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A convenient and simple service for tracking time of work and earnings

About development of Checkiant. Behind the scenes

Today we will take you behind the scenes of Checkiant time-tracker. What and who is behind it? We want to share our goals and plans with you. So, let's begin!

The reasons for creating Сheckiant

The main kind of our activity is web design and online marketing. Over the course of five years of work, we began to cooperate with more than 200 clients and gained a lot of experience in the development, support and online advertising of web projects. A little more than 20 people work in our small team and we are proud of our friendly relations. We have frontend and backend programmers, testers, designers, SEO specialists, contextual advertising, email marketing, SMM, copywriters, customer managers.

What we have not had so far is our own project which we would do for ourselves not as an outsource. In the previous article, I talked about the idea of creating Checkiant, but I did not mention the pleasure from the process of creating our own product which, of course, is also one of the reasons for our huge enthusiasm.

What and who is behind the Checkiant??

Checkiant is a web application written in PHP on our own framework, the database is MySQL. On the frontend, we use jQuery, Bootstrap and a paid topic (it saved us tens of hours of work). As you can see, the stack of technologies is far from exotic, but it allows us to quickly and effectively solve the tasks. For sliders we use the wonderful application Smart Slider 3, I'm just in love with it! 

The Checkiant team currently has 1 backend programmer, 2 frontend programmer / layout maker (one of whom is also a designer), 3 copywriters-advisers ( the first 2 articles in our blog blog about productivity are already written by Karina, I advise you to read them), 1 SMM specialist who is still resting and a whole team of web studio, helping us with their ideas and tips.

Our plans

Our plan is absolutely clear and simple enough, I will put it in the form of a list. Naturally, we will embark on each following item only after the successful execution of the previous ones.

  1. The task of paramount importance is to finish the development of the basic version of Checkiant (in the basic version we did a feature cutting (cutting of extra functions), but it would be desirable to expand it after the launching).
  2. To test drive the service in our web studio.
  3. To run the advertising campaign on the CIS in the Russian-language Internet (such a soft launch in one region to make sure that the business model is working).
  4. To run the advertising campaign in English-speaking countries.
  5. To add to the service some functions and integrations with other services that we deliberately excluded from the basic version.
  6. To develop versions for the operating systems Windows, Mac, Android, IOS, and others.

We understand that the plan is ambitious enough, but we will try to follow it. However, if we do not succeed in making our business model workable (and we will do our best), we will just close the project and start a new one, we do not intend to surrender.

Our goal

Of course, we want to create the world's best timekeeper. However, it is too early to talk about this, and there are just no defining metrics, because "the best" is too subjective. Nevertheless, how much Checkiant is good as a product (and how good is the marketing we are doing)? Only the number of customers who will use the service can determine it. How large is the market of time-tracking services?

To get an answer, we went into detail on the question of studying the existing time-tracking systems (we have read the tons of comments in their open support branches, follow them on social networks and their blogs) and it was not very cunningly defined (certainly not exactly) how many new users are registered monthly in the leading services. How did we do that? We just registered 2 accounts on each service with a gap in a month and analyzed the field user_id in AJAX-requests sent by the browser. Commonly it is an integer that determines the user's serial number in the service database.

Thus, we learned how many users on average are registered on leading services (some do not hide their statistics, so we made sure that our "super-hacker" way works). Knowing this number, we set the task for the next six months after the launch to approach the same number of new users per month (of course, most of the users will use the free version of Solo Lite, but in this case, it's secondary for us ... No, do not think! We seriously think about the issues of monetization, but let's talk about this in the next articles).

Well, the article is written, it's time to program a bit!

Translation from: Как мы разрабатываем Сheckiant. Что за кулисами?