The Agile Entrepreneurship Podcast

The Agile Entrepreneurship Podcast


Building an online timesheet & invoice software business

October 15, 2020

Subscribe & DownloadListen onApple PodcastsFollow us onSoundCloudListen on       Google PlayListen on       SpotifyGuest: ​William Roberts & John Holmes Episode Transcript (Click to expand)00:04Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur video cast and podcast. And this is your host, Ramesh Dontha. Today, with the very first time I'm going to talk to two co-founders, John Holmes and Will Roberts. Both of them are co-founders and executive partners at www.weworked.com. It's an online timesheet software company. They have bootstrapped it built into a company that serves customers in what, 120 countries. That is phenomenal. All right guys, John and Will welcome.00:41Will: Thank you.00:41Ramesh: So, John, can you introduce the company please?00:46John: Sure. I'm a little bit about weworked, we started, weworked about nine years ago. My time may be off a year or so. It goes back pretty fast, but not years ago. When I started, weworked we both worked for small companies and weworked basically as a time sheet invoicing payroll/ leave tracking software that we developed with the focus of small business clients. And it's kind of morphed into something much bigger. But from the beginning, that was the initial focus.01:27Ramesh: Okay, great. So Will how about you, if you could introduce yourself and then the side of the business that you focus on as well?01:35Will: I am Will Roberts; I am a cofounder here at www.weworked.com. I've primarily focused on the technical support team, database architecture, database management and some marketing.01:53Ramesh: Fantastic. So all right guys, so welcome. And so let's talk about the nine years ago before, right. So that's when you guys started. And how did you decide to start a company? What were you guys doing before that? So let me start with Will. So what were you doing before you guys started www.weworked.com?02:14 Will: I actually was, I had started my own consulting firm, I think back in maybe2005. And I was, you know, pretty much serving as a contractor to the federal government.02:32Ramesh: I see. So John, how about you? What were you doing before that?02:36John: I was a software programmer for small businesses. And I did some government contracting work as well.02:47Ramesh: Okay. So then how did you guys meet up and then how did the thought of starting a company come, who started and then who followed up?02:57Will: Well, firstly we met on the job.03:02John: Yes, we both met probably back in 2000, 2001 we were both working for a smaller tech company that created software for the government on the department of transportation. And Will and I kicked it off right away from beginning. So years later after Will started his business and I was probably two jobs moved from where we met. I had reached out to Will regarding weworked. So its kind of, I kind of had the initial brainchild of it. I was out of work for a few months and sat around thinking about what I could do to kind of change the projection of you know, my future with respect to jobs and businesses. So having worked for small businesses most of the time, one thing that I noticed was none of the small businesses had in house Time sheet software. And it was a struggle for a lot of them back in the early two thousands, because a lot of the software was developed for large enterprises. So started working on it, developed a good starting point. And then realized I needed a lot of help to pull this thing off and went through my mental Rolodex who I could call upon and Will was the first guy. And that's how, that was in short. That's how it kicked off.04:50Ramesh: Fantastic. Okay. So let me ask you this guys. Whenever a software company like this gets formed and you have an idea for a product, the challenge is always you know, we build it, they will come, you know, they may not come. So that's an issue. So when you had this idea of this online time s...