SUCCESS STORIES 48
A Real “David vs. Goliath” Story Co-Owners’ Start-Up Takes on Facebook Co-Founder & Industry Leader Asana By Home Business Magazine
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evin Withnall had previously worked with MSN in Australia, and is the founder and CEO of a 12-person development firm. Jason Weaver was formerly a Project Manager at ING. Together, they did not found a typical Silicon Valley start-up — they are not 22 years old, they have been hardened by the business world, and they started off building a product for themselves 2 years ago for internal purposes for Kevin’s 12-person development firm. Kevin’s and Jason’s start-up, TiimFocus, is a B2B product that provides team members with one central location where they can see what peers are working on, and can receive updates on how a project is progressing. Rather than trying to stay organized through emails and meetings, organizations can use TiimFocus to move faster and to better manage tasks in an increasingly mobile workforce.
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Jason Weaver (left) and Kevin Withnall (right) are co-founders of TiimFocus.
TiimFocus is angel-investor backed and has raised $500,000 in funding. “Our mission is to create a product that can best manage workflow between teams,” says Kevin. “We created TiimFocus because we didn’t see a product fulfilling the need in the market. The largest player in the market is Asana, which was started by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. However, it’s greatest strength (an easy-to-use product), is also its largest weakness (minimal functionality). We outgrew Asana within a month. TiimFocus was built to be the world’s most complete collaborative task system. Companies will not be able to outgrow TiimFocus.” Examples of features in the product include Workflow, which allows individuals to determine and push tasks that have been sitting idle and are causing bottlenecks, and Metrics,
| July/August 2013
which helps workers focus on completing the right tasks at hand. Despite the well-funded competition, with Asana having raised $38.2M in Venture Capital funding, TiimFocus believes it will compete in the marketplace. Says Jason, “We believe the beauty of this marketplace, particularly as more attention is focused on B2B companies, is that the best product can win. Despite the pedigree of Asana and other competitors, we spent 2 years building and validating TiimFocus, and we, and our clients, believe this is the best product in the market.” Kevin and Jason are offering to set up free 3 month accounts for the first 25 Home Business Magazine readers. Monthly subscriptions are charged for subsequent users. Visit www.tiimfocus.com/about-us/.
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