Every so often, I like to sit down and jot down some reflections on how things are going with TimeKeeper and what’s happening in the business.

The last update was mid-2023, where I shared TimeKeeper’s origin story. Now feels like the right time for another update.

Picking Up Where We Left Off

2023 was intense for a bunch of reasons.

We had just expanded to a team of three (Florence joined in January), and revenue grew 58% over the year—solid progress. But internally, we hit a few roadblocks that were very preventable.

With Florence onboard, we went all-in on outbound efforts—email sequences, joining the local chamber of commerce, lots of potential customer coffees, attending events like Accountex, and even exhibiting at ICB Bookkeeping Expo in London. It was a busy time for her!

While Florence was out meeting people and building connections, Penelope kept the growing task of managing Customer Success running smoothly. This involves handling customer live chat, the support calls and keeping all documentation and stakeholders up to date and inline.

During the year, we hit some major milestones - a relaunch of the mobile app, getting listed on the Sage Marketplace and being featured as Xero’s app of the month in November. Plus, we rolled out a bunch of features.

Looking back, 2023 was a year of good growth for the business but also just way too chaotic. We tried to do too much with the resources we had.

I know one mistake I made was not hiring an extra team member in Customer Success sooner. We stretched Penelope too thin, which eventually led to her moving on in 2024. I was disappointed to lose her to another company but thankfully we parted on good terms.

Personally though it was a memorable year as my wife and I welcomed our first child (a baby girl) into the world in September 2023. She spent some time in neonatal initially in the first week which was a scary experience and everything work related paled in comparison. Luckily she recovered to get home and it has been a whirlwind (in a good way) ever since. Health truly is wealth.

2024

So, heading into 2024, it was just Florence and me for a couple of weeks in January. But by the end of the year, we had grown to a team of five. Our first priority? Hiring a new Customer Success Manager and a Software Engineer to handle the growing platform ambitions.

We ditched our hybrid work setup and went fully remote (those three office days a week were more hassle than they were worth). Going fully remote also made sense as we could hire from a wider pool outside of those local to Belfast.

With our expanding roadmap, we needed to start building out the engineering team. Keelan joined in January and quickly started shipping features. Early on, we focused on fixing pesky issues for larger clients and improving things that caused friction for users. In February, Mandy joined to replace Penelope and dove headfirst into the gnarly world of timesheets. Mandy (a fellow Northerner) took on the daunting task and did a superb job getting up to speed and becoming an expert in TimeKeeper.

We decided to pause most of our outbound activities. The return on investment just wasn’t there from the in-person events in terms of time and money. A factor in that decision was Florence's availability. She was expecting a baby in May 2024 so it was a good time to go back to the drawing board. She’s now a proud mum, joining the ‘parent midnight club’ with her baby boy!

As Florence prepared for motherhood, we also took a step back to rethink our strategy. She shifted gears to focus on building solid, long-term partnerships. She keeps a close eye on what’s happening in the accounting and bookkeeping space, and helps those clients succeed with TimeKeeper. We’re confident this approach will be a win-win for everyone in the long run.

Learning from our 2023 mistakes, we hired another Customer Success Manager in July—Claire joined us, this time from Galway, Ireland. Mandy helped her get up to speed and we've levelled up our Customer Success procedures and tooling as a result. With both of them in place and the new tooling, and I’ve been able to step out of support more than previous and focus on bigger projects - which has been a massive boost for the company.

In August, we had our first company retreat in Wicklow, which was a great experience. We did a bunch of activities including an eventful and tricky hike. You can read more on that trip here.

Being remote and async, we’re aiming to make in-person meet-ups a regular thing.

On the product side, we kicked off a major rebuild of the web portal in April 2024—a huge project we initially thought would take a few months (spoiler: it didn’t). We brought in a professional UX firm to design a new system, and Keelan painstakingly built us a brand-new UI kit from scratch.

We also switched to an async work schedule, cut down on meetings to allow for more focus time. Most updates are now shared via JumpShare, giving everyone more flexibility to fit work around life—whether that’s working late, hitting the gym midday, or grabbing groceries.

Revenue-wise, our efforts from the previous year started to compound. We saw another 60% growth in 2024, which gets harder as you scale. Interestingly, we grew faster while saving a lot of cash on some of the outbound activities we were doing in 2023. The year felt less chaotic overall (though again personally, it was fun chaotic with a 1 year old). We focused on training new team members, improving processes, and getting the team in a good place.

While I’d hoped we’d ship the new web portal, I underestimated the scope and work involved. Still, it’s coming along, and we’re in a much better place as a team.

2025

Which brings us to 2025. The big personal news? My wife and I just welcomed our second child, a baby boy (16 month gap - we are dealing with this new reality).

But there’s more. In mid-2024, we made a strategic decision to change TimeKeeper’s direction and positioning.

TimeKeeper was being marketed to all kinds of businesses— construction, pubs, salons, cafes, offices, engineering outfits. While their needs overlapped in many areas, they pull you in different directions. Bars wanted rota costing, while construction firms needed site tracking.

You might be thinking, “Things seem to be going great—revenue’s up, the team’s expanding—so why change?” My gut says that by not saying no to enough customers, we’re actually holding ourselves back from growing faster the right way.

To get there, we had two options:
1. Raise capital and go all-in as a fully-fledged HR platform.
2. Niche down as the timesheet platform of choice for a specific vertical

After weighing both, I chose the second option. Raising capital would have meant chasing rapid growth, working for a period of time building HR features while aiming to compete with well-funded players like BreatheHR and Deputy, and adopting a higher-risk playbook. I could see us competing in this market to win market share, but I'm more interested in winning a sub-category of the market.

Niching down felt more achievable for a bootstrapped business like ours—focusing on a specific vertical where we could truly excel.

Finding Our Niche

We already had a hunch about our best-fit customers, but we let the data confirm it. By digging into our customers, we found a repeatable pattern of the types of companies who use us and love us.

It's been apparent for years however it didn't hit home until it was visualised in a word cloud. A word cloud (a brilliant idea by my wife) that looked at our customers names (taking into account ARPU and other factors). The result was obvious.

Our sweet spot is Construction and Field Services - think Construction, Mechanical & Electrical, Plumbing, Painting and Roofing contractors, Field engineers and their corresponding Office HQs.

We are already serving them, our features are specific to their needs, they love TimeKeeper so we just needed to start to position ourselves towards them. Since mid-2024, we've been working on re-positioning to show that we are the timesheet platform for them.

If you’ve been following our blog since mid-2024, you might’ve noticed our content starting to lean into this niche.

That all came together with the launch of our new marketing site.

Our New Marketing Website

The first thing you’ll notice is our fresh new look—we’ve moved away from our old black, white, and orange colour scheme in favour of various shades of green and white. Green makes perfect sense for us, not just as a Northern Irish company but also because it’s associated with ‘clocking in’ to start your day.

Beyond the visuals, we’ve also refined our messaging to speak directly to our ideal customer. If you’re in construction, you’ll likely find yourself nodding along as you read. But if you’re in hospitality, you might think, “This isn’t as relevant to me.”—and that’s exactly the response we’re aiming for.

A marketing website itself isn’t a huge project, but this relaunch involved many moving pieces. The new site is powered by an internal TimeKeeper UI Kit, carefully built in-house with design help from a UX agency. This ensures a consistent look and feel across both our marketing site and the upcoming new web portal (more on that soon).

To build trust, we’ve collected real customer case studies—both text and video—along with testimonials from our users. These are now featured in a dedicated section, highlighting authentic TimeKeeper experiences as social proof.

As part of this relaunch, we’ve also adjusted our pricing. For new customers, the rate has increased from £3.50 to £4 per employee per month, while existing customers remain grandfathered at their current rate.

On the technical side, we ditched Gatsby.js after Netlify seemingly abandoned it post-acquisition. The new site is now powered by Next.js, benefiting from TypeScript, improved page speed scores, and better URL structure to support SEO.

At the same time, we coordinated this with a mobile app update—not just to match the new colour scheme, but also to tackle a huge React Native upgrade from 0.68.5 to 0.73.9 (the less said about that, the better).

There was a lot of moving pieces, so it's great to get this to it's conclusion and out the door.

What’s Next?

We’re doubling down on features relevant for our Construction and Field Service customers. The big focus is exploring and making paid acquisition channel work. We've brought in a PPC consultant to help us manage our ads professionally.

With the new web portal set to launch this year, we’re aiming to be the go-to platform in this space. And if all goes well, we’ll start to look at expansion beyond the UK and Ireland by late 2025.

The Future

Looking ahead, we're hoping to grow the tech team by hiring a Frontend Engineer with deep React expertise. If that's you, please apply here.

We’ll keep working remotely and asynchronously, and another team retreat is on the cards for summer, possibly in Europe.

On the business side, our goal is to achieve 67% revenue growth this year while staying focused on delivering an excellent experience for our existing customers.

With a fresh brand, a clear niche, and a dedicated team, TimeKeeper is set for its biggest year yet.

Got questions on TimeKeeper or bootstrapping in general, shoot me an email at sean@timekeeper.co.uk. I love hearing from fellow founders working on their business.