Yummygum: web design agency
Hey Vince! Tell us a bit about what you do at Yummygum.
Sure! Yummygum is a web design studio based in Amsterdam. If you’re a start-up and you’re in need of gorgeous design for your website, web- or mobile app, we’re your go-to guys! There are currently 9 of us – 5 designers, 3 developers and myself. I mainly manage the business and team, but also find time to put on my hat as a UX Director.
Why did you start tracking your time?
As a growing agency, you start taking on more projects and hiring new colleagues to join the team. We were looking for a tool to help organise and structure our work, as well as track project hours. Time tracking was a no brainer – it lets us know exactly how we spend our time spent so we can work more efficiently and bill clients accurately.
Why did you pick Timely?
It’s just a game changer. By tracking everything we work on automatically, we don’t have to think about time tracking any more – we can just focus 100% on our work. We have tried other time tracking tools before, like Harvest and Toggl, but for us they were either too bloated or missed important functionality. Timely just fit perfectly into our existing workflows. New employees in our studio are literally up and running in a less than five minutes and it’s proven to be able to scale with us as we grow.
How does Timely help your team?
We use it to bill accurately for work, plan time ahead, review project performance, and send beautiful reports to our clients. It also lets us easily evaluate our previous work, which has helped us optimise a few of our processes. With accurate estimation of how long tasks take, we can estimate our performance against competitors to offer competitive pricing that we know is profitable.
What about as a manager?
Everyone in the team has their own different working flow, so it’s really useful to be able to quickly pop in Timely and get an overview of what everyone’s working on. As a manager, I switch between a lot of tasks each day, so the automatic tracking is essential. Timely’s also useful for planning and coordinating company-wide efforts like pitching. And since different parts of the team use different tools – JIRA for developers and Trello for designers – it’s great that Timely can just pull everything into one place for you. More time saved!
What’s Timely’s one key benefit?
Its easiness. There’s just such a mental win to knowing everything is being tracked for you, and the whole tool is really unobtrusive. Each morning, you just check Timely’s running and then don’t look at it again until the end of the day. The UI is also gorgeous and super intuitive, so set-up is completely painless.
What’s next for Yummygum?
We’ve actually been working on some cool stuff in the crypto currency world and are building a lot more front-end development projects in-house. But we’re probably most excited about a new designer tool we’ll be releasing soon. Keep your eyes open wide! 👀
