Two years ago, I was a freelancer who was terrible at one thing: tracking my time accurately.

I'd finish a project, stare at a blank timesheet, and try to reconstruct three weeks of work from memory and Slack messages. Sound familiar?

That frustration became FillTheTimesheet — a smart timesheet manager built specifically for freelancers and small agencies who hate admin work.

Lesson 1: Solve Your Own Problem First

The best products don't start with a market analysis. They start with a person who was genuinely annoyed.

FillTheTimesheet came from my pain. That meant I knew exactly what the product needed to do from day one: reduce friction. Every feature had to pass one test: does this make logging time faster or slower?

If you're building something, start with the problem you personally understand deeply.

Lesson 2: Distribution Is the Product

I had a working timesheet tool by month two. I thought the hard part was over.

It wasn't.

Getting people to find the product was 10x harder than building it.…