Track Our Startup: We Appointed Amazing Advisors + Hired Awesome People

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This past week a bunch of us have been traveling. What you might not know is that we’re a distributed company which to us means, get your sh*t done from anywhere, anytime. If you’re committing to it, just get it done. So Josh is in SoCal, I was in the Caribbean. James has his growing (and awesome) team in Austin where our only office is. But you know what? We got our sh*t done. Here’s the proof!

New Advisory Board

Walter Kortschak and John Jantsch, Dasheroo's new board of advisors.We were super excited to announce two new amazing people that joined team Dasheroo as advisory board members. We think it’s pretty important to surround ourselves with people way smarter and more experienced than us and these guys kill it!

Walter Kortschak has been around the tech block here in the Silicon Valley, he’s a technology venture investor who joined Summit Partners in 1989 and is the founder of Kortschak Investments. He’s invested in a ton of amazing companies himself, even little ol’ Dasheroo! Walter knows how tech companies go from zero to hero and will certainly provide amazing guidance to help us get to where we need to be.

John Jantsch is no stranger to the small business market as the guru behind Duct Tape Marketing. John gives us so much information on what the small businesses need to make molehills outta the mountains of data in front of them. He’s talking to them all the time and giving them recommendations for how to market their business, and how to better market ours too!

Welcome aboard guys!

Apps We’ve Been Working On

Eventbrite business dashboards are almost ready for primetime! It has been “bugging” (pun intended) us a bit but we’re almost there. We’ve also been working hard on our next app which is GetResponse to round out the sea of email marketing providers we connect with, since all of you use one provider or another.

As you know billing has been the bane of a few of our existences around the halls of Dasheroo; we’re looking at July to pull that puppy over the finish line.

Hiring

Who says the summer is slow? On Monday, two new folks joined Team Dasheroo! We hired Nivi Kumar as Sr. Product Manager who Nivi Kumar and Alex Lau, new Dasheroo people!resides here in the Bay Area. She’ll help Josh with amping up the number of applications we connect with and ultimately allowing any developer in the world to connect to any app in the world right in Dasheroo. That is our how-we’re-going-to-grow-a-developer-community-so-you-have-more-apps-than-you-know-what-to-do-with strategy. And if you’re a developer you’re going to love what we’re building and what Nivi is going to provide. We also hired Alex Lau who is a rockstar engineer to add to our crowded Austin office! He’ll be working on building out awesome new features and functionality to make sure you get the most value from your business dashboards.

We’ve got a few more awesome folks in the hopper that will help us get to our goal of 30,000 users by the end of the year. Can you help us get that many? You bet! Tell your friends about us because we don’t want to spend on ads.

Spending

Since we haven’t really talk about this it’s time we should. We’re tracking to our forecast, another reason we love monthly board meetings. Even though we’ve been hiring a tiny bit ahead of the curve, we firmly believe that if you’ve got someone who is good, bring them on and they’ll pay for themselves. Close to 90% of our budget has been on people, which is exactly what we wanted, so THERE Google Adwords :-)

Up Next?

  • App integrations in product planning: billing & e-commerce providers!
  • Getting training together as we bring new people on. We love training stuff!
  • May need a new office in Austin, we grew fast.
  • Working up a marketing plan to support user growth.

I’m sure there’s more, but we gotta get back to work.

Track Our Startup: AWeber Business Dashboards Launched!

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We had a pretty productive week here at Dasheroo. We wrapped up our time sensitive ’20 Years Free Grande Plan’ offer yesterday and wrote a blog post about our experience. We also had a brand spanking new business dashboard release, check it out:

AWeber Business Dashboard from DasherooRelease!

We launched AWeber business dashboards. You’ll be able to see:

  • Recently sent emails: A list of the most recent with the quantity sent, # opens, # clicks, # bounces and # unsubscribes, handy!
  • List health: view your subscriber growth over time
  • Engagement: track your trending open and click rates by day based on the last 30 emails you’ve sent.
  • Bounces and unsubscribes: track your trending bounce and unsubscribe rates by day based on the last 30 emails you’ve sent.

Billing

One week closer to releasing billing. It’s a nasty (but great!) project and we need to make sure we nail it right from the get-go. Great job to Andrew and Josh for relentlessly working this through.

Back Office

We had a great board meeting, they happen monthly and we love it. It keeps us all on our toes and there is no room for any surprises.

Don’t know if you heard but Ducksboard, a viable competitor who was acquired by New Relic, closed their doors last week, We have a nice home for you Ducksboard users, a very nice cozy new nest.

We’re getting ready for 3 new hires in a week and there’s computers to be set up, payroll & insurance to be done and a lot of work getting these awesome folks up to speed. Someone’s gotta do it, thanks James for keeping the computer wheels on the bus.

Videos

We’ve got two more very cool videos, using custom date ranges with your dashboards and uncovering Insight and metric details - what does what you’re looking at mean and what should you do about it? All answered here. Thanks Alf!

Video image for Dasheroo's custom date ranges
Video image for Dasheroo's Insight & Metric Details.

Marketing

Dasheroo's "give feedback" link.We were kindly included in this great article from Hiveage: Why You Need an Analytics Dashboard for Your Business by Kristi Hines, who writes some pretty killer marketing content for a ton of businesses.

We’re also putting together a marketing plan to get us to 30,000 users by the end of the year. Impossible? No, and you can help. We don’t want to pay a bunch of money for advertising, we’d rather build a killer product that you all love and want to tell your friends about. So your feedback is super important to us and telling your friends is too. Can we get a handshake on that? Click on Help > Give Feedback in your Dasheroo account. And while you’re at it, we’d appreciate a kind Tweet or Facebook post!

Track Our Startup: Notes From Our Offsite, AWeber Business Dashboards on Deck

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Team Dasheroo all got together at Chez Hingley for an one-day all-hands meeting. We fit in our living room! James, Court and Andrew came in from our Austin office and Josh and Alf came all the way in from the East Bay. It was awesome, we went through all of the great things we’re doing, prioritized what we need to do for an awesome customer experience and nailed an amazing dinner at Don Pisto’s here in San Francisco.

Team Dasheroo offsite!

James, Andrew, Court, Josh, Alf, Josh & James (again camera hogs), John!

We attended an event hosted by our lovely VC partners Cloud Apps Capital in The Battery. Guys that swank party was off the hook! Great to meet our “family” GoFormz and Insightly. Great to catch up with old Salesforce and Zuora buds as well.

Hiring

New hire started this week…Mimi Daigle, welcome aboard! Mimi hails from Austin (that’s our 4th in that great city!) and is our Director of Sales. She will be scouring the earth to find the excited people that find so much incredible value in what we provide they want to pay us.

We’ve also hired 3 other amazing folks, their names soon to be announced. We’re officially up to 10 people!

Coming Up This week

Our upcoming release is scheduled! We are shooting for this week and it’s drum roll please…AWeber!! Eventbrite business dashboards is on the heels of it but we’re not sure we can get both out.

We’re still on the billing train, getting closer every day. We’re knee deep in figuring out our sales tax issue and our UI and user experience paths.

Oh, make sure you get your buds on the VIP list before June 15 so they can get the Grande Plan free for 20 years, it’s a savings of $6k, no lie.

Board meeting with Cloud Apps is this week. We’ll also be announcing a few fantastic board advisors in the next few weeks that we’re pretty excited about.

More VideosDasheroo video: Google Sheets dashboards

Alf is at it again with a blockbuster of a video, Getting Started with Google Sheets!! Get your popcorn out this one is a doozy, but it had to be because that’s what Google Sheets are. We’ve got a ton of ways to use Dasheroo to spit out some fine-looking charts and graphs so get cozy.

Travels

Alf is traveling to New York, John will be in the Caribbean, Josh is traveling to So Cal. Whew! Guys, send HQ some pix we’ll include them in next week’s post.

Track Our Startup: New Release + Nice Conversion Rates

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We did another release, & we’re still on track to release every two weeks. From James in a Slack conversation: “Fun side note: We are averaging a milestone release every 2 weeks in 2015 so far. That is not a small feat; keep up the awesome work everybody :-)”

Release Summary:

  • Sync new signups to Salesforce automatically - John was inputting each new user into Salesforce one by one, not scalable so the team really helped him out.
  • Mobile dashboard endpoints (consumed by iOS app)
  • Re-implementation of Mixpanel funnel events - This is going to enable us to really learn how people use our application and put things on the screen in the proper order.
  • Handful of bug fixes and UI blemish fixing!

Great job guys!

Next Up?

For your business dashboards pleasure we are working on:

  • Billing - We’re getting closer to releasing our billing system. We do have to charge some people something at some point to stick around for ya. That reminds me, if you don’t have your Dasheroo account you should get yours before June 15 and you’ll get the Grande plan free for 20 years. Tell your friends!
  • AWeber dashboards (aren’t we done with most email marketing apps yet?) - Getting these released in the next few weeks.
  • Eventbrite dashboards - We’re working on these next, they should be on “staging” very soon.
  • Goals and Alerts! - We’re working on a way for you to set goals in your insights so that when you hit one you get an alert, pretty nifty huh?

Screen Shot 2015-05-29 at 9.36.21 AM

Conversion Rates

For those of you who are geeky about conversion rates, from the point where people visit our website to the point they sign up for a Dasheroo account we get a whopping 20% conversion rate, that’s a hugely nice number for us.

Oh, btw, we use our Google Sheets dashboard to give us this data.

Hiring

We continue to grow. We had a great interview with a salesperson who we really like. We also had some great conversations with a few engineers too.

We’re having our Onsite meeting today. Yep, Team Dasheroo all in one place. It’s been about 3 months or so since we all saw each other, so it should be a ton of fun not to mention doubling the amount of people in our living room! We’ll take some pix and share on Instagram.

More videos: Customizing Your Dashboard, and Commenting and Collaboration with Dasheroo.

By the way, we rely on Google Hangouts as our communications tool since we’re distributed all over the place. Either Google Hangouts suck, or Comcast, or both. We can’t tell! Let’s blame it on Comcast :)

Track Our Startup: Hiring, Billing & Videos, Oh My!

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It’s been a busy couple of weeks for team Dasheroo! After we released Campaign Monitor for your business dashboards last week we started work on our next integration with AWeber for email marketing (we’ve almost got the email marketing-sphere covered!)

Small Business Computing LogoWe got a HUGE review from Small Business Computing; Dasheroo Delivers Insight into Critical Business Metrics. What a great review we got. Thank you Jamie Bsales for a great and very thorough write up!

John is chairing a judging committee for the American Business Awards. It’s pretty cool. He’s got Kim Stiglitz from Campaign Monitor and Connie Sung Moyle from Hearsay Social recruited to be on the judging committee as well. Thanks guys, should be fun. Next year we’ll be nominated!

We attended Market New York and boy did we hear from a ton of businesses. Business owners want easy access to data, agencies want an easy way to manage their client’s data and business owners don’t know where to start with accessing data from the applications they use! Yay! Immediate feedback? People thought we were creating mobile apps. So we learned to tailor our message and we need to re-tool our messaging a bit.OzBargain site image with Dasheroo on it!

Someone put us up on an online shopping site in Australia called OzBargain and BAM got a ton of sign ups instantly. You Aussies are connecting insights like crazy so thank you for that!

John kicked off his “Startup Stories” weekly blog posting. Will be good because it’s pretty raw and transparent, like you all like it!

Hiring

James and team have been busy interviewing candidates for our engineering position. Josh hired a wonderful person for our Sr. Product Manager position who starts in a few weeks, we’re pretty stoked!

iOS!

We are diligently working on our iOS app so you can easily view your business dashboards on your iPhone. It’s in Apple’s hands now as we just wait. As soon as we know anything you’ll be the first.

Billing

Josh, Andrew and James are knee-deep in developing our billing platform. We need this for a number of reasons; we need to stay in business and we need to pay anyone who wants to resell Dasheroo. We think it’s at least a 6 week project so tell your friends about Dasheroo, for the next 6 weeks they’ll get the Grande plan free for 20 years!Dasheroo video: sharing your dashboards

Videos

Alf is working on a bunch of videos for how to use different features of Dasheroo. We’ll post them on the blog, on our YouTube Channel and on the site. We’ve already got “Getting Started with Dasheroo” and “Sharing Your Dasheroo Dashboard“.

We’re prepping for our 3rd China Hill “onsite”. Why do we call it an onsite? We don’t technically have an HQ, our only office is in Austin at TechRanch where James, Andrew and Court are jamming. John lives between Nob Hill and Chinatown in SF and he’s trying to rename that zip code. Good luck Johnny, it worked for the Tender Nob.

New Release: Business Dashboards for Campaign Monitor & Speed!

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We’ve been gearing up for our next release after launch. We try to release every few weeks to keep our momentum going and to give you what you’re asking for. Please keep that feedback coming in. FWIW, every time you email us or send us an app request it goes to all of us at Team Dasheroo, so we all see what you want.

Faster than a speeding bullet…

We’ve done a bunch of work behind the scenes to make sure that when you connect an insight or use our Mashups it’s as fast as possible! You’ll notice a huge decrease in any wait times to display your data. James and the team have really been working hard to make sure you get the right data you need, quickly!

Dasheroo dashboard of Campaign Monitor

We’ve got business dashboards for email marketing provider Campaign Monitor.

We’ve got Campaign Monitor business dashboards!

If you use that awesome app Campaign Monitor to do your email marketing, now you can track your campaign results right in your Dasheroo dashboard. Track opens, clicks, unsubs and bounces for your recent campaigns, track your subscribers and your engagement over time.

Billing…it’s coming.

We’ve been working on our billing system, we chose Stripe, it seems like a great product so far. We’re spec-ing out every possible way we might need to bill. The biggest thing for us to do is make sure that if you sign up before we launch billing, you get our grande pricing plan FREE for the next 20 years. So if you have not signed up, better get in while the gettin’ is good!

People are talking.Dasheroo dashboard of our traffic spike

Dasheroo was mentioned in the Y Combinator run site Hacker News. Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. A member of the community thought we were interesting and BAM! We got a ton of traffic to the site and over 300 new users. We sure hope they like what they see and tell us if they don’t! They even alerted us to a scrolling issue on the mobile version of our main website which we fixed right away.

We got 247 pickups on our press release using PRWeb, nice!

New York, here we come.

We’ll be at Market New York at the Javits Center this Thursday May 21st. Swing by and say hi!

Track Our Startup Post Launch: Pricing, Press & People

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We got right back into ‘hard at work’ mode after we launched last week. With the new business dashboards launch we gave our users mashups, bundles, dashboard templates, wider date range access, Facebook Ads and email marketing giant Emma insights, whew!

We passed the 2000 user mark and we’re starting to really gain traction with our growing user base! Please tell your friends because advertising gets expensive. PEOPLE ARE EXPENSIVE, however we’d rather spend our money on people working for you rather than ads to get new people.

Up Next?

We’re working on releasing Campaign Monitor and following that up Aweber. A number of users have been requesting these applications so that’s what we’re focused on.

image of Dasheroo's pricing offerUpcoming Pricing

Did you see our upcoming pricing? Get in on the early adopter special and tell your buds about it, it’s a great deal :-) That leads us to tell you that we don’t have a billing platform in place yet, but we’re excited to be using Stripe.

We got some great press from our launch and hopefully will continue to:

We’re hiring!

Does it matter where you live? Nope. We do have an office in Austin so if you’re an engineer in the Austin area even better but not necessary. We’re also looking for Product Managers and Sales too.

We’re off to Market New York to show Dasheroo off and get some really great feedback! Great feedback = positive OR negative to us. Stop by we’re at booth #200.

What Happened When We Launched Our Business Dashboards

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Check out our Google traffic on launch day!

Check out our Google traffic on launch day!

Yesterday was launch day, and what a day it was! Thanks to the team for getting up early and killing it all day. We’re already moving onto the next feature set we’ll be offering.

We launched Emma email marketing business dashboards. You’ll be able to see your last campaigns with all the related metrics like clicks, opens, bounces, unsubscribes.

We launched a new website, if you haven’t checked it out it’s here.

We started a new Facebook ad campaign where we’re sending people to the site to sign up. Currently we’re at .61/click and we’ve got 3 new sign ups to our service. We’re just playing around for a week of data but 3 sign ups so far for $50, so that’s $17 per new user. We’ll see where that goes.

A few of us (OK one of us) woke up at 3:30am thinking there was a mis-message in the press release. We RAN to PRWeb (ok to our computer) to change it, called them and had them approve it. We texted James at 4:30am (thank God he’s in Austin and has a small child, we hope he was up) to change the website.

Our dog Dwight helping John with the startup.

Our pup Dwight even got into the launch mix!

TechRanch posted about us, that was awesome, thanks guys!

SaaScribed gave us a very nice review. Thanks Alex!

Our press release was posted to Yahoo Finance and at this point now has 14k headline views and 6oo full page reads. Not really sure how they know eyeballs scanned and read the entire page but it’s a stat we’ll take.

We launched on Cinco De Mayo which is just cool.

We’re having issues with Facebook returning data to us for Campaigns, stay tuned we’re on it with them.

Someone who got the email and is very anal retentive saw a small typo…booooo.

Now the real work begins!

I’m John Hingley and This is Dasheroo’s Startup Story

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That's me, John Hingley, one of 4 very proud Dasheroo co-founders today.

That’s me, John Hingley, one of 4 very proud Dasheroo co-founders today.

John Hingley here, I’ve been around the marketing, e-commerce and sales business for quite a while both full-time and consulting with great businesses. In one of these businesses I was brought in to fill a huge gap the company had, a sales and marketing leader. Although the business ran pretty sophisticated marketing programs - email marketing, Google AdWords, all forms of social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, trade shows, you name it - at this particular time, they weren’t growing as fast as they needed to.

I observed that most of the weekly meetings were those typical ‘status updates’ that often devolve into, well, a waste of time! So I initiated a weekly meeting called the Triple-S. People around the office asked me what it meant. It was simple; Sell Some Sh*t. If you weren’t talking about the metrics driving the business, you weren’t in the meeting.

The format of SSS was a metrics-driven meeting driven off a Google doc. I wanted a place where everyone could put their data in a shared, collaborative environment. A ‘unified view’ of the data if you will. And you know what? It worked! Our lead generation folks got a better understanding of what the landing page optimization people were doing, and the content marketing people started to create content that was more relevant based on the keywords people were coming to the site from. And so on.

But after a few of these, I noticed some faults. About 2 hours before each meeting, I noticed the team scurrying around, gathering the charts and graphs to place in the Google doc. Time suck! Next, there was little transparency in many of the numbers as some of the team would create their own Excel charts from the data of the native app, like Facebook. How did I know if it was accurate? And last, WTF do we all have to wait until Tuesday at 1p to look at all this great stuff?! It should be updated and available to any of us, any time, from anywhere.

So I took a step back, looked at it and asked, why the hell isn’t there a solution for any business that automatically gathers all of this data up to the minute (or hour even!), eliminate human error and display what’s going with the biz RIGHT NOW, not what happened 6 days ago? RIGHT NOW we can affect change, we can’t make up the 5 days we lost if we could have seen the reports now.

We've got Dashboards for all kinds, free!

We’ve got Dashboards for all kinds, free!

When I stopped my consulting gig I decided to toy with the idea of starting this new company we lovingly call Dasheroo, and create the best product for businesses that need business dashboards. (Did I mention every business needs a business dashboard?)

Luckily our idea of bringing data together in an easy-to-read format was met with smiling faces of people around me. After a few months James Ryan our amazing VP of Engineering (sold his last company to Get Satisfaction) came on, set up shop in Austin, TX, and we worked to get an alpha version of our product out with 800 users.

We piqued the interest of a venture firm, Cloud Apps Capital Partners, that believes in everything we’re about; delivering productive business apps in a ‘business freemium’ model. Matt Holleran and Judy Loehr have been amazing to work with, they’ve given all of the support we need and more, and the best part is, they’re really, really nice and are part of the Dasheroo family already.

Screen Shot 2015-04-25 at 12.21.09 PMAmazingly, to round out the team this past year we scored Josh Feinberg (VP Product) and Alf Brand (VP Customer Success and UX expert) to join. These guys all have the experience we need to make an awesome product even more awesome.

And now we have the best tool any business can have in their tool chest; all of the important business metrics in their own business dashboards, for free.

How can it be free, you ask? What’s the catch? We know a lot about how to make things for small & mid-size business owners, agencies and even enterprise businesses, being that we’ve always been one ourselves. And we know that you need a break, but you’ll pay for bells and whistles you really need. Plus, I used to run an agency, so I hope other agency types see value in Dasheroo too. So that’s the deal, it’s free, you’ll love all of the functionality you’ll get and when you grow, we grow. Can we shake on that?

So thanks to the 1,700+ amazing beta users who have been banging on Dasheroo for the past few months, telling us what you like and more importantly what you don’t. This product is yours, not ours. It grows with you.

We’ll keep being transparent with you, we’ve always told you 99% of what’s happening behind the scenes, there’s not a chance of stopping that now.

So take us for a spin, we’re ready to grow and grow fast. And if you like us tell your friends. We don’t want to spend our money on advertising, we’d rather give it to you in the form of a stellar product.

Cheers,

John, James, Josh, Alf, Court, Andrew

P.S. Special thanks to the following friends for helping us get to this point:

John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing), Viveka Von Rosen (Linked Into Business), Alex Theuma (SaaScribe), Matthew Toren (iSmallBusiness), Adam Toren (Kidpreneurs), Dave Kerpen (Likeable Local), Jay Baer (Convince & Convert), Lauren Simmonds (Small Business Computing), Bryan Eisenberg (Idealspot), Pratik Dholakiya, Tom Taulli, Mark Evans, Steve Strauss (The Self Employed), Carol McManus (LinkedIn Lady), Ken Herron, Emily Crume and Erik Fisher (Social Media Examiner), Anita Campbell (Small Biz Trends), Matt Mansfield (MattAboutBusiness), Ramon Ray (Smart Hustle Magazine) and last but certainly not least Janine Popick.

Our friends and family of amazing investors (who are literally our friends and our family :-)

For the full press release, go here.