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A twelve-year-old time-tracking SaaS at an eight-figure run rate, run by about 200 people in roughly 43 countries with no office at all — and with an async operating model that lets it carry half the management layer a comparable on-premise company needs
around 25% growth in 2022 · roughly 195% growth in 2020 · about 200 people across about 43 countries (all founder-reported, August 2022)
"The managerial level inside of asynchronous organizations is 50% thinner than their on-premise counterparts." More people doing the work, fewer people managing people — that is the actual economic case for async, and a company paying for an office cannot copy it.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
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.
Time-tracking software is bought by the person who signs the invoices, not the person whose time gets tracked, and that single fact determines where the first customers come from.
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Data credibility: Podcast interview: Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 616, published August 2022, Rob Walling interviewing Liam Martin on the day his book Running Remote was released. Every number is Martin's own statement on air and several are given as ranges or approximations in his own words: "a nice reliable eight-figure run rate," "I think we should be floating around 25 growth this year," "I think we did like 195 growth" for 2020, "about 43 different countries," "like 200 people in our organization." No dashboard, filing or third-party dataset is shown at any point, and a run rate is an annualised snapshot rather than revenue collected. Pricing, customer count, churn, margins and funding history are never discussed. The 50%-thinner management layer and the employee net promoter scores of 72 versus an industry average of 36 come from Martin's own research for his book, describing asynchronous companies he interviewed — they are not Time Doctor's audited figures, and the book is a commercial product he is promoting in this episode. The retreat cost of half a million to a million dollars per event is his figure for his own company. No country or city for the company or the founder appears in the transcript, so none is recorded here; the group file's "Brazil / Portuguese" labels are search-query tags, not evidence — the episode is in English. ProvenStartups has not verified any of it and makes no claim about the company after 2022.
The revenue unit for this category is a seat per month, and the first payment comes from a small team rather than an enterprise.
Two engines are visible. The first was exogenous and enormous: in 2020 every company on earth went remote at once, the category expanded overnight, and Time Doctor grew about 195% in a single year.
For a twelve-year-old SaaS the quiet stretches are not at the start, they are the eighteen-month experiments whose payoff nobody can measure, and Martin is unusually honest about running those.
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