When we talk about being "by farmers, for farmers", we really do mean that FieldClock is for all farmers. Whether you're a large enterprise, a small family farm, or somewhere in between - FieldClock is the right time tracking app for your farm. We cut our teeth in specialty permanent crops, but we quickly found that our solution is applicable for all farms regardless of size or crop.
Building a farm labor app from Scratch
One of the coolest things about building FieldClock was that we weren't stuck with any legacy constraints. We had no old servers, no old software, no old hardware, no old ways of thinking. We were able to look at the problem (how to track farm labor easily and effectively) and design the best possible solution we could dream up, not just the best possible solution "given the circumstances".
I'll explain what I mean by that...
Think about big-name mobile apps you've used. Odds are that you've installed Facebook or Instagram, or maybe a sports app to set your bracket, and you probably never thought about what version you were downloading or whether it could talk to the app on your friends' phones. It would be annoying if you launched CBS Sports and were told that you were on a different version than your friend and you couldn't compete in the same March Madness pool. Nobody wants that.
A lot of old software worked that way because distribution was complicated and costly back in the 1990s and early-2000s. We were fortunate to start building FieldClock in 2015 when the App Store was already 7 years old and distribution was cheap and easy. We were living in the future! Selling specialized hardware and charging customers for upgrades was unnecessary and would have felt like we were taking advantage of our users. From Day 1, we've always made the latest version available to all users at the same time.
Good decisions create good side-effects
So how did we get from "cheap and easy distribution" to "best farm labor app for every farm"? A little bit of planning and a little bit of luck.
In our attempt to make FieldClock as easy to use as any photo-sharing app, we made several architectural decisions to keep our own maintenance costs low. We automated everything possible - from build and delivery channels to fleets of servers that scale up-and-down based on realtime system activity. In order to facilitate this level of automation, it made sense for all clients to talk to the same servers. This is where the luck comes in.
To support this seemingly-simple decision, our entire infrastructure had to be ready to scale up to support every employee in every customer's account at any moment. We didn't set out to build enterprise-grade reliability and features for small family farms, but a happy side-effect of a well-designed scalable architecture is that we are the only farm labor app that can serve small family farms just as easily as enormous multinational commercial operations.
Available when you are
Another happy side-effect of our investment in automation is that FieldClock is highly available. Our dev team is constantly rolling out new improvements without disrupting our users. This allows us to service our customers across the United States as easily as our customers overseas and in other hemispheres. Many in our home region (shout-out to the Pacific Northwest!) head for home at the same time as our Aussies and Kiwis are headed to work. Off-season for Washington cherries happens to be in the middle of harvest for Florida citrus. Our customers are always working, and so is our platform.
This high-availability is a necessary feature of our system and we're proud of our reliability. We publicly post our uptime (and incident reports when they do happen) at status.fieldclock.com. This public transparency is part of our core ethos. We believe that respecting our customers means being honest and up-front with them whether it's our uptime, our prices, or when we fall short. It's important that farmers have all the information whether they're already a customer or just checking us out.
Everybody benefits
When we make customer-first decisions, everybody wins:
- If you're a large enterprise farm we offer CSMs, SLAs, APIs and plenty of other acronyms for you to seamlessly integrate FieldClock with your ERP and BI suites.
- If you're a mid-size farm, you're us. 'nuff said.
- If you're a small family farm, you get to ride the coat-tails of the bigger guys at a dirt-cheap price.
For all farmers, by farmers.
-josh
