How Vahagn Sargsyan Bootstrapped a Time Tracking Tool Into a Global SaaS Platform

Most SaaS companies that reach ten thousand customers did it with venture capital. The playbook is familiar: raise a seed round, hire aggressively, grow fast, raise again. The ones that survive long enough eventually find a business model. Many don’t.

The bootstrapped path looks different. Slower growth, tighter constraints, every feature funded by actual revenue. No safety net. The product has to work because there’s no runway to burn while you figure it out.

What makes it interesting right now is AI. The SaaS landscape is splitting companies that built their stack in the pre-AI era scrambling to bolt on intelligence and a smaller group that timed the rebuild right, rearchitecting from the ground up with AI at the center. The funded companies can throw money at the transition. The bootstrapped ones have to be more precise.

WebWork sits at that intersection. A time tracking and workforce management platform, self-funded since its founding in 2016, now serving over 26,000 businesses across 160 countries and in the middle of a transformation from conventional SaaS tool to AI-powered workspace platform. No outside investors. No board to approve the roadmap. The company rebuilt its entire technical foundation in 2024 while the customer base was still growing.

This is the story of how that happened.

The Problem Before The Product

Before WebWork existed, Vahagn Sargsyan was building software. He ran development teams first small, eventually scaling past 150 engineers working on projects for international clients. He also built mobile games through Evigames, a studio that produced titles with over ten million combined downloads.

Managing teams at that scale taught him something that would later become the central argument of his book: most of the talent on a software team is being wasted. Not through laziness or bad hiring, but through the system itself. Meetings, context switching, unclear decisions, tool overload the structural friction that nobody measures but everyone feels.

“Talented developers spend about thirty percent of their time actually building,” Sargsyan says. “The rest disappears. And the worst part is, everyone looks busy. The hours are there. The output isn’t. I saw this across every team I managed for fifteen years it wasn’t a people problem, it was a system problem.”

In 2016, he went looking for a time tracking tool that could make this visible something that went beyond logging hours and actually showed where time was going and why. He didn’t find one. So a team of four built an MVP, released it for free, and started iterating based on real usage.

There was no launch event. No press release. No plan to turn it into a company.

Building In Silence

WebWork’s first years were quiet. The product started as a basic time tracker hours logged, screenshots captured, activity levels recorded. Each year added a layer. App and website usage monitoring came in 2017. Project management in 2018. By 2020, mobile apps launched. Over the next year, the active user base tripled.

All of this happened without outside funding. Revenue from the growing user base financed the next phase of development. The team grew past ten people. The product stabilised. And critically, it remained free Sargsyan was still building, not selling.

The commercialisation came in 2022. WebWork Time Tracker, Inc. was incorporated as a USA corporation based in San Francisco. The company rebranded new identity, new website, redesigned dashboard. A team of thirty now spanned engineering, design, and marketing.

“We had international clients from the beginning the US, the UK, India, the Philippines basically wherever distributed teams were operating at scale,” Sargsyan says. “Incorporating in the US wasn’t symbolic it was practical. Payment infrastructure, legal clarity, credibility with the markets we were actually serving.

The product had been built over four years without venture investment. By the time it went commercial, roughly eighty percent of planned features were live and being used by thousands of teams.

The Case For Self-Funding

Time tracking is one of the few SaaS categories where bootstrapping is the norm, not the exception. Toggl has been self-funded for eighteen years. Time Doctor built without venture capital. Hubstaff ran independently for a decade before taking a private equity investment in 2023. The market rewards patience low price points, high retention, steady growth.

WebWork followed the same logic. At $3.99 per user per month, the economics only work through volume and retention. There’s no room for aggressive enterprise sales cycles or expensive customer acquisition. The product has to be good enough that teams stay.

“When your growth depends on people choosing to keep using the product every month, you build differently,” Sargsyan says. “Every feature is a bet funded by existing revenue. You get disciplined fast.”

By 2024, the customer base had more than doubled in a single year.

The Rebuild

By 2024, WebWork’s core technology was nearly eight years old. The platform had grown from a basic time tracker into a full workforce management system but the underlying architecture still reflected those early decisions. For what the company was planning next, it wasn’t enough.

The team rebuilt the platform throughout 2024. New backend, new tracking technology, new architecture designed from the start to support AI capabilities that the original stack couldn’t handle. The existing product kept running and serving customers while the new foundation took shape underneath it.

“You don’t rebuild a working product because you’re bored,” Sargsyan says. “You do it because you can see what you need to build next and the current system won’t get you there. We knew AI was the direction real AI, not a chatbot layer on top of old data. That required a different foundation.”

From Tracker To AI platform

The 2024 rebuild was designed with AI in mind. The first WebWork AI prototype was developed internally during that same period, and by February 2025, it launched publicly. Managers could ask questions about their team’s data in natural language who worked on what, where time was going, which projects were over budget and get answers instantly instead of digging through reports.

By July 2025, Smart Monitoring added a deeper layer: automated behavioral analysis that detects patterns, categorises performance, and flags risks like burnout or unusual activity without manual configuration.

By early 2026, the system became agentic. WebWork AI now creates tasks, generates team summaries, sends proactive alerts, and initiates conversations directly inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, and WebWork’s built-in Team Chat. It acts without being prompted.

And because the agent lives in the communication layer full-time, the team extended it beyond productivity. WebWork AI celebrates birthdays in team channels, sends personalised congratulations for holidays, reminds the workspace about upcoming days off. The kind of small social rituals that physical offices had naturally the kitchen chat, the whiteboard with birthday names now happen in the digital workspace too.

“Once the agent is present in every conversation, it makes sense for it to handle the human side, not just the metrics,” Sargsyan says. “A workspace isn’t only about output. The things that make a team feel like a team matter too.”

The Book

In December 2025, Sargsyan published Builder’s Time: The Blueprint for Creators, Leaders, and Teams to Master Time. The book makes the argument he’d been developing since his days managing 150 engineers: that time in organisations is a system to be designed, not a metric to be tracked.

The thirty percent figure the claim that developers spend only a third of their time actually building came from watching his own teams over years and measuring where the rest went. Meetings consumed a share. Context switching between tools took another. Waiting for decisions, sitting in standups that could have been messages, recovering from interruptions it added up to a pattern so consistent across teams and projects that Sargsyan became convinced it was structural, not individual.

“I wrote the book because I watched this problem for fifteen years and finally had the data and the language to describe it,” Sargsyan says. “The tracker became the place where I could actually fix it. The book explains why it needs fixing.”

What’s Next

WebWork enters 2026 as a profitable, self-funded SaaS platform, no outside investors, and an AI system that is moving from analytical tool to autonomous workspace participant. In January 2026, a major integration expansion Make.com, a rebuilt Zapier integration, and a modernised API connected WebWork to over 8,000 apps.

“We’re not done with the AI transition we’re at the beginning of it,” Sargsyan says. “The agent today can analyse, flag, and act. The next step is an agent that understands each team’s working culture and adapts to it. That’s where this is going AI that doesn’t just track work but actually makes teams better at it.”

The bootstrapped SaaS story usually ends in one of two places: acquisition or stall. The rarer outcome is a company that stays independent, stays profitable, and keeps evolving. Ten years in, with no investors to answer to and a product that just taught itself to wish your team happy birthday, WebWork has earned the right to keep building.