hTime

hTime is getting 40+ visits every day, that's 1200+ visits/month. This has resulted from Hacker News, posting on different platforms, and cold emailing potential users. I'm working on building a daily active user base for hTime before launching the freemium model. The plan then is to convert them, to be realistic some % of them, into premium customers.

I launched hTime on Hacker News and made it to the #1 topic of interest and discussion for 2 days in a row! The post resulted in 197 comments, 5000+ users, and 15000+ pageviews.

The lessons I learned:
1- Submit multiple times, and don't give up. This was my 6th attempt.
2- Content is key. In every submission, I tried a new tagline. The one that succeeded was the most realistic one with no big, buzz words.
3- Listen carefully to what users say. It's vital to keep an open mind for the negative commenters and not over-excited for the positive ones.

For the past few years, I haven't thought of hTime as a business. It was for me a passion project that I enjoyed working on. I kept on adding updates and features to the clock to make it more convenient to use. It's only until recently that I felt the clock was generating traction and sparking interest. The clock needed to make money in order for me to have a team and foster innovation to fix time zones once and for all. At this point, I started thinking of hTime as a startup and a business.

I worked for 3 months on building the MVP. The core of the MVP was the algorithm to run the global clock and its design. I experimented with several versions with my friends and family. I settled then on the design that was the simplest and made the most sense.

I studied time and the clocks for quite some time and came up with a simple conclusion. Time comes with the universe, and it seems that we can't change it- yet. The clock, on the other hand, is a human-made invention, and like other inventions, it can be improved. The idea and design of a "new clock" to combine UTC and local times was born. I tested it on paper, and the first mockups proved to work.

It was this very question that led me on a personal crusade to tackle the challenge of the global workplace: time zones.

It began when I was working on a startup and felt the frustrations that came with scheduling calls across different time zones. Several times a week I would schedule calls between San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin. I was spending time calculating what is most convenient for people in several time zones, over and over. And when someone wasn’t available anymore, I had to calculate it all over again. Such a mess.