much as possible when we encounter roadblocks. Tools like this only insult employees thus causing them to work less. There are other ways to know what people are doing, and measure performance.
Just to follow up with some of the comments on this blog, I wrote Finisht (http://finisht.com) for a different purpose. Not just for accountability, but for a true sense of accomplishment. Far too often, people do so many small things through the day that sidetrack them from completing larger, more significant tasks. It’s helpful to get a high-level overview of what those small tasks were.
You can read more about the project and my reasons behind it at my blog:
http://nicksergeant.com/blog/d.....finishtcom
A lot of people use Trac for that. Just make everything a bug and the boss can do their reports however they like with their own company time.
Good domain name, though. Seriously!
Yawn!
Another Web 2.0 Silo app.
How about actually allowing your team to relate your tasks to specific areas of your business? How about being able to assign tasks?
I hate status updates as much as anyone, but isn’t this just Twitter for your boss?
More like an inversion of Twitter. Many sources, few subscribers.
Cool, I think this website is especially useful to early stage startups. I think there’s a huge variety of work that it’s easy to forget what’s going on. People lose track of time and it’s good to stay organized at the end of the day.
It’ll be cool if I could organize things by milestones though.
It’s an interesting idea, but there are some issues I have with it:
- I think they released too soon and with too few features. (I know about the concepts of release early / release often / iterate often / etc. but this may have been too little in the way of features, to start with - my feeling is that not many users may use it and give them feedback on more features and on improvements to existing features and on bugs (yeah, I know - the fact that I’m writing this comment with feedback (after trying it out some) seems to contradict what I say - but maybe not - talking about most users, not me alone)).
- They should have an option of export of data to XML format, not just Excel and PDF.
Or to CSV or even ASCII flat files or some common and portable data format. Related to next point.
- Considering that TechCrunch has espoused all the Data Portability initiatives in the recent past, I suggest that the TechCrunch Team should encourage startups, (via their TechCrunch blog posts), to adhere to Data Portability concepts and guidelines. Saying this as a burned user - I had a profile up on GoJobby.com and then one fine day when it was acquired by Jobster, I later tried to check / update it, only to find that my accound no longer existed. In fact, I didn’t know GoJobby was acquired by Jobster - I entered GoJobby.com in the browser address bar and was redirected to the Jobster site where I got a curt message “Jobby has been acquired by Jobster”. Wow … and what about my data ? Thank you very much … for nothing.
- Vasudev
Ididwork - Thrive or Fail? [VOTE] - http://www.thriveorfail.com/dc899
The idea fails.
If you’re going to make your employees report on the work they do in daily/hourly intervals, you’re going to have problems with trust and communication. Employees don’t like oversight and having to rationalize the way they spend their hours.
If I worked for someone who made me do this, I’d quit. If you don’t think I’m working hard enough for you, then fire me, cause I’d rather not waste my time convincing you that I’m doing work.
The idea may be useful in small teams, but thats about it.
the idea of using an analogy to/for timesheets is pretty simple, and has been around for god knows how long.. i’ve filled them out when i was starting, i’ve had my team members fill them out as well… i’ve introduced them to organizations where i’ve worked as well…
the basic idea is to convey to whoever you’re reporting to, what you’re doing, as well as potential issues/problems coming down the pike… at the same time, it’s easy enough to pick of what are going to be major issues that someone might not be aware of.. it’s simply a form of communication.. no more.. no less.
the fact that this kind of app is getting built/funded/talked about, tells me that there really is a lack of good ideas/implementation out here in the valley, or at the YC groups…
peace..
Why no OpenId? Ycombinator has it own single sign on service right?
Great idea, excellent productivity tool!
ididwork.com is completely vulnerable to trivial attacks. These guys are clowns.
I belive the classic stopwatch approach we have at Paymo (http://www.paymo.biz) is much more effiecient if it’s easy to use (ie Windows/Mac widget).
Absolutely ridiculous. Please please please people.
These sound like exactly the kind of so called productivity and performance tools that bad bosses and poor leaders would love to impose on their people.
Let’s all increase the bureacracy everywhere, yay! 400-hour workweek anyone?
Some recent research I just published shows how we’re actually overwhelmed with things to do already. I can’t imagine many (any?) managers wanting to add more to their to-do list.
If you wanted proof that we’re overwhelmed and frustrated by senior managers and executives download The Death of Leadership report.
lol pretty cool
It would really be cool if it was not something you had to access the web every time to log a new item, it would be cool if they made an adobe air app in which a user can keep open and it will sync the data in the app with the live site.
Looked interesting to me, but my company blocks the url — not sure if it’s listed specifically but WebWasher blocks it with a category of Spam URLs. so no use to me.
Looks promising but also raises some privacy issues e.g. who will own the data and will the data be sold to other companies so that they can snatch the good employees from the competitors and hacking etc.
Looks promising but what about the privacy issues? what about the data being sold to competition so they can take away the good employees? what about hacking? These questions needs to be considered and answered…..
i actually find this site very useful. in my free time, i work on freelance projects. so instead of writing everything in an email (for the reports), i just type into ididwork.com and not worry about anything else… this could actually work. they can even provide “paid” features - so i don’t see why some comments are saying that there is no business in this site :-/