Long before Work Log was an idea in his imagination, Andrew Rodrigues was in the same boat as a lot of other shift workers: checking hours between shifts, trying to remember start times, end times, trying to keep things straight.
In fact, before he launched Work Log, Andrew was juggling multiple shift jobs. Tracking all those hours wasn’t complicated…in theory.
But out in the real world, it was so easy to lose track. Plus, existing tools didn’t quite get the job done either. Some were bloated. Others didn’t match the reality of how shift work… worked.
“I try to respect people’s time,” says Andrew Rodrigues, founder of AR Productions, the studio behind Work Log. “The app should let people do what they need to do; then get out of the way.”
But Andrew hit a snag at first: he didn’t have a background in engineering or computer science. So he had to teach himself how to code, building a basic tool on his own time outside of his shifts, something to serve as a single place to log all his hours, across all his jobs.
And so, in July 2013, he released it as Work Log.
From the beginning, Andrew made a conscious decision about how people would access the app. He wanted people to be able to download the app without needing to think about it. He wanted it to be easy to share with another coworker and have them use it too.
“A paywall would’ve added friction to all of that,” he explains.
That’s why Andrew went with an ad-supported model instead, integrating Google AdMob to help him show ads in the app and make some money off his work.
Ads covered costs and allowed the app to stay free. For users, that meant easy access. For Andrew, it meant growth.
And it worked too: Work Log grew because people found the app useful, kept it installed, and passed it along to others. Then, as time went on, ad revenue grew to become steady enough such that Andrew was able to work on the app full time.
“Ads gave me stability,” he says. “They also made it possible to keep improving the product without changing how people access it.”
