It’s Official: The 2018 Hubstaff Year in Review Is Here

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year.

That’s right. It’s time to look back on all the progress we made in 2018 as we prepare for the new year. If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, you know what that means.

It’s time to create a Year in Review.

Here at Hubstaff, we believe in tracking more, so you can make better decisions in the future. The good old-fashioned year-end review process is not only a chance to celebrate key milestones but also prepare for an even better 2019.

What’s next? Which goals are we still going after, and which new objectives will we set our sights on in the new year?

Thus, we created our Hubstaff 2018 year in review. But, we didn’t stop there.

Get your own business year in review template

In addition to gathering our key performance metrics (KPIs) and results, we’ve created a helpful template so you can use your Hubstaff data and other business metrics to generate your own year-end review. Check it out.

Step-by-step template

Of course, there’s more than one way to look back on the year. This is our process and template, which helped us decide what to include.

1. Gather data: Look first at the numbers that matter. How have you helped customers this year? How many new products, services, or industries did you launch this year? How much did your revenue grow?
2. Look inward: Then, think about your company culture and growth. How many people have you added? If you’re a remote team like us, check how many Slack messages or video calls your team had together. How many meetups? How many new initiatives did you launch as a team?
3. Liven it up: Finally, the fun stuff. Think about what makes your company unique and then highlight that in your year-end review as an added bonus. Since maximizing time is a big goal for us, we like to look at year-end metrics such as, “How much time did we save by not commuting to an office?” or “What’s our dog-to-cat fans ratio?” (It’s 17 dog people to 6 cat fans last time we checked.)

Year in Review: Hubstaff by the numbers

Without further ado, here’s how our 2018 went. We used tools such as Baremetrics, Slack, Intercom, Hubstaff, and more to easily compile this list. *Data based on October 2017-October 2018 unless otherwise noted.

49% Customer growth

That’s right, 7,509 customers signed up in the past year; an increase of almost 50% from 2017.

But we also grew in other ways, earning us this special honor:

Hubstaff made the Inc. 5000 list!

35+ New features and updates released

Part of the reason we can look back at 2018 fondly is because of the features we released. The Hubstaff team worked hard to give customers the functionality that would help their businesses run better, now and in the future. Here are a few new features from 2018.

• Time off and holidays
• Adding clients and budgets, editing tasks, project search and better invoicing
• Timesheet approvals
• 13 new reports
• Adding tasks to projects
• 11 new features launched in March

1 Major integration added

Read more about our added payment integration with TransferWise.

Hubstaff customer metrics

We couldn’t give a proper year in review summary without talking about our customers. Here’s a sampling of metrics we look at quite often.

Businesses using Hubstaff

10,860

Individual users

61,044

Average team size

5.6 people

Most common plan size

3 people

130% Growth for Hubstaff Talent

Our completely free talent and job posting platform, Hubstaff Talent, also had an impressive year. Our teams focused on making the hiring and job searching process easier, by connecting remote talent with businesses. Here’s how 2018 went.

Total approved profiles in 2018

26,730 added

Total approved jobs posted (all-time)

11,243

Jobs posted from Dec 1, 2016, to Oct 14, 2017

3,402

Compared to jobs posted Oct 15, 2017, to Oct 15, 2018

7,841 jobs

All of that adds up to

130% growth in jobs posted on Hubstaff Talent in the past year

 

The financial side of Hubstaff

Hubstaff embraces transparency as one of Baremetrics’ open startups. We think it’s important not only for establishing trust, but for getting our whole team committed to the company’s goals. You can read more about why we chose to embrace revenue transparency, and how it’s helped our business.

An added benefit? Pulling together our financial year-end review was pretty simple.

60.4% Increase in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

This is one metric that’s been steadily growing in 2018. We’re working hard to keep it that way in 2019.

77% Growth in net revenue

$814 Lifetime value (LTV)

Reaching its highest in June 2018.

6.1% User churn

Highest of 2018 – 6.8%
Lowest of 2018 – 5.4%
Average at year end – 6.1%

7.7% Increase in average revenue per user

Hubstaff team metrics

A summary of our Hubstaff team in 2018. Plus, some other stats that we find interesting.

Team growth

43 team members
In 11 time zones
And 14 different countries

Slack messages sent

215,470

77, 416 Support tickets responded to

With overwhelmingly positive feedback.

Team data from Hubstaff

Total hours worked across our team

56,907 hrs 21 mins and 35 secs

Average activity rate

51%

Tasks completed in 2018 – Reported by Hubstaff Tasks

986

Remote team culture

Being a fully remote company comes with plenty of advantages. Here’s how a year of working remotely looks in terms of key metrics, starting with the most important one: commute time.

Hours spent commuting vs. average

The average U.S. commute time is 26 minutes (a fairly steady increase since 1980). We each saved 9 days by not commuting to an office. And that’s if it was located in our own city!

In total, that’s 387 days saved as a team by working remotely.

1 Annual retreat hosted

Want to know more? Read all about our Hubstaff Lisbon retreat.

22 Team members attended

5 Hackathon projects completed in one day

136 Pasteis de Belem consumed

19,110 Average steps per day

Here’s to 2019

Now that we’re recapped the year, we’re onto the next set of goals.

In the next year, we’re going to keep finding ways to help customers reach new levels of productivity. That means:

Adding more to mobile

A more robust mobile app is coming in 2019. You can look forward to:

• More functionality built into the apps, including timesheets, schedules, and reports
• Tools specifically for field services teams
• Geofenced Time Tracking! Which means automatic start and stop for mobile timers based on when you enter or leave a work site with geo tracking
• Ability to create tasks in mobile

Integration improvements

• 2019: year of new integrations!
• This year will be about making more your business software work happily together

Hubstaff Tasks

Time tracking and project management are better together. When Hubstaff Tasks gets a full release in 2019, you’re going to experience the benefits firsthand. Hubstaff Tasks is a visual, simple PM tool that allows you to move tasks and projects through a workflow while tracking time to those tasks in Hubstaff. More on that to come.

Better reports

Charts and filters are coming soon to an app near you. And that’s in addition to the 13 new reports we added this year.

Just, all-around more improvements for customers

Sure, this one isn’t as easy to describe as the others. But we have a ton of updates and features in the works so it’s best just to say this: You can expect an even better Hubstaff in 2019.

• Continue to improve UI
• An invoice pay button
• Even faster syncing with integrations

To our customers, thank you for your continued support. We have a lot of exciting things coming in the next year. If there’s something you’d like to see Hubstaff do in 2019, let us know in the comments.

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