Time Doctor

01The full story

Liam Martin has co-run Time Doctor, a time-tracking SaaS at timedoctor.com, for twelve years at the point of this August 2022 interview with Rob Walling. The numbers he is willing to share: team members in about 43 different countries, "a nice reliable eight-figure run rate," growth he expects to land around 25% for the year, and roughly 200 people in the organisation. The outlier year was 2020 — "I think we did like 195 growth" — when the time-tracking category was hit by every company on earth going remote at once. He describes the experience without flattery: "it was literally like you know those big tubes where they put like 20 bills… that was the first couple months of covid for us." He also says he made a lot of wrong moves in that window, and names the companies that got it right — Loom and Mural, both of which went freemium almost immediately because they understood the prize was attention for the whole remote stack rather than monetisation of that quarter. The demand was that indiscriminate: he took a phone call from a G20 country that had moved 540,000 employees remote the previous day and wanted to know what to do next. "I said I have no idea, we have like 200 people in our organization, why don't you talk to somebody else — and they said you're the first guy that picked up the phone." The reason this company is worth a file on a directory of copyable businesses is not the product, which is ordinary, but the operating model. Martin's book Running Remote came out the day this episode published, and its argument is that asynchronous work is not remote work with extra steps — it is a different cost structure. His own research found async organisations carry a management layer 50% thinner than comparable on-premise companies, and that the async companies he interviewed averaged an employee net promoter score of 72 against an industry average of 36.