Interview with Maurizio Pinotti, CEO of EasyHour
March 21, 2022
Interview with Maurizio Pinotti, CEO of EasyHour, the startup dedicated to the effective management of smart working and the development of work/life balance.
In recent years, also due to the pandemic, smart working has spread like wildfire. There are many companies, including industry giants such as Ford, Spotify and Generali, who have eliminated the classic shifts in presence, in order to accommodate work from home. This has led to significant benefits for both the company and the worker himself. Working remotely, however, could be more complicated than expected, especially if you don’t have the right tools to be able to coordinate between colleagues. That’s why I’d want to talk to you about EasyHour today!
What is EasyHour?
EasyHour is a software that will allow you to organize and monitor smart working in a simple and fast way. Thanks to its predictive algorithms, you’ll be able to coordinate your entire team and analyze everyone’s needs, making your work much more effective.
It is a customisable tool that will offer you with constant feedback on the progress of your projects, based on your needs.
Another very important feature to know that EasyHour has is its perfect integration with the most popular business softwares, such as Zucchetti or TeamSystem, and you can also take advantage of a free trial period before committing to a subscription!
Let’s take a closer look at EasyHour, thanks to the interview with Maurizio Pinotti, the startup’s CEO.
Hi Maurizio, it’s a pleasure to meet you and thank you for the time you are dedicating to us. Please tell us something more about EasyHour
With EasyHour we want to help all companies that have found themselves overnight with the desire or need to employ a hybrid model for office presence. This transition is often painful: both for managers who no longer see their team in the office and for employees who are often forced to use outdated systems to carry out business processes.
EasyHour is a small HR management system that allows you to collect various data in a single system, such as worked hours per job, clocks, shared desks reservations, vacations, smart working requests, business tripsand expense reports. Everything can be used from the Web or from smartphones, with a modern, pleasant and intuitive interface.
How and when was the idea for EasyHour born?
My business partner, Andrea Previati, and me have formerly worked together on a joint venture, Mobimentum, which was founded in 2013. Few people were talking about smart working at that time, and nearly no one was actually doing it; we were among those few, we looked for a tool that fit the bill, but it didn’t exist. Luckily, we had all the skills needed to make it in house: designers, project managers, developers and testers.
Mobimentum was later acquired by an industrial conglomerate in 2021, and EasyHour was split off as a separate product.
How did you launch EasyHour? Did you make use of crowdfunding campaigns?
We have always done everything ourselves, investing a part of the Mobimentum selling proceeds. We are self-sufficient in the development of new features and the enhancement of current ones with our internal staff, but we rely on an external agency for everything that is marketing-related: SEO, blog, social advertising and so on. The best sales method is still the flywheel of word of mouth and for this we have to thank the first customers who in turn have brought new companies on board.
Who is your software aimed at?
Everyone has the desire and the need to measure time, and as I usually say, if you don’t realize you have this need, you already have a problem! Software organizations, as well as manufacturing, consulting, professional firms, accountants, and other businesses, are among our clients., We also have a free plan for startups to help them grow, as well as a free plan for freelancers to quickly report on the work they perform using EasyHour.
The most popular function at this time is desk booking, which allows businesses to keep track of who is in the workplace, avoid overcrowding, and gradually move towards a “clean desk” model.
You can also request a demo of EasyHour, would you like to explain more about how it works?
You can sign up for free and independently on try.easyhour.app, you don’t even need a credit card (for now). Once you have signed up you can use the complete product for 60 days: it’s a very long time, but the real value of EasyHour can be seen at the end of the month when you make the reports, so we wanted to make available to new customers all the data needed to evaluate the product.
We are, of course, also available for demos and “deep dives” on the product: based on our experience, a half-hour call is enough to show the main features and put customers in a position to utilize the product without stress right away.
What will your future developments be?
First things first, strengthening support for smart working in order to make it more “smart” and less “remote”, shifting the focus away from “hours worked” in order to bias it towards “goals achieved.” However, EasyHour grows “from the bottom up”: in fact, many of the features we’ve created have been requested by our clients, and once implemented, they’ve been made available to everyone.
Curiosity: how did you come up with the final name?
As often happens, these things are born by chance: at day one we didn’t have an official name but we needed a “technical” name to create the software project and we put together the two key concepts of the product: ease of use (easy) and time management (hour).
We realized that the name was a perfect fit after talking about it to employees and clients: it was short but sufficiently identifying of the brand, easy to type and to dictate, it was English-speaking but understandable by an Italian and, in addition, the easyhour.app domain was free. At that point the decision was made: EasyHour would have been the official name!
Credits:
