Taylor Brasher
BUS M 490
Jon Bradshaw
Jared Armstrong is the founder of
MinuteDock and handles the CEO & CTO roles at MinuteDock. He keeps the
business moving forward and his code runs a huge number of MinuteDock's complex
backend systems. Jared Armstrong founded
MinuteDock (which will be explained later in the interview) with two fellow
colleagues while looking for a solution to one of their time tracking
problems.
Q. What Demographic do
you target with your product?
 |
| --MinuteDock; CEO Jared Armstrong (center) |
A. “Initially we really focused on
freelancers, and small 1-3 people businesses.
Over the years we have came to realize that from a business perspective
that isn’t such a great demographic because they aren’t willing to pay much
more than the minimum amount of money for the product. At the moment the main demographic is still
in the small business space but we are trying to get companies that employ
around 10-20 people. Usually the
industries are professional service businesses, such as design
agencies, accounting
firms, and developers.
Q. What gave you the desire to start this business?
A. “MinuteDock was started in mid-2009, and there were
originally three of us who made it. What we were at the time was we were
software consultants and we were selling our souls for an hourly rate and
tracking our time, adding all the details of what we worked on, and being Kiwis
we also were on to this new great thing called Xero for our accounting. Xero
doesn’t have time tracking in their product so we thought, “Okay, we just need
a basic tool to track our time and get it into Xero.” It sort of grew from
there really. We added a whole bunch of other features and worked for around
that time-tracking problem to really make tracking time and keeping track of
your targets and budgets for clients and customers. It’s really easy and really
seamless.”
Q. How did finance your
business, or find investors?
A. “We are fully
bootstrapped, we basically funded it through our contacting work. For a long time we were working on it part
time. Then once our part time wages
weren’t covering expenses we started to contract our clients. For now we plan to continue private, and in
the long run we can go public, but we have not planned for that yet.”
Q. If you had one tip for
new
entrepreneurs what would it be?
A. “Make sure you choose
your fellow founders wisely. Establish
goals and make sure you are all on the same page before you start up the
business. For us in MinuteDock we worked
extremely well together for the first few years, and then we started to have a
few problems and that’s when I ended up buying out the other founders. Also to get the best outcome on any business
you need to invest everything you have in that particular business and focus on
that.”
“MinuteDock is an
online time tracking software. Essentially it’s built for any small business
that has a time component as a key part of their business. It allows the business to track and bill their
time and gives them an easy way to get invoices into their accounting system
and send off to their customers.
