Back in early 2000s Toggl was an Estonian IT company, called Apprise, building software for clients. We were one of the biggest in Estonia, but even so we were always struggling to stay afloat. We were snorkeling - always having just enough money to survive until the next project.
The problem was we had no idea how much time the projects were taking. We tried time tracking tools, but they were all overly complicated and too expensive. So we built our own, and called it Sahara. It wasn't pretty, but it was easy to use, and that was the most important thing.
Soon, Apprise clients found out about the tool, and asked if they could use it too. We said "why not?", rebuilt the tool for the web and called it Toggl. But it was just a side project. Apprise carried on as usual, building software for others.
Then, in 2008, the big recession hit. Apprise lost half its business overnight. We still had our developers, but no work to give them.
What we had, though, was Toggl - and a handful of customers. With nothing to lose we shifted focus on Toggl full time. That was the first time we allocated a team of 4 people to work on Toggl and promised not to take them away, no matter the alternatives.
And then, from late 2008 there was Toggl, with its own product development team, its own customers and its own revenue stream.
As Toggl grew, a new problem emerged - how to find people to grow Toggl?
Hiring is slow, and resumes lie. It took us four months to find a new developer. When we found one, they didn't have the skills for the job. Back to square one. But we didn't have another four months to spend on hiring. Something had to change.
So we put together a short online test that would quickly show if the candidate knew their job. Within a month, we had hired a person.
That system eventually became Toggl Hire.
A few years later a second problem also emerged: how to plan our work in the most clear way possible?
Toggl Plan started out as an in-house product that replaced a work planning Excel sheet. The first version was completed in two months and launched in 2011. The development was led by Toggl board member Krister Haav.
The product was originally called Planner, but for marketing and branding purposes the name was changed to Teamweek in 2013. The product has been rewritten and redesigned several times since then.
In January 2017, Teamweek (Toggl Plan) officially separated from Toggl and operated as an independent business entity. Five years later, Toggl Plan and Toggl Track merged to become one company: Toggl.
Even though Toggl Hire accelerated our hiring process, there was still an issue with getting enough candidates to apply. While getting qualified candidates wasn't a problem anymore, finding enough of them was still difficult.
Estonia is small. There aren't enough good developers. Your best chance of getting good developers is to poach them from other companies. But who says you have to hire from one country only?
More and more people are working remotely. Modern tools make location irrelevant - great people can do great things from anywhere. Most of the Toggl team was already working from home half the time.