March 13, 2025 • 28 mins
Paul Doerwald set out to solve a problem he knew well. Helping small consultancies manage multiple projects without getting lost in Trello boards and Gantt charts. The idea made sense. It was solving a real issue. But when he brought it to his target audience, the response was clear: "I wouldn’t use it."
Instead of defending his idea, Paul listened. The same person, without prompting, brought up a completely different frustration: timesheets. That’s when Clockk was born.
Highlights include: Scratching Your (Product) Itch (03:42), Customer Development Questions (05:25), The Product Validation Process (09:06), Being Your Own First Customer (12:47), And more…
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Episode Transcript
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Collin Stewart (00:00):
Welcome back to the Predictable Revenue Podcast. I'm your host, Colin Stewart, and today I'm joined by Paul ald. He's the founder at Clock, and we're talking product market fit. Paul, welcome to the show. Paul Doerwald
talking specifically about the product market fit journey of Clock. And I'm excited to this is one, this is a project that you've been working on for a long time, really, and one of the reasons Yeah. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show. And so talk to me about where the idea came from and when the idea came about. Okay. 'cause the one thing I really appreciate about your story is how persistent you've been. Paul Doerwald (01:00):
Yeah, so, so the background is convoluted. It goes back a little less than 10 years now to I was working on an idea that was tangentially related to what Clock became a kind of. Project dashboard for small consultancies. And I'd heard from someone that you should talk to your customers before you start coding. So I thought, okay, I'll do that. And this was before I knew that customer discovery was a thing. So I asked someone in my ICP, and this was before I knew what an ICP was about my idea. And he listened to me and he said, yeah, I wouldn't use it. But then he paused. He
paused and he said, you know what really annoys me? Time sheets and at that moment, clock was born. So it was just because something I had said and what we were going to do or that I had been thinking about twigged something in his head. He's like, that would help me with time sheets. He didn't actually make that connection, but his brain did and that was like, oh yeah, I can use the core of what I'm working on and work and put it toward clock. Collin Stewart (02:00):
Amazing. I had a similar experience with my first company, but I ignored all those people and I went, nah, they're idiots. They those jumps that they're making. Irrelevant. So like, good on you for listening. What was, I'm curious, what was the idea before Clock was? Clock? Paul Doerwald
(03:00):
work on over the course of a week when it involves five different projects? So five different Trello boards and a bunch of other tools as well. How do you get a holistic view of what you're going to do? Because all the Gantt chart tools, all the project planning charts are assuming that you're gonna have eight hours of time per resource on a task. And that's not actually reality. You might only have, you might only be able to plan 16 hours for one person on this taskthis week, and then things are also gonna change as you're going. So how do you actually get a holistic view across all the different things when there's constantly competing attention for what you're gonna do. Collin Stewart: Totally. And so you came to them with this big complicated thing that's arguably, or probably solving the pain that you were experiencing and you went, nah, time sheets. Paul Doerwald: Yeah, exactly. So basically, yeah it was fixing my itch.
(04:00):
And I think people do have the itch or the pain that I was getting into, but I don't know. When you're a small consultancy, you're scrappy, you're figuring it out as you go, and you just deal with it. And you come up with it, and you come up with your ways. And as you grow bigger, scale allows you to address those problems. 'cause you have more people on the project. So you can give them whole days or two days or whole weeks at a time to work on something. It's when you're really small and you've got lots of demands from yourclients that you are jumping around a lot. Collin Stewart: Totally. Yeah. And I think it's a great example of like having, finding a pain that resonates with you. And then going out to validate it and people are like, I'm not in the same situation, but here is something along those lines that bothers me. It is a case study in listening to what your customers are or with the customer development people are saying. Yep. Absolutely. So was it sounds like it was a pretty instantaneous one meeting and then, okay. I feel like I need to, I.
Make the change or was there a number of these? Paul Doerwald (05:00):
So that meeting, let me see that I was going on the wrong path and there were some challenges anyway on that and it let me switch, but I thought, I need to do customer development on this new idea on the time tracking idea. And so that, and opened up a whole bit about that. So. Collin Stewart
(06:00):
was super eye-opening for me, so I don't know if I should go into the core thing. Go for it. But yeah, what she said was like in the book, it was really powerful. She said, there are basically five questions you need to ask. None of them are leading questions. So a leading question, this was really eyeopening for me as well, is any question to which the answer could be yes or no. I. So don't ask any question that has that kind of an answer, which is great. So the questions are, tell me how you do X today. Do you use any toolsto get X done? Last time you did X, what were you doing immediately before and after? But this one was really exciting. If you could wave a magic wand and be able to do something you can't do today, what would it be? And then the final question, is there anything else about X that I should have asked? So these are like great questions and so I went. Armed with them into a bunch of customer development interviews. And it was interesting, so people talking about time sheets can actually get super emotional. Like one woman, a
(07:00):
controller at an agency was nearly in tears talking about time sheets because of the pain she had getting the people working in the agency to fill in their time sheets. She's like, I just wanna send an invoice. Please do this. And like invoices are taking three, four weeks to send and they need to make payroll, they need cash, and people just don't care. Yeah. So like she was in pain. Other people would just get angry and they're just like, and the thing that I heard over and over, people would say, it'sjust make time sheets go away. Yeah. So that was like the key thing. Make them go away. Collin Stewart: I was laughing there. Not because I was laughing at. This controller, but because I have sat with our controller and they, she has had a similar conversation with me a number of times. Yeah. Both from yeah. Development purposes for tread and things and for, trying to work out people's time. It's not a, it's never a high priority task to do for anybody. Nobody loves tracking their time. Paul Doerwald:
No. Collin Stewart (08:00):
And then the poor controller is like. I have to rely, I'm an important person doing important work, but it relies on all these people doing this thing that they see as an extremely unimportant task that I have to effectively whip them to do. Yeah. If you ever seen the office, it's that moment where like Michael has to sign like three different documents or five different pieces of paperwork, and he just, it always takes him like five hours and everybody has to stay late, and it's like, it's that. Every time. Every month. So the controller can send her invoices. Paul Doerwald
and technical technological reasons, like they just are critically necessary to run a consultancy. Collin Stewart (09:00):
And so talk to me about the validation process. It sounds like a hundred conversations informally, 20 formal conversations using Cindy's method. Yeah. How did that go? What did that, yeah, what did that turn into Paul Doerwald
something you can stop doing. You have to keep going at it. Because there's always more to learn as you're getting feedback on the product, on the market, and such Collin Stewart (10:00):
strongly agree there. Even as a services business. I still do customer development once a year. As like a, make sure that we're still I don't know. Serving our customers and keeping up with the changes. Paul Doerwald
(11:00):
like, he actually had, oh, I know this guy. I think I've met him. Yeah. So, but he's a fabulous designer and I wanted to work with him. I'd seen his work, I'd seen his process. I'm like, I want that process. Part of my team, his name is Brian, Jeff Cock, and he's just fabulous. I recommend him highly, but he hated the idea of clock. But when we sat down to do work, I'm like, look, Brian, if you're gonna work on clock, and I want you to, but I need you to feel. The struggle that people who use Clock have, and the only way you can feel that, you can't feel it with fakedata, you have to feel it with real data. So I need you to install the trackers. You can uninstall them as soon as you're done, but I need you to do this. He is like, fine, I'll do it. So he installed the trackers, we put them aside, we worked on our thing for a couple hours, then he went on to do his other client work, and that evening I am just sitting at home watching tv and he sends me a message on Slack. He's like. Okay, so I'm using Clock and, huh. This is a neat vi visualization of my day. I can actually see what clients I worked on when, and then there was a
(12:00):
pause, oh clock. Just found 20 minutes that I didn't bill. So on his first day of using clock, clock made him enough money to more than pay for the first month of service. And from that point he was hooked. And I've seen that kind of thing over and over again with new users when they get clock and they start using it, it's like, bang. And another woman who I onboarded on our first meeting, 'cause she had set up the trackers earlier, but we met a day later. She's like, do, oh. Wow.She saw a block for two hours and she said, I only build like 45 minutes for that. So boom. Again. She made a ton of money in her first day by using Clock, and so Brian, he's still a customer now, six years later, he hasn't churned. He uses clock literally every day. Collin Stewart: That's amazing. That's really cool. It, I thought it was gonna be one of those similar stories. Like I'm writing a book, it comes out in October and the, it's still in progress, but the actual Amazon
(13:00):
listing is up. And I was like, no way. It's not. And I Google and so I not Googled that. I went into Amazon and I typed it in and I saw it there, and I was like, oh. And I bought my own book. So like, I'm my own first customer. I, it's like you ki you cheated Paul, but it's cool that he. It's still using it even though you like paid them to build it. And that's really cool. Yeah. And so talk to me about is obviously this hiring a UI designer to build something for you to get a customer is a pretty expensive cost to acquire a customer. Not avery efficient go-to-market motion. Where did the next customers come from? Paul Doerwald: Yeah not efficient at all. So the next customers. To be honest, I don't really remember. They were both Canadian, so one was from Halifax and one was from Vancouver. But the Canadianness was just accidental. Our marketing has always been absolutely terrible, so it's remarkable. They heard about us at all, but both of them came on, started paying, and both of them stuck around for a fairly long time and used clock quite regularly. And then after that we
(14:00):
spent a year in the app Sumo marketplace. And so I. You probably know about AppSumo. It's a bit of a mixed bag, and that's a whole conversation on its own that I'd be happy to have. But it actually worked fairly well for us. It was a great source of early users and a lot of them gave really good feedback. Some of them not at all. So like. It could be, it can be a really mixed bag. But the ones who are good were really excellent and we still count a lot of those users among our regulars who continue to givegreat feedback and have said nice things about us. Today most of our leads are coming from SEO way, way back I wrote an article, what is AI Time Tracking? And that was before AI was really much of a. Thing. So when it started being a thing, ai, time tracking already had good SEO juice on that keyword. So we just started to ramp up there and signups, ramp up. It's been modest, but that has been where a lot of signups came. I just learned last week that chat, GPT is recommending us when people ask about time
trackers as well. And I had been noticing an uptick in signups. So I think we're getting a lot of benefit from our SEO work all that time ago. And chat GPT is working for us. Collin Stewart (15:00):
Huh. That's fantastic. You're the second person on the show that's rec or that's mentioned that they're getting lead flow from Chet. Paul Doerwald
license agreement. It's complicated. I think we should save that one for another conversation. Happy to do it. Okay. But I need to be mentally prepared for that one, to have all the bullets and what was good and what was bad. And, but I have. I have good feedback for, or good advice for anybody who would be interested in doing AppSumo and what to watch out for and how to really get the most out of it. Collin Stewart (16:00):
Yeah. What would the high level be Paul Doerwald
(17:00):
making a buck here, making a buck there and always looking for an edge. They don't have much loyalty, but they have a lot of software knowledge. So make sure that the app Sumo user is the right user for you. There's a really good natural fit for a lot of app Sumo people. A lot of people are, yeah they're hustlers. They're making a deal. They're doing work. They're consultants. So clock is a natural fit for them. So make sure you're doing that because there are some tools out there that are justlike, this doesn't fit the market at all. I. And I found it really helpful to incentivize feedback. Not necessarily paying them, but just giving like extra features in the app to get them to write fair. I always looked for fair and honest feedback, but using their app, sumos own system of getting reviews, which gets you more attention, which gets more reviews and such, really worked well for me. So those are some high level things that I would suggest. Collin Stewart: Fantastic. Thank you. And so
your first couple of users I'm curious, the guy who said, the first person who said, I hate time sheets, make 'em disappear. Did they sign up as a customer? Paul Doerwald (18:00):
I don't think so. It's, a lot of people said that, and I chased a bunch of them down, but it's hard to get people to answer emails and, you're on the other side of that all the time. Collin Stewart
person is experiencing. It could be about how you solve that pain or that they even want to solve that pain, which I guess feeds back a targeting. And so in, in order to have really great targeting, you need to do a ton of user research. Yeah. So it is this like, okay, which one do we do first? I'm a big fan of like customer development first, and then slowly work those folks into a sales pipeline. Slowly Paul Doerwald (19:00):
learn first, slowly, and I think me, I'm a technical background, so a lot of market research I just didn't understand. Why you would do it, or I could ask the not understand. I understood why. But I didn't understand the questions that I was asking and I didn't understand how to dig more to actually find out what's underneath because I'm not used to thinking with a marketing hat on. And the same thing I think was less true, but still true for customer development. I hadn't done it before, so I didn't really know what. Questions I'm asking. I don't really know the implications and what, how to dig deeper now that I've been through it
once and I'm on the other side or well other side, I'm well into a product. If I could go back and do it again, I would do it with so much more intelligence and wisdom and I would ask better questions, but you just have to do it, learn and do it again. It's a trial and error kind of thing, and I think that's true for marketing. It's true for everything. You just get experience and you get better at it. Collin Stewart (20:00):
Totally. I'm a huge fan of using customer development interviews to really refine your targeting, whether you're going into the same market or go, oh, trying to open up a new market or trying to a, add a new feature because they will, if you are solving something and you do have a product, after the meeting you say, Hey, I think I've built something for you that you might like. Do you wanna check it out? Paul Doerwald
like, that's fine, I'll do that. Because I'm interested. But they phrased it just right. And then they asked me a bunch of questions and at the end of it's just like, so this is what we're doing. And they showed it to me and it just naturally rolled into, what's your credit card number? And I'm like, I gave it right then and there for a hundred bucks. And I came in cold and I was a customer. It was really cool experience. I'm like, I wanna do that next time. Collin Stewart (21:00):
Yeah. Fantastic. You'll have to forward that newsletter to me. I'm really curious to see to see what it looked like. Paul Doerwald
product a few years ago until an advisor wisely said to me, you don't have many customers, Paul, so. That's like kind of proof that your product isn't good. If it were good, you'd have customers and like, ha, your logic is sound, something to this. So he recommended that I do the Sean Ellis test. I assume you know the Sean Ellis test? Collin Stewart (22:00):
Yeah. It's, but remind listeners. Yeah. In case. So it has Paul Doerwald
(23:00):
really bad lead flow, poor conversions, low LTV, high churn, all super bad signs. So we had this conflicting information. So yeah, big discrepancy. So I'm like, okay, I have to get to the heart of this, like, what's going on? Why do we have really high product market fit yet? All of these really bad metrics. So I started asking users at. All stages of clock that were willing to talk to me, like I just wanted to ask them. So I'd offer them a $50 gift certificate, which has beenpretty effective to incentivize people to give feedback. And so, like, without an incentive, hardly anyone would talk to me. But with the incentive for 50 bucks, enough people are willing to roll out a bed for that. So I learned a bunch of things, like some key things. One, our tracking wasn't nearly as good as I thought it was. Two, our UI was actually pretty frustrating. But then on the other hand, the people love clock, so it would be like the Brians who on their first day are
(24:00):
making more money. So for the people for whom the product just actually worked. Just right. And they had just the right workflow and we're solving the problems. We're knocking it out of the park with them and that's why we're getting this huge rating. So. It's just basically like we saw the tracking wasn't good, the UI is frustrating. So we've gone on this long process of steadily refining our tracking and improving it steadily, refining our UI to make it better and better. We've been on this long road and if I weresmart I would've given up on clock a long time ago. But it's these fans that we have who absolutely love Clock that keep me going. And every now and then a new one pops up and I get a new person filling in the PMF survey. And there's like. I can't believe this software is here. I absolutely love it. It's what I've been looking for. And in fact, so it kinda takes me to the end of this, like, where did we know we had product market fit? I think it might actually even be this morning. So I had two calls today with customers.
(25:00):
Both of them had churned or not signed up. I think they're both churns. And I talked to them and they talked about what they loved about Clock, and it's like, these are exactly the problems we set out to solve six years ago. You're jumping between projects and it's hard to keep track of what you're doing. We solved that. And their complaints are actually, I. Fair and minor in the grand scheme of things. Like one guy, he really needs an integration with his project management tool and we don't have that. Our competitiondoes. And our competition is good enough. So he went with that, but he would really rather use clock because clock is better and it works more the way he works. So like bang, we've got it. We've got this guy. We're just in that we just need to add a feature for him. And then the other one he. It's like your clock is amazing software. It has all the accuracy that I want, but sometimes I just need the job done and I can't wait to do the accuracy. I wish it were like faster in certain ways. I'm like, we're actually working on
some features that are gonna make that part easier as well, so we can catch even more data earlier on with less manual in less manual tasks. So. Yeah, two calls. Both of them were churns. Both of them were like, if you did this, we would be there again, and they want to help and they're excited and they're seeing the value that we provide. So, yeah. I think today was, we're there. Now we just need to up the deal flow. And we're we've, but we've got the software, we've got the product. Collin Stewart: That's fantastic. It's, there's nothing better than somebody leaning in and being like, yeah, I really love what you built. There's nothing like obviously the money is good and to have the kind of success that comes with it, but I don't know, for me, there's nothing more satisfying than like helping somebody. You do this big complicated mental Lego project and then you actually manage to get it. Built out somehow, and it doesn't catch on fire, and you're like I helped somebody like this little, (26:00):
undefined
yeah. Paul Doerwald (27:00):
And clock was just way harder to do than I thought it was gonna be six years ago. I thought, oh yeah, this will be pretty simple. We'll whip together some code to do this. My goodness, this has been the hardest project of my life, not just on a business level, but on a technical level. There have been more challenges than I ever would've expected, and they just keep coming and, we've been knocking them off piece by piece and it's been overwhelming and sometimes I haven't known if we'd get to the other side of the mountain, but from a technical perspective, like we're there, like, it's pretty amazing to look back at all the challenges we've faced and where we've come and it's thanks to our users who have been willing to stop and give us feedback along the way, like continuing that customer development all along, constantly talking. A friend of mine who's also pretty renowned Caitlyn Bogo says whoever's closest to the customer wins. And that's been my goal for the last years is like, how close can I get to the
Welcome back to the Predictable Revenue Podcast. I'm your host, Colin Stewart, and today I'm joined by Paul ald. He's the founder at Clock, and we're talking product market fit. Paul, welcome to the show. Paul Doerwald
talking specifically about the product market fit journey of Clock. And I'm excited to this is one, this is a project that you've been working on for a long time, really, and one of the reasons Yeah. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show. And so talk to me about where the idea came from and when the idea came about. Okay. 'cause the one thing I really appreciate about your story is how persistent you've been. Paul Doerwald (01:00):
Yeah, so, so the background is convoluted. It goes back a little less than 10 years now to I was working on an idea that was tangentially related to what Clock became a kind of. Project dashboard for small consultancies. And I'd heard from someone that you should talk to your customers before you start coding. So I thought, okay, I'll do that. And this was before I knew that customer discovery was a thing. So I asked someone in my ICP, and this was before I knew what an ICP was about my idea. And he listened to me and he said, yeah, I wouldn't use it. But then he paused. He
paused and he said, you know what really annoys me? Time sheets and at that moment, clock was born. So it was just because something I had said and what we were going to do or that I had been thinking about twigged something in his head. He's like, that would help me with time sheets. He didn't actually make that connection, but his brain did and that was like, oh yeah, I can use the core of what I'm working on and work and put it toward clock. Collin Stewart (02:00):
Amazing. I had a similar experience with my first company, but I ignored all those people and I went, nah, they're idiots. They those jumps that they're making. Irrelevant. So like, good on you for listening. What was, I'm curious, what was the idea before Clock was? Clock? Paul Doerwald
(03:00):
work on over the course of a week when it involves five different projects? So five different Trello boards and a bunch of other tools as well. How do you get a holistic view of what you're going to do? Because all the Gantt chart tools, all the project planning charts are assuming that you're gonna have eight hours of time per resource on a task. And that's not actually reality. You might only have, you might only be able to plan 16 hours for one person on this taskthis week, and then things are also gonna change as you're going. So how do you actually get a holistic view across all the different things when there's constantly competing attention for what you're gonna do. Collin Stewart: Totally. And so you came to them with this big complicated thing that's arguably, or probably solving the pain that you were experiencing and you went, nah, time sheets. Paul Doerwald: Yeah, exactly. So basically, yeah it was fixing my itch.
(04:00):
And I think people do have the itch or the pain that I was getting into, but I don't know. When you're a small consultancy, you're scrappy, you're figuring it out as you go, and you just deal with it. And you come up with it, and you come up with your ways. And as you grow bigger, scale allows you to address those problems. 'cause you have more people on the project. So you can give them whole days or two days or whole weeks at a time to work on something. It's when you're really small and you've got lots of demands from yourclients that you are jumping around a lot. Collin Stewart: Totally. Yeah. And I think it's a great example of like having, finding a pain that resonates with you. And then going out to validate it and people are like, I'm not in the same situation, but here is something along those lines that bothers me. It is a case study in listening to what your customers are or with the customer development people are saying. Yep. Absolutely. So was it sounds like it was a pretty instantaneous one meeting and then, okay. I feel like I need to, I.
Make the change or was there a number of these? Paul Doerwald (05:00):
So that meeting, let me see that I was going on the wrong path and there were some challenges anyway on that and it let me switch, but I thought, I need to do customer development on this new idea on the time tracking idea. And so that, and opened up a whole bit about that. So. Collin Stewart
(06:00):
was super eye-opening for me, so I don't know if I should go into the core thing. Go for it. But yeah, what she said was like in the book, it was really powerful. She said, there are basically five questions you need to ask. None of them are leading questions. So a leading question, this was really eyeopening for me as well, is any question to which the answer could be yes or no. I. So don't ask any question that has that kind of an answer, which is great. So the questions are, tell me how you do X today. Do you use any toolsto get X done? Last time you did X, what were you doing immediately before and after? But this one was really exciting. If you could wave a magic wand and be able to do something you can't do today, what would it be? And then the final question, is there anything else about X that I should have asked? So these are like great questions and so I went. Armed with them into a bunch of customer development interviews. And it was interesting, so people talking about time sheets can actually get super emotional. Like one woman, a
(07:00):
controller at an agency was nearly in tears talking about time sheets because of the pain she had getting the people working in the agency to fill in their time sheets. She's like, I just wanna send an invoice. Please do this. And like invoices are taking three, four weeks to send and they need to make payroll, they need cash, and people just don't care. Yeah. So like she was in pain. Other people would just get angry and they're just like, and the thing that I heard over and over, people would say, it'sjust make time sheets go away. Yeah. So that was like the key thing. Make them go away. Collin Stewart: I was laughing there. Not because I was laughing at. This controller, but because I have sat with our controller and they, she has had a similar conversation with me a number of times. Yeah. Both from yeah. Development purposes for tread and things and for, trying to work out people's time. It's not a, it's never a high priority task to do for anybody. Nobody loves tracking their time. Paul Doerwald:
No. Collin Stewart (08:00):
And then the poor controller is like. I have to rely, I'm an important person doing important work, but it relies on all these people doing this thing that they see as an extremely unimportant task that I have to effectively whip them to do. Yeah. If you ever seen the office, it's that moment where like Michael has to sign like three different documents or five different pieces of paperwork, and he just, it always takes him like five hours and everybody has to stay late, and it's like, it's that. Every time. Every month. So the controller can send her invoices. Paul Doerwald
and technical technological reasons, like they just are critically necessary to run a consultancy. Collin Stewart (09:00):
And so talk to me about the validation process. It sounds like a hundred conversations informally, 20 formal conversations using Cindy's method. Yeah. How did that go? What did that, yeah, what did that turn into Paul Doerwald
something you can stop doing. You have to keep going at it. Because there's always more to learn as you're getting feedback on the product, on the market, and such Collin Stewart (10:00):
strongly agree there. Even as a services business. I still do customer development once a year. As like a, make sure that we're still I don't know. Serving our customers and keeping up with the changes. Paul Doerwald
(11:00):
like, he actually had, oh, I know this guy. I think I've met him. Yeah. So, but he's a fabulous designer and I wanted to work with him. I'd seen his work, I'd seen his process. I'm like, I want that process. Part of my team, his name is Brian, Jeff Cock, and he's just fabulous. I recommend him highly, but he hated the idea of clock. But when we sat down to do work, I'm like, look, Brian, if you're gonna work on clock, and I want you to, but I need you to feel. The struggle that people who use Clock have, and the only way you can feel that, you can't feel it with fakedata, you have to feel it with real data. So I need you to install the trackers. You can uninstall them as soon as you're done, but I need you to do this. He is like, fine, I'll do it. So he installed the trackers, we put them aside, we worked on our thing for a couple hours, then he went on to do his other client work, and that evening I am just sitting at home watching tv and he sends me a message on Slack. He's like. Okay, so I'm using Clock and, huh. This is a neat vi visualization of my day. I can actually see what clients I worked on when, and then there was a
(12:00):
pause, oh clock. Just found 20 minutes that I didn't bill. So on his first day of using clock, clock made him enough money to more than pay for the first month of service. And from that point he was hooked. And I've seen that kind of thing over and over again with new users when they get clock and they start using it, it's like, bang. And another woman who I onboarded on our first meeting, 'cause she had set up the trackers earlier, but we met a day later. She's like, do, oh. Wow.She saw a block for two hours and she said, I only build like 45 minutes for that. So boom. Again. She made a ton of money in her first day by using Clock, and so Brian, he's still a customer now, six years later, he hasn't churned. He uses clock literally every day. Collin Stewart: That's amazing. That's really cool. It, I thought it was gonna be one of those similar stories. Like I'm writing a book, it comes out in October and the, it's still in progress, but the actual Amazon
(13:00):
listing is up. And I was like, no way. It's not. And I Google and so I not Googled that. I went into Amazon and I typed it in and I saw it there, and I was like, oh. And I bought my own book. So like, I'm my own first customer. I, it's like you ki you cheated Paul, but it's cool that he. It's still using it even though you like paid them to build it. And that's really cool. Yeah. And so talk to me about is obviously this hiring a UI designer to build something for you to get a customer is a pretty expensive cost to acquire a customer. Not avery efficient go-to-market motion. Where did the next customers come from? Paul Doerwald: Yeah not efficient at all. So the next customers. To be honest, I don't really remember. They were both Canadian, so one was from Halifax and one was from Vancouver. But the Canadianness was just accidental. Our marketing has always been absolutely terrible, so it's remarkable. They heard about us at all, but both of them came on, started paying, and both of them stuck around for a fairly long time and used clock quite regularly. And then after that we
(14:00):
spent a year in the app Sumo marketplace. And so I. You probably know about AppSumo. It's a bit of a mixed bag, and that's a whole conversation on its own that I'd be happy to have. But it actually worked fairly well for us. It was a great source of early users and a lot of them gave really good feedback. Some of them not at all. So like. It could be, it can be a really mixed bag. But the ones who are good were really excellent and we still count a lot of those users among our regulars who continue to givegreat feedback and have said nice things about us. Today most of our leads are coming from SEO way, way back I wrote an article, what is AI Time Tracking? And that was before AI was really much of a. Thing. So when it started being a thing, ai, time tracking already had good SEO juice on that keyword. So we just started to ramp up there and signups, ramp up. It's been modest, but that has been where a lot of signups came. I just learned last week that chat, GPT is recommending us when people ask about time
trackers as well. And I had been noticing an uptick in signups. So I think we're getting a lot of benefit from our SEO work all that time ago. And chat GPT is working for us. Collin Stewart (15:00):
Huh. That's fantastic. You're the second person on the show that's rec or that's mentioned that they're getting lead flow from Chet. Paul Doerwald
license agreement. It's complicated. I think we should save that one for another conversation. Happy to do it. Okay. But I need to be mentally prepared for that one, to have all the bullets and what was good and what was bad. And, but I have. I have good feedback for, or good advice for anybody who would be interested in doing AppSumo and what to watch out for and how to really get the most out of it. Collin Stewart (16:00):
Yeah. What would the high level be Paul Doerwald
(17:00):
making a buck here, making a buck there and always looking for an edge. They don't have much loyalty, but they have a lot of software knowledge. So make sure that the app Sumo user is the right user for you. There's a really good natural fit for a lot of app Sumo people. A lot of people are, yeah they're hustlers. They're making a deal. They're doing work. They're consultants. So clock is a natural fit for them. So make sure you're doing that because there are some tools out there that are justlike, this doesn't fit the market at all. I. And I found it really helpful to incentivize feedback. Not necessarily paying them, but just giving like extra features in the app to get them to write fair. I always looked for fair and honest feedback, but using their app, sumos own system of getting reviews, which gets you more attention, which gets more reviews and such, really worked well for me. So those are some high level things that I would suggest. Collin Stewart: Fantastic. Thank you. And so
your first couple of users I'm curious, the guy who said, the first person who said, I hate time sheets, make 'em disappear. Did they sign up as a customer? Paul Doerwald (18:00):
I don't think so. It's, a lot of people said that, and I chased a bunch of them down, but it's hard to get people to answer emails and, you're on the other side of that all the time. Collin Stewart
person is experiencing. It could be about how you solve that pain or that they even want to solve that pain, which I guess feeds back a targeting. And so in, in order to have really great targeting, you need to do a ton of user research. Yeah. So it is this like, okay, which one do we do first? I'm a big fan of like customer development first, and then slowly work those folks into a sales pipeline. Slowly Paul Doerwald (19:00):
learn first, slowly, and I think me, I'm a technical background, so a lot of market research I just didn't understand. Why you would do it, or I could ask the not understand. I understood why. But I didn't understand the questions that I was asking and I didn't understand how to dig more to actually find out what's underneath because I'm not used to thinking with a marketing hat on. And the same thing I think was less true, but still true for customer development. I hadn't done it before, so I didn't really know what. Questions I'm asking. I don't really know the implications and what, how to dig deeper now that I've been through it
once and I'm on the other side or well other side, I'm well into a product. If I could go back and do it again, I would do it with so much more intelligence and wisdom and I would ask better questions, but you just have to do it, learn and do it again. It's a trial and error kind of thing, and I think that's true for marketing. It's true for everything. You just get experience and you get better at it. Collin Stewart (20:00):
Totally. I'm a huge fan of using customer development interviews to really refine your targeting, whether you're going into the same market or go, oh, trying to open up a new market or trying to a, add a new feature because they will, if you are solving something and you do have a product, after the meeting you say, Hey, I think I've built something for you that you might like. Do you wanna check it out? Paul Doerwald
like, that's fine, I'll do that. Because I'm interested. But they phrased it just right. And then they asked me a bunch of questions and at the end of it's just like, so this is what we're doing. And they showed it to me and it just naturally rolled into, what's your credit card number? And I'm like, I gave it right then and there for a hundred bucks. And I came in cold and I was a customer. It was really cool experience. I'm like, I wanna do that next time. Collin Stewart (21:00):
Yeah. Fantastic. You'll have to forward that newsletter to me. I'm really curious to see to see what it looked like. Paul Doerwald
product a few years ago until an advisor wisely said to me, you don't have many customers, Paul, so. That's like kind of proof that your product isn't good. If it were good, you'd have customers and like, ha, your logic is sound, something to this. So he recommended that I do the Sean Ellis test. I assume you know the Sean Ellis test? Collin Stewart (22:00):
Yeah. It's, but remind listeners. Yeah. In case. So it has Paul Doerwald
(23:00):
really bad lead flow, poor conversions, low LTV, high churn, all super bad signs. So we had this conflicting information. So yeah, big discrepancy. So I'm like, okay, I have to get to the heart of this, like, what's going on? Why do we have really high product market fit yet? All of these really bad metrics. So I started asking users at. All stages of clock that were willing to talk to me, like I just wanted to ask them. So I'd offer them a $50 gift certificate, which has beenpretty effective to incentivize people to give feedback. And so, like, without an incentive, hardly anyone would talk to me. But with the incentive for 50 bucks, enough people are willing to roll out a bed for that. So I learned a bunch of things, like some key things. One, our tracking wasn't nearly as good as I thought it was. Two, our UI was actually pretty frustrating. But then on the other hand, the people love clock, so it would be like the Brians who on their first day are
(24:00):
making more money. So for the people for whom the product just actually worked. Just right. And they had just the right workflow and we're solving the problems. We're knocking it out of the park with them and that's why we're getting this huge rating. So. It's just basically like we saw the tracking wasn't good, the UI is frustrating. So we've gone on this long process of steadily refining our tracking and improving it steadily, refining our UI to make it better and better. We've been on this long road and if I weresmart I would've given up on clock a long time ago. But it's these fans that we have who absolutely love Clock that keep me going. And every now and then a new one pops up and I get a new person filling in the PMF survey. And there's like. I can't believe this software is here. I absolutely love it. It's what I've been looking for. And in fact, so it kinda takes me to the end of this, like, where did we know we had product market fit? I think it might actually even be this morning. So I had two calls today with customers.
(25:00):
Both of them had churned or not signed up. I think they're both churns. And I talked to them and they talked about what they loved about Clock, and it's like, these are exactly the problems we set out to solve six years ago. You're jumping between projects and it's hard to keep track of what you're doing. We solved that. And their complaints are actually, I. Fair and minor in the grand scheme of things. Like one guy, he really needs an integration with his project management tool and we don't have that. Our competitiondoes. And our competition is good enough. So he went with that, but he would really rather use clock because clock is better and it works more the way he works. So like bang, we've got it. We've got this guy. We're just in that we just need to add a feature for him. And then the other one he. It's like your clock is amazing software. It has all the accuracy that I want, but sometimes I just need the job done and I can't wait to do the accuracy. I wish it were like faster in certain ways. I'm like, we're actually working on
some features that are gonna make that part easier as well, so we can catch even more data earlier on with less manual in less manual tasks. So. Yeah, two calls. Both of them were churns. Both of them were like, if you did this, we would be there again, and they want to help and they're excited and they're seeing the value that we provide. So, yeah. I think today was, we're there. Now we just need to up the deal flow. And we're we've, but we've got the software, we've got the product. Collin Stewart: That's fantastic. It's, there's nothing better than somebody leaning in and being like, yeah, I really love what you built. There's nothing like obviously the money is good and to have the kind of success that comes with it, but I don't know, for me, there's nothing more satisfying than like helping somebody. You do this big complicated mental Lego project and then you actually manage to get it. Built out somehow, and it doesn't catch on fire, and you're like I helped somebody like this little, (26:00):
undefined
yeah. Paul Doerwald (27:00):
And clock was just way harder to do than I thought it was gonna be six years ago. I thought, oh yeah, this will be pretty simple. We'll whip together some code to do this. My goodness, this has been the hardest project of my life, not just on a business level, but on a technical level. There have been more challenges than I ever would've expected, and they just keep coming and, we've been knocking them off piece by piece and it's been overwhelming and sometimes I haven't known if we'd get to the other side of the mountain, but from a technical perspective, like we're there, like, it's pretty amazing to look back at all the challenges we've faced and where we've come and it's thanks to our users who have been willing to stop and give us feedback along the way, like continuing that customer development all along, constantly talking. A friend of mine who's also pretty renowned Caitlyn Bogo says whoever's closest to the customer wins. And that's been my goal for the last years is like, how close can I get to the
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