Featured Startup Pitch: Minsk, Belarus-based Weavora has created a business-focused time tracking solution that promises simplicity and ease-of-use

By Mike Kulakov, Everhour and Weavora co-founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: Everhour is a fresh breath in time tracking. It’s so simple and lightweight that even people with timesheet phobia will love using it.

Product Description

Everhour is a go-to web app for seeing where your time is going. The tool perfectly fits freelancers with hourly-rated jobs who need to provide clients with precise time sheets, and small company owners in search of an employee time tracking solution.

Creating time entries in Everhour with handy @mentions and #tags is as easy as using social media and virtually takes no time. Besides, the tool provides a good basis for analysis of the time spent via informative yet concise reports of different types (personal/organization, by date/issue/member/project/etc.).

Working on the app, we focused on keeping the functionality just to the point with no excessive features or tricky interface. We knew that overloading Everhour with a lot of redundant things would kill our ‘less-software’ approach.

Founders’ Story

In 2009, my friends and former fellow students Sergey (currently the company COO), Yury (CTO), and I started Weavora, a web development and consulting company. By that time, we all had already worked at different IT companies and gained deep knowledge of the industry. With Weavora, we wanted to fulfill the idea of a dream team working on the most challenging projects in line with our vision, and the dream has come true.

After the launch, we faced an urgent time-tracking and reporting need which was hard for us personally to solve via lots of popular tools we’d tried. This left us no choice but to create our own app tailored for our requirements, and that’s how Everhour was born half a year ago.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

We believe in the lean startup approach and have never intended to spend tons on advertising and promotion, so over 1,500 users who have joined us so far mostly represent word-of-mouth in action.

In the long term, we’re hoping our audience steadily grows organically, and for now we’re focusing more on personal contacts, an individual approach to potential customers, social media engagement, and content marketing (blogging, guest posting).

Market Opportunity

The time tracking market is currently up, with plenty of tools out there. We can distinguish about a dozen similar web-based solutions, like Toggl, Harvest, Freckle, RescueTime, and Timely that are the closest to what we offer with Everhour.

With the time management and productivity trend being so much in right now, our audience is infinite. Anyone invoicing for worked hours is a potential Everhour user, and here I mean basically each of four-and-a-half million freelancers registered on oDesk alone, and around three million businesses on LinkedIn.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

Sleek design, simplicity and ease-of-use are key for us in Everhour. We didn’t want to pack the app with each and every feature and get a Jack-of-all-trades tool. Users value their time too much to waste it on getting their bearing in a too complicated interface, instead of starting using the app for its main purpose.

Moreover, Everhour is a piece of business software that is breezy and doesn’t feel fiddly or awkward at all. I’ve noticed that often such kinds of tools lose in design and UX compared to personal apps.

Business Model

The app is free now, but we’re planning to launch paid business accounts for about $4/member/month.

Current Needs

At the moment, our biggest need is to invest more time in PR and marketing efforts and get more people and companies to solve the timesheet issue once-and-for-all. We’re also planning to concentrate on enhancing the functionality and performance, as well as work on the design.

# # #

Headquarters: Minsk, Belarus

Founders: Mike Kulakov, Yury Tolochko, Sergei Staroverov

Investors: Bootstrapped

Year Founded: 2009 (Weavora), 2013 (Everhour)

Twitter: @everhour

Facebook: facebook.com/pages/Weavora/207254339293296

CrunchBase: crunchbase.com/product/everhour

AngelList: angel.co/everhour