Before 9seeds and before my previous job, I had a small web development company. At the time, PayPal was pretty new. Their set of tools for for selling products on a website were pretty limited, and the documentation was… I will just say that it wasn’t as good then as it is now. (Cough cough) Just to add a product and then add a button to your site took a while. If you wanted to set up a shopping cart, you were in for a lengthy and daunting journey.

As more people came to me looking to build an online store, it got to the point where I realized I needed a better solution. Without being able to find one, I built my own. I started using this new software to build easy ecommerce sites. It had a little admin page where site owners could add products and set prices. The front end was pretty basic, too. But it worked. Actually, it worked pretty damn well. What started out as a simple little tool ended up being a fairly robust product that made my job easier, and made me some extra money on the side.

What are you building that for?

Last year I was frustrated with tracking time for my companies’ contractors. We were using a modified version of the P2 theme, and it was working, but just barely. I had started attending the Vegas Jelly meet ups. They were a bi-weekly hack session where the idea was that you would set aside your normal work and instead work on a side project. I would go and camp out for a few hours and bang away on this or that. Nothing really exciting. I was just happy to be hanging out in a group of techies who were all doing cool stuff.

As my company grew, tracking time in P2 was starting to be very cumbersome. So one night at Jelly, I started building a new time tracker in WordPress. After a few hack sessions, it was taking shape and I started to show it to some people for feedback. One of the guys responded with, “There are a bunch of time trackers out there. Why not just use one of them?” I explained that I had tried a few and none worked how I wanted, so I was building my own. I am pretty sure he sighed at me as he walked away.

This isn’t just a tool, it’s a product

Once we started using the new tool at work, I loved it immediately. It was easy for my staff to use, and made my job a lot easier when it came time to send invoices to clients. I realized soon after, with a couple other features, this could be something I could sell.

Of course, it is never that easy. I realized that if I was going to make it a product, I would have to rewrite a bunch of it to make it a bit more generic so anybody could use it. So over the course of about a month, I rewrote the bulk of it (with a little help) and we released it. All the while, we are using the same code as our own internal time tracker. Version one was pretty lean on features, but it worked. Pretty damn well, if I do say so myself.

Building selfishly

The first version of WP Time Tracker was pretty simple. It didn’t have a lot of features. It did most of what I wanted it to do, but not much more. So almost immediately after the first release, I put together a laundry list of features that I want to add to the plugin that will my job easier. That sounds so selfish, but the reality is, the more I focus on making my life easier, the better the product becomes. It still has a way to go yet. My list of features to build seems to gain new items more frequently than I am completing them. But that’s ok. I am building the product that I would want to buy.