Leaving Corporate

Fans of 8aweek may have heard of another company that helps you manage your time: RescueTime. If you’re a startup junkie you’ll also know that both 8aweek and RescueTime are funded in the winter ‘08 batch of Y Combinator — as Michael Arrington noted, “The products seem too close for comfort - I’m surprised Y Combinator is backing both of them.”

Why is Y Combinator funding both of these companies, does this create conflict, and are 8aweek and RescueTime really that similar? We get those questions alot, but we’re alot more comfortable with the situation than outsiders expect.

Arrington is right that it’s a bit curious that both 8aweek and RescueTime are backed by Y Combinator in the same funding cycle. But what makes this situation unique isn’t just that 8aweek and RescueTime are in the same space, but that there are very few other competitors in this space. In that sense, Y Combinator will come out with a solid foothold in this market. For YC it’s a great investment, as they will be a part of two different approaches in what we feel is a large, emerging market. Since this is such a new market, there is easily room for multiple companies pursuing different strategies, and certainly there will be more competitors in the future.

The RescueTime founders are great guys, and we chat with them every week at the YC dinners (and even swap some trade secrets). It’s hard to deny that we are competitors in a sense: we operate in a similar market! However, the degree to which we compete is much smaller than most people suspect. In our discussions with Tony, Brian, and Joe of RescueTime, we’ve shared strategies, product roadmaps, infrastructure tips, and survey data. This is far from the Microsoft/Google relationship most people expect.

The ways in which these products differ, and will continue to strategically diverge, is most obvious when you examine the respective companies’ tag lines:

Rescuetime - Ridiculously Easy Time Management. RescueTime is a very polished and effective tool for managing your time. You can break down your computer usage by category, and slice & dice the resulting data from every angle imaginable. This lets you discover how you spend your computer time each day, for instance to compare the amount of time you spend on web design to your blog writing. RescueTime also allows the ability to set goals and alerts to manage your time.

8aweek - Save Time Online. 8aweek, on the other hand, is less about time management and more about time saving. 8aweek’s feature-set is distinctly focused on saving you time when you’re using the internet. Yes, it tracks habits and displays your usage in interactive and pretty graphs, but it does so from the aspect of identifying time wasting websites. You can then add the biggest time wasters to your restricted list in order to limit the amount of time you spend on them. The real value of 8aweek is not in simply observing your web usage, but changing your habits to make you more productive.

There is certainly overlap in our products’ feature sets. Just as RescueTime’s goals and alerts extends into 8aweek’s core features, our habits tracking is similar to their base functionality. However, when you examine how these features are actually implemented, it’s clear that they uniquely support each products’ core focus.

To a great extent, having overlapping products can provide each company with their own competitive advantage. We have a constant (or at least weekly) reminder to focus on the value our differentiation provides. That’s an important point for any business, but it’s also something that is often forgotten in the rush to bloat a product with features. We recognize the value a time saving toolbar brings that a desktop time management application cannot, and vice versa. This forces us to focus our development and marketing on our product’s unique value-add — those aspects which cannot be easily duplicated by our competition. This constant obsession with competitive advantages is what will make our product great. In the case of 8aweek and RescueTime, having a competitive advantage is not mutually exclusive - it’s beneficial for both of us.

As our respective products continue to evolve, the differences will become more defined and apparent. The different approaches will manifest themselves in the subsequent feature sets. In fact, many Y Combinator founders already have installed both 8aweek and RescueTime, using them for separate reasons. And we’ll be rolling out an exciting 8aweek feature in the coming days that’ll provide a clear demonstration of just how different these products are, and will become.

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