Noko (formerly Freckle)

Amy Hoy built Noko (originally called Freckle) in 2008 during the recession because she and countless consultants she knew despised time tracking. Every existing tool was bloated, complicated, or painful to use. As a freelancer herself, Amy knew the problem intimately: consultants either avoided tracking altogether or made up hours at the end of the month, directly costing them money. She decided to build something radically simple—focused purely on quick time entry and reporting, nothing else.

While consulting with her co-founder Thomas on high-end JavaScript projects (work that actually thrived during recessions because businesses still needed to advertise), Amy built Noko on the side. She designed it to solve her specific pain: a tool that took seconds to log time in, with reporting that showed you exactly how much you were spending on each client. The original pricing was intentionally cheap: $12, $24, and $48 per month for solo, small team, and large team plans.

Amy announced Noko to her mailing list—mostly Ruby and JavaScript developers who already knew and trusted her from her blog. That first month, she hit $1,500 MRR. She didn't spend money on paid ads or complex growth mechanics. Instead, she wrote about the business, created targeted cheat sheets (like a guide to charging credit cards, which was brutally hard in 2008), and let Thomas write technical deep-dives about the JavaScript under the hood. People loved the clean interface and the fact that you could log time from Git commit messages. They told their friends.

Word-of-mouth became Noko's engine. Amy deliberately avoided chasing SEO or platform-dependent growth because she'd lived through multiple advertising crashes (banner ads, Facebook reach decay, Google algorithm shifts). She distrusted any growth channel she didn't control. Noko grew steadily—not explosively, but reliably—because it solved a genuine problem for people willing to pay.

Amy's strategy of multiple income streams (consulting, the ebook, workshops, Noko) insulated her from recession risk. When one stream slowed, others picked up. She never had to choose between starvation and desperation. Years later, due to her own health issues, she largely stepped back from promoting Noko. It didn't matter. The product kept humming, kept making money.

Despite Amy's relative absence from growth activities over several years, Noko generates over $500K ARR steadily. The company recently lost a large $5K/month account (a customer Amy didn't even know existed), which hurt but taught them to profile accounts better. As remote work exploded during the pandemic, Amy began working on features to make Noko more proactive—integrating deeper into users' workflows rather than just asking them to log hours. She also started considering a cheaper tier to reach more of her existing audience and exploring whether to target companies using expensive tools who might downgrade to Noko. The recession mentality that shaped Noko in 2008 still guides her: build for people with real, money-related problems, keep costs low, and never depend on any single customer or platform.