Next Monday, between 1 am and 2 am CEST (what time is that for me?), some updates to our servers will be made. Therefore, mite will be unavailable for a very brief period of time. We expect the interruption to last for no longer than 10 to 15 minutes.

Maintenance will include updating the kernels, i.e. the heart of the server systems, as well as some improvements to the hardware, i.e. server rack restructurings. This maintenance takes place to reduce the possibility of future downtimes by tackling the root of past problems. We ask for your understanding.

Julia in Tech talk

It’s time to introduce myself, so that you know who’s behind the new name that will answer some of your mails from now on:

I am a Media System Designer and worked as a self-employed web generalist for 8 years. During my diploma thesis, I supported the OLPC-Project in Ethiopia.  My last adventure took place in Santa Barbara, USA, where I worked as a Project Lead, a Developer and a UI Designer at ELC Technologies.

For me, a well written software should be simple, open in communication, and enjoyable to work with.  As a loyal user myself, I am inspired by how mite embodies these qualities. And now that they took me on board, I feel like I’m finally where I wanted to be! Here at my new, digital home: Yolk.

Coming in with a fresh perspective, I am extremely motivated to make use of my former experience for mite.  Together with Julia and Sebastian, I’m excited about the new things you’ll see from Yolk.

After Berlin (Julia) and Hamburg (Sebastian), I am aiming to open Yolk’s third office in Paris. And yes, there is WiFi in the Parc du Champ de Mars.

Gregor in Inside out

Yolk turned two. And three! On May 1st, German Labour Day, we were happy to celebrate two birthdays simultaneously. One, Yolk was founded two years ago. Two, Yolk 1-uped! We’re excited to welcome a new mate around here: Gregor Martynus joined Yolk to support the ongoing development of mite.

This growth is not only an enormously joyous milestone for our young company. You’ll benefit from this power-up as well, for sure. Most important, development will speed up, but we’ll also have more time on our hands to push this blog a little further.

Today, we’d like to send a big thanks to all who applied for this job. Every single application says, in a way, that we’re on the right track. Merci!

Our second curtsy goes to all of you, our customers. You made Yolk what it is from today on: a very happy trio! Merci & cheers to an awesome voyage, together. Let’s see where the next years will take us.

Julia in Inside out

Between 1:22pm and 2:20pm CEST, mite was down for all users. We’re terribly sorry, please accept our apologies!

The reason for this downtime were problems in our data center: defect routers of the upstream provider caused an interruption in the external connection. Three minutes after this downtime started we began to update on this problem via Twitter. Within minutes, technicians started working on the hardware in the data center. Collaborating with our hosting partner SysEleven, we’ll keep looking into this problem to prevent similar problems in the future, this goes without saying. Of course, your data was totally safe throughout this downtime.

Again: we’re so sorry! This shouldn’t happen.

Julia in Tech talk

If you have to specify in great detail what you’ve been working on, or if you’d simply like to structure your notes in a better way, today’s update is for you: the note of a time entry can now be multiline.

The first point that was important to us while crafting this improvement was to keep the input form tight. Adding a time entry should be possible in no time, that’s for sure, but furthermore, the form itself should reflect this rapidity visually. Therefore, we kept it streamlined: now, it’s a two-liner by default. When entering more text, the text area simply grows accordingly. When entering more than six lines, a scroll bar will appear.

The second point crucial to us was not to break the current workflow of many users: by hitting the Return key, you were able and you are still able to send the form, to add the time entry. To prevent collisions, we therefore taught mite to trigger a line break within the notes field as soon as somebody hits Shift+Return or Shift+Enter. We updated existing text areas, e.g. when adding or editing a new customer, project etc., accordingly. We do know that this solution is not a perfect one – we think it’s the best though. Please give yourself some time to adapt to this slightly modified behavior.

Along with this obvious update, the multiline notes, we released some minor enhancements as well, all dealing with adding time entries, such as:

• Hours first: The most important field of all, »Hours«, now holds the top position within the form as well. This improves the time tracking process if you navigate by keyboard. You can now tab through all attributes smoothly.
• Advanced arithmetic: More complex operations such as »2:15+0:30*1.5«, input in the field »Hours«, are now interpreted as well.

Thanks to all users who sent us feedback to push those updates forward! We hope they’ll help you – and all the other mite.users – track your times in a better way. Keep it coming, please, we love to learn from your experiences.

Julia in New features

Hear hear, Mac users: version 2.0 of DynaMite was released today. With DynaMite, you have full control over your timers directly from the menu bar of your operating system – it’s kind of a remote for your mite.

Thanks to the new version, time entries can now be enriched with notes. Plus, stopping a ticking timer became a whole lot easier: just right-click on the orange icon in your menu bar to stop the timer.

Features

• Always keep an eye on ticking timers; And never forget to switch ’em off, ever, again.
• Start, stop or switch timers with a single click.
• See the total working time of your last working days at a glance.

If you’re tracking your exact working hours throughout the day, DynaMite makes time tracking so much more easy. Really – we’ve been using it ourselves.

Installing DynaMite

DynaMite makes use of our open data interface, the mite.api. To setup the connection, you’ll have to activate the mite.api within your account first. You’ll find this option by clicking on your user name in the upper right-hand corner in mite. Please activate the corresponding checkbox there and save your changes.

During set-up, DynaMite will ask for your account name: that’s the subdomain of your mite.account. E.g., if you login at http://testteam.mite.de, the account name is »testteam«.

Later on, a window will pop up, asking for your e-mail address and your password, or, your Mac will ask you to allow using your mite.credentials stored in your key chain. Please enter the credentials asked or allow access to those infos in your key chain. DynaMite needs those credentials to connect with your mite.account.

Trial vs. full version

You can give DynaMite a try for free: the only limitation of the trial version is that timers won’t run for more than 30 minutes at one go.

A single license of the full version of DynaMite can be purchased within the external application. DynaMite is €10 $15, support by MediaAtelier included. Mac OS 10.5+ is required.

Merci, MediaAtelier

Adding notes to time entries in DynaMite was feature request number 1 since the first beta version. But, this feature wasn’t trivial to add. Stefan Fürst, developer of DynaMite, had to rebuild DynaMite from scratch to make this happen. Therefore, we’re double grateful he took this step. Thank you, Stefan!

Last but not least: Stefan is also the brain behind GrandTotal, the invoicing app for Mac users that integrates with mite. We’re happy to inform you that this hint might be special to you. There’s a promotion going on: If you buy GrandTotal and DynaMite bundled, you won’t pay a Cent for DynaMite. The bundle costs exactly the same as a regular license of GrandTotal.

~~
Update, 2019: MediaAtelier doesn’t offer DynaMite to new customers anymore. So sad. However, as a current or former customer, you can still download DynaMite 3 over here.

Julia in New features, Add ons

Update, March 21th, 7:53am: Maintenance went as planned.

One of our brand-spanking new servers isn’t feeling quite at home yet. To prevent future problems up front, we’ll therefore move it to a new server blade. Unfortunately, this action requires another scheduled maintenance. Fortunately, this one requires a very short period of time only.

mite will be offline on Sunday, March 21th, between 7:30am and 7:50am CET. (What time is that for me?)

We’re so sorry for this second interruption! This decision didn’t come easy. But we’re convinced that this preventive step makes sense even if nothing serious happened yet. We ask for your understanding.

Julia in Tech talk

At about 11am CET, mite became extremely slow; So slow, that the service went down between 11:24am and 11:35am. First of all: we are terribly sorry, this shouldn’t happen!

These problems were due to a disruption of the external internet connection of the data center where our servers are taken care of. Our own alarm systems did work, as well as the ones of our hosting partner SysEleven; we updated via Twitter. SysEleven managed to solve the problems of the IP uplink. All seems fine again. Nevertheless, you can definitely count on us for being extra-observing today.

Again: we’re sorry. Please excuse this interruption!

Julia in Tech talk

37signals, poster child of our industry, claims to serve more than 3 million users. What they don’t tell is, how many of those people pay for the premium version of their web apps (Basecamp, Highrise et al). All of them are served in the freemium business model, which is: use a basic version of the product for free, decide later to upgrade to a paid version with extra features, more storage or the like. Evernote, offering a (great) freemium »remember everything« notebook, served more than 500,000 users in summer 2009, according to the New York Times. But, even $79,000 in monthly revenue could not cover their striking expenses for servers and staff which a user base this huge demands. Bottom line: Evernote was in the red.

So what about the smaller, premium-only services? Those, who offer Software as a Service as well, but not in the freemium model? Those, who do not make 5 customers pay to support 95 users? How big can their customer base grow, and at which rate – not having access to hundreds of thousands of users who could rave about the service? Is it possible to grow via referrals only nevertheless? Even if the service doesn’t make it on TechCrunch, RWW et al? Or is VC money the only way then, to pay for advertising crusades? Or is it this whole idea, premium-only, downright stupid? Is freemium the only way, even for a service such us mite, a time tracking tool with a clear benefit focused solely on business customers?

The force driving this article

When thinking about starting our company, we were desperate for in-depth figures of real-life start-ups, who’d been there before. We’d given an arm, a leg and at least one macbook for figures providing insight into the early stage of development, making it possible to understand the evolution of such a business, not only a certain point in time, a result. This would have allowed us to base our vague assumptions on real success – or the lack of it. We craved for such figures. But we didn’t find them.

Well: let’s change that. Let’s publish those facts and figures ourselves. Hopefully, this’ll help somebody out there to take a chance! No matter what: we do believe in sharing experiences and knowledge openly. We therefore chose to contribute. Even if this information is probably the most sensible to divulge.

mite: facts and figures

Trials per month

For 30 days, users are welcome to give our time tracking tool a try. Trials are fully-featured, and: you won’t need a credit card to sign-up; We’re convinced that this is the best decision by far – nobody likes to give away his credit card credentials up-front, whithout a clue if the service is really useful, right? Sign-up just takes a minute. We want to encourage people to try mite in action. That’s when our service convinces best.

Conversion: Once a user, now a customer

Convincing users to sign-up for a trial is just the first step. In the end, what counts is how many of those users become paying customers. Unquestionably, the conversion rate was the hardest parameter to pre-estimate. 5% are a great rate in freemium businesses. We thought that we could top that with our »either/or approach«, and aimed high – for 10%. Ambitious? Yes. Doable? We hoped so, as we had a stable and lovingly crafted enterprise product with a clear financial benefit. A product, that cannot be used in a basic, however restricted version if you’re not up to pay for it.

After 20 months, we do know which rate can be done. Take a look:

Nearly 20%! Every sixth to fifth trial converts to a paying customer.

That said, we think that the quality of our traffic is the determining factor for this great conversion rate. The biggest part of our visitors reaches our site via a personal referral: a blog post, a tweet, or the recommendation of a co-worker, a freelancer or a customer who is already a customer of ours. (Thank you so much, all of you!) We do not place any ads: no banners, no viral campaigns, no SEM. Instead, we invest solely in improving our product continuously and commit to a great customer service day-by-day.

Paying accounts, paying users

mite is multi-user software. Subscription fees are based on the number of active users per account. Therefore, the figure most important to us is not how many paying accounts, but rather how many paying users we’re happy to serve. In February, almost 3,000 users paid for our time tracking app.

Users per account

On average, 2.7 users are collaborating on one account. But the chart above shows that this figure isn’t significant at all. At the moment, about 24% of all users fight alone. Our biggest accounts count more than 50 users though – a really diverse customer base.

Monthly revenue / monthly expenses

mite doesn’t grow exponentially. We’re a slow grower, and you know what? We’re happy with that. The trend is what matters. It’s positiv enough to take the next step: the duo behind mite is looking to 1-up the team.

Feedback, please?

No matter how cool we play: to get that naked in public cost quite an effort. Vague statements à la »it’s going pretty well, thanks« are passé, now. We know that. And we hope it’s worth it!

Therefore, we’d be double happy if you’d left a comment: Does this transparency help you? What figures came as a surprise, and what did you assume? Any lessons learned? And… how’s your SaaS start-up going?

Julia in Inside out

Update, March 7th, 5:18am: Everything went as planned. Good time tracking on the new servers, everyone! Just in case you stumble over a bug: please get in touch with as much details as possible.

Safe, secure and lightning-fast: that’s how mite behaves today and should behave in the future, no matter how fast the user base grows. To make this happen, Sebastian who’s taking care of the technical infrastructure here has been preparing mite for the next step: this weekend, we’re moving the application to a new server cluster. Therefore,

mite will be offline on Sunday, March 7th between 3am and 5am CET. (What time is that for me?)

We’ll update this blog post and keep you posted on Twitter in real time.

Ideally, you won’t notice a thing about the new infrastructure. All your data will stand at your service exactly as it is used to, this goes without saying. Nevertheless, experience shows that in production we might have to tweak the system here and there a little bit to optimize its responsiveness and stability – despite testing, testing, testing up front really thoroughly. Therefore, not only us, but also the team of SysEleven, our new hosting partner, will be extra beady-eyed. Promised. Now, let’s get moving!

Julia in Tech talk