Cofounder Wanted: www.timeoffhq.com

Does it integrate with any HRMS or payroll systems? It may be a nice bolt-on to such systems which have rather dated interfaces, and would allow you to target past the small business focus you have at the moment.

Cute, I like it.

You should consider some simple avenues to get sales before paying the huge equity cost of getting someone else to do it for you.

- Get all of your friend's employers to use it (even within subsets of their business)

- Write some blog articles about what you learn and post them on HN

- Get some blog coverage about your product

- Even pay for some ads or adwords

You might also find a cofounder as you drive up your traffic.

What (I think) you need to do now is to stop trying to improve the product and concentrate on getting friends and family to use it.

I made something just like this for work (internal). Looks pretty good!

where do you live? Kansas City, MO?

Looking Good It seems most HRMS/Payroll systems do a poor job of this.

Integration with Google Apps is nice / key. ( https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?pr... )

Hey, good luck.

Just one small suggestion: that video... You scared the hell out of me.

Spelling error in the video - "Email notificaiton" (I always make similar typos).

What a good idea!

Link: http://www.timeoffhq.com/

Just curious, what's it coded in?

Edit, actually nvm, I'm guessing rails since your blog is on heroku.

A system like this is nice, but IMHO it needs to be aimed at larger corporations and/or those that deal with limited skill job sets(many employees). Being an engineer my team has always been small enough that getting time off just takes mentioning it to my boss 20ft away and making sure I email him the dates after. If you can tell me how this will save a company money I would completely agree you can sell the service. This may sound odd but once again IMHO your pricing is too aggressive, seeing the product and putting my take of going after larger corporations on it I would say you would want to have a sales force pushing a specialized version of this to each customer. Essentially you would go to a Hospital for instance, pitch them on how much they could save in time and $ using this, add some zeros to the end of your current rate and do the full install making sure it works with their current system for scheduling, a support contract is in there somewhere as well.(huge run on sentence but that's how my mind works) My biggest question is who is your competition? I could go on, but I would like to hear your take on competition and who you believe your customers are.

Looks like a great product, I do have to agree the video did freak me out a bit.

I've worked for mid to small businesses in the past and this could integrate great with them, yet the missing part if you want daily users of your system you need to have time tracking functionality, and this plays in perfect with 'timeoff' as an employees time off accumulates based on hours worked at some defined rate.

Hey Ryan, your product looks quite interesting and I think it is especially good that you have done no marketing yet: It shows that users are intrinsically motivated to use your product and are even willing to pay for it. You should be proud of that! Before you make all your family and friends use the product or pay for ads, you should start off having a conversation with your existing customers. - Try to get suggestions off them for new features - Understand what other problems they have (it was already pointed out that HRMS or payroll systems for small businesses do a poor job with automatisation of such simple tasks) --> Your existing customers are the business experts you are looking for and they would be able to tell you whether or not your ideas are what they value - Understand how much money/time they save by using your product and what they value about it (put it on the front page instead of the features) In the next step you could think about paid ads, but before using them, your frontpage needs a clearer focus on people coming in from ads. This is the case as those people will likely be less educated in terms of their needs and thus your page has to display and tell them what exactly they are looking for! Some things to consider and then measure: - Your page talks in terms of features and not solutions. You might want to consider to change that. - it should mirror the feedback from your customers and have a proactive tense e.g. consider your “sign up & pricing” button → you might think about changing it to “Sign Up Now” - look at the big screenshot → you might want to think about using this prominent space for your video as it tells much more and is much more convincing that the current screenshot. Obviously, those are the little things in the beginning but they might have a significant impact. Other thing to consider are pricing: It is not clear whether or not the prices are total per month or per user per month (as is usually the case with such products). As you can see there is a lot of work in front of you, but you should be proud of yourself, as I have pointed out! In terms of a business cofounder: It is great that you have realized that you need those skills in your team. I have worked in biz dev with quite successful start-ups and can tell you from my experience that HN is probably not the best place to find those people as it has a very technical focus (what I like about it). Best of luck, Alex

I don't think its a bad idea- but like others mentioned, the video is a turnoff for me. I like your enthusiasm, but I suggest a remake of the video. The video to me seems like it's an unprofessional product made by someone on a whim. It's great if it were a testimonial, but when used to describe your product- It could be less personal.

Keep up the good work and let me know how it turns out.

Cheers

yeah that video is creepy

Cool idea. Very well narrated and concise. The 1 min next to video convinced me to spend one min on it.

Visiting http://www.timeoffhq.com/accounts - shows a xml dump of all your accounts and users!!

I can tell from your blog that you are a good coder, but need to be careful with little things like the routes file as this can lead to big problems.

All the best!