Dasheroo Blog | Business Dashboards Done Right!

New Release: Free iOS Business Dashboard Mobile App

August 24, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Yep, we’ve been talking about it for a long time and it’s finally here. You’ll be able to easily scroll through your Dasheroo business dashboard on your iPhone with our iOs mobile app! No more fat-fingering your insights all around only to find that you’ve pissed off the marketing person and moved all of her insights all over the place! Nope, just simply choose your dashboard and you’ve got all of your data in an easy to read format, on the go!

So head on over to the Apple store and get your Dasheroo mobile app free!

New Release: Your Very Own Stripe Dashboard!

August 21, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

We are super excited for this release (partially because Stripe is our billing system) because many of our users have asked us for this and we feel we did a GREAT job at this all-new Stripe dashboard. Check out all of the amazing payment insights you now have access to!

Average Revenue Per User - ARPU is a valuable metric for subscription businesses to track revenue growth. It is the average revenue the business makes from one customer.

Monthly Recurring Revenue - Monthly Recurring Revenue is an important metric for every subscription business to track.It is considered to be a measure of predictable and recurring revenue for a subscription business. We calculate MRR as total recurring revenue in a month minus the refunds.

Revenue vs. Refunds - This insight compares your revenue your business generated with the amount of refunds in the given time period. You will want to maintain a good balance between these two.

Stripe Fees - Stripe charges you a certain fee so that you can accept payments and use their services. This trending line graph shows you how much you spend in stripe fees in a given time period. This is a cost your business incurs and is a good metric to keep track of.

Refunds - Refunds issued by your Stripe account are represented as a trending line graph in this insight. This gives you an overview of how many refunds you have issued and whether it is trending up or down.

Recent Activity -The recent activity insight lists the most recent transaction in your Stripe account along with the status of the transaction and the $ amount involved. Activity can be a payment, a subscription, an upgrade, a downgrade, a refund etc

Refunds By Plan - Refunds issued by your stripe account are represented as a trending line graph in this insight. This gives you an overview of how many refunds you have issued in specific plans and whether it is trending up or down. You can choose up to 5 plans to view this insight.

Net Revenue - Net Revenue is the revenue your business generates after accounting for refunds, Stripe fees etc. This insight shows a trending line graph of your business’s net revenue in the given time period. The net revenue in this insight is calculated across all your stripe plans.

Net Revenue By Plan - Net Revenue is the revenue your business generates after accounting for refunds, Stripe fees etc. This insight shows a trending line graph of your business’s net revenue in the given time period for specific stipe plans. You can choose up to 5 plans to view this insight.

Customers - This insight shows you a trending line graph of the number of new customers who sign up for your business. In the given time period you can see how this number trends. This will include customers across all your Stripe plans.

Customers By Plan - This insight shows you a trending line graph of the number of new customers who sign up for specific plans your business offers. In the given time period you can see how this number trends. This will tell you what your popular plans are how many users sign up for them.

Upgrades - View the number of customers who have upgraded to a higher plan and how it is trending in the given time period.

Downgrades - This insight shows a trending line graph of the number of downgrades in the given time period. In a subscription business upgrades and downgrades happen. It is important to keep track of upgrades and downgrades as they affect your revenue numbers.

Failed Transactions - This insight provides a list of recent transactions that failed along with reasons why.

So get on in to your Dasheroo account and add a Stripe dashboard if that’s what you use for your payment solution!

Startup Lessons Learned: Be Fluid & Pivot!

August 19, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

These days it’s important to be able to “change course fast” especially if you’re in a nimble startup environment. Don’t get me wrong you need to set your course and nail a roadmap, but if something comes up that’s going to make you grow faster than normal, you need to think about doing it. These onStartup Lessons Learned week I’m focusing on the right way to pivot the team for a big opportunity.

There are a few questions to ask yourself when considering a pivot:

Am I doing this for just one potential customer or will many customer benefit from a pivot
Does it mesh with our strategic plan?
Will it help us grow faster and gain traction?

If you answered yes to all of these good for you, a pivot is likely in order.

At Dasheroo we’ve been marching down a 5 pt. strategic path to get us to where we’d like to be. The plan did call for some partnerships but they don’t happen when you want them to, they don’t happen over night and they usually happen with a lot of luck coupled with your hard work at seeking them out. One such potential partnership is on the horizon so we had to pivot our team and their time and put some development and marketing effort into this partnership earlier than anticipated.

The first thing on your to-do list is to get your team around it. If you’ve got a great team and the pivot makes sense then they’ll follow the strategic marching orders to the end. So I gathered the team and talked to them about it and we went through it together. As a team we wanted to make sure that pivoting for this partnership:

Will benefit this customer or partner and all that come after, and it does. The work that Alex is doing for this partnership on OAuth gets us working with other partners quicker!
Goes along with what we need to do to grow. We don’t want to spend a ton of money on advertising on Google so getting our product distributed through partnerships is what we need to do and this one could be big.
Hopefully gets us to where we want to be faster and better. If this partnership works the way we’d like it to, we could potentially have a nice pop in growth.

It was important for me to include everyone in on the decision since the entire team will be doing a all of the work. And this team fortunately gets it. There’s no guarantee that it will work wonders for us but everyone understands that giving it our best shot is all we can do.Got a potential pivot coming up? Make sure everyone is on the same page! More on this partnership as we launch.

Track Our Startup: SIX New Projects We’re Working On!

August 18, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

You can get your very own Stripe and PayPal payments dashboard at Dasheroo now! Go check them out if you use these payment solutions for your business, it’s pretty cool to see your these metrics next to your Google Analytics dashboard or your social media dashboard.

Here’s what we’ve been working on for your future Dasheroo business dashboard:

Josh submitted our iOS app to Apple and we’re in QA with our Android app. I won’t talk about it again until we launch!
Alex has been working on OAuth. This is simply a way for us to easily integrate with a ton of 3rd party applications like the ones you have on your dashboards. This also enables a top-secret integration with Salesforce.com too, more on that soon!
Andrew has been working on the “scaffolding” for our agency & partner admin console. If you’re an agency you want some controls over your client’s dashboards and you want to be able to easily log in and out of them from one spot.
James has been working on responsive design for our dashboards and Court has been busy in QA with it. This is great for integrations but also enables our dashboards to look nifty on tablets and mobile devices.
Competitor Dashboard - Nivi and team have been making great progress on this new dashboard template so that once James (he went to Alaska!) is back, he can assess when we can take the competitor dashboard live. You’ll be able to select this feature right from the dashboard templates to compare how you’re doing with a few metrics to how your competition is doing.
Do you think the Foo Fighters need a business dashboard? We do!

OK, that’s a ton of stuff in flight!

But Wait There’s More…

We’ve decided to sponsor Dreamforce! Like we said Alex has been working on a super-secret Salesforce project and you’ll get to see it at this amazing annual event. John and Josh will also be speaking on how we did it and show you.

We’ve just had our first request for a non-profit pricing program. We were so successful with it at our last company it makes total sense. Plus we really love helping those who save people, animals and the environment, everyone should huh? Janine is taking on getting this project together since she worked it at VerticalResponse. More on that as it unfolds but it’s slightly complicated.

Back Office

We don’t have a policy for vacations here, pretty cool huh? We just work off of the “Get your sh*t done” policy. So I talked to our legal team this week who blessed a non-policy policy, for now it works for all of us so hopefully it continues to!

John at Dasheroo

P.S. I hate accounting.

VIDEO: Custom Date Ranges for Your Business Dashboard

August 17, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Alf does a great job at getting all of our “how-to” videos up in our Dasheroo YouTube Channel. Plus he’s got such a fine and friendly voice, doesn’t he? If you haven’t heard him, watch this 1-minute 17-second video on how to find custom date ranges in your Dasheroo business dashboard.

Other videos you need to watch, and they’re short too!

Free PayPal Dashboards Just Released!

August 14, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Dasheroo’s Transaction By Type PayPal Dashboard.

In an effort to get billing dashboards out to the masses we are super excited to announce that we’ve just released PayPal Dashboards! A large number of you have been requesting this for some time so we thought it was pretty important to get this out to you. Without further adieu here are the insights you’ll be able to add to your Dasheroo business dashboards to rock and roll your business.

Product Leaderboard - View the products you sell the most in a given time period

Transactions by Type -Transactions in PayPal can have many different statuses. This insight shows the different types of PayPal transactions in your account including completed, failed, refunded, pending , cancelled reversal etc.

PayPal Fees - Paypal charges you a certain fee so that you can accept payments and use their services. This trending line graph shows you how much you spend in PayPal fees in a given time period.

Refunds - Refunds issued by your PayPal merchant account are represented as a trending line graph in this insight. This gives you an overview of how many refunds you have issued and whether it is trending up or down.

Dasheroo’s Most Revenue PayPal dashboard insight.

Most Revenue - This insight shows a list of transactions in your PayPal account that contributed to the most revenue in the given time period. This helps you identify transactions that make the most money for your business.

Most Recent Transactions - The most recent transactions in your PayPal account are listed in a tabular format. Apart from the name of the transaction, details like the $ amount, fees charged by PayPal for the transaction, the net amount, status and the total balance remaining in your PayPal account at the end of that transaction are all listed.

Revenue - The most recent transactions in your PayPal account are listed in a tabular format. Apart from the name of the transaction, details like the $ amount, fees charged by PayPal for the transaction, the net amount, status and the total balance remaining in your PayPal account at the end of that transaction are all listed.

However you use PayPal you’ll be able to track your revenue and as always your feedback is hugely appreciated so tell us what we could be doing better!

Startup Lessons Learned: SEO, It’s a Journey Not a Destination

August 13, 2015 by John Hingley·1 Comment

We’ve been plugging away at making our product the best it can be. We want people to love it and tell all of their friends about it so we don’t need to spend a ton of money on Google AdWords - been there, done that. Not at Dasheroo.

This week’s startup lessons learned is all about SEO. We’ve been focusing on our search engine optimization strategy. Janine and Alf have been putting a ton of time into getting above all of the search engine noise. Going up even a point for your Moz page authority and domain authority is NOT easy and takes time. Our focus isn’t just to only win at one big keyword, but to win at dozens of other keywords as well. Only a diversified SEO strategy (ranking high for lots of relevant keyword searches) wins in the long run.

We decided to start with Moz’s pie chart of what goes into Google’s search algorithm. This chart was created by insights from a ton of SEO experts, and focuses on key efforts that are going to really move the needle.

1. Inbound Linking - We put a concerted effort into inbound linking since that makes up almost 21% of the ranking factor. And it ain’t like the olden days where you could stick a link on a million sites and get ranked #1. Here it needs to be from quality sites that have a good domain authority. We use the Moz bar when we’re looking at sites and if they’ve got a killer domain authority, they make the list.

2. Page Level Linking - Since this makes up for almost 20% of the ranking factor, we took a look at our website and our blog and found we were not really doing enough linking from page to page and we were just doing one word linking instead of entire phrases. So we changed that. Instead of just linking “Dasheroo” to our blog, we link phrases like best free dashboards a business can find to our site. And we don’t mind linking people off of our site, say to the Moz Bar tool page since it makes total sense for this content you’re reading.

3. Page Level Keywords & Content - This makes up almost 15% of the Google ranking factor. So we took a look at our site and decided that for every app integration we do, we’re going to make the focus be long-tail keywords. Instead of “business dashboards” all over the site, on these specific pages we may focus on the specific integration. For instance we have an integration with Google Sheets where you can take your Sheets data and create great-looking dashboards. So we have a specific Google Sheets dashboard landing page where the URL reads: https://www.dasheroo.com/google-sheets-dashboard. We put the keyword right in the URL and use the keywords in the description and the content so we hopefully will someday be found pretty easily, we’ve already risen out of nowhere to page 2; page 1 here we come!

SO WHAT HAPPENED AFTER A MONTH OF FOCUS?

Our page authority went up 2 whole points and our domain authority went up 3 (the more important one IMHO). Like the headline says, it’s a journey not a destination. We’ll keep you up to date on how we’re improving and what we’re doing to get there.

Track Our Startup: Stripe Dashboards + Knee Deep in SEO

August 11, 2015 by John·1 Comment

We’ve been super-crazy busy these past few weeks. Instead of releasing new features and bug fixes every two weeks we’ve been releasing EVERY WEEK! Our product and engineering groups have been so great at defining and developing the stuff you want, that we want to get it out live ASAP. Last week we told you were were working on iOS and Android apps, and they are still on the way. We submitted our iOS app to Apple last week, so now the ball’s in their court and we’re hoping for a speedy approval. Our Android app is in heavy QA and once we deem it to be ready, that’ll go into a submission process as well.

What did we do?

We also told you we had PayPal dashboards ready to go, we’re just waiting on team PayPal to officially “bless” our integration. As soon as they waive their magic wand you’ll be able to see all of your incoming and outgoing payments on one nifty dashboard!

What are we working on?

We’ve got a ton of insights for your Stripe dashboards on the way!

Stripe is on the way. On the heels of our PayPal integration we thought we should also give you your very own Stripe dashboard. Stripe is what we use here at Dasheroo for our payments. So you’ll be able to see metrics in a given time period like Revenue, Most Recent Transactions, Refunds and more in one easy to understand place.

We had been working on Alerts but had to pause development for a few weeks.

Alerts will allow you to set a specific value in one of your Dasheroo insight metrics and get sent an email if your performance goes above or below that set value, whichever one you decide. So if you’re looking closely at your Google Sessions and you think it might spike because of an article you just had published you can set a value for if sessions go over 10% of what you normally see in a day. Then you’ll know it’s working! The feature is still on the backlog and we’re about to pick it up again because we think it’s pretty cool.

We’re also getting closer to the beginnings of a competitive dashboard. You’ll be able to track your social media fans and followers alongside whoever you choose as a competitor. Me? I’d stick some RSS feeds on the dashboard as well to keep an eye on what my competitors our putting out their blog. More on that as we get further along.

Working on something special for September to show at Salesforce.com’s annual event Dreamforce. Unfortunately we’re under lock and key for this one but stay tuned, it’s pretty cool.

Marketing

We’ve been working diligently on our search engine optimization so we’re found on page 1 when people are searching specific terms. Here’s what we’re doing:

1. Landing Pages: We’re in the process of creating targeted landing pages that focus on specific keywords. For instance, when we refer to “Google Sheets dashboard” we link it from the blog to our Google Sheets landing page where we talk all about the benefits of Google Sheets. The link has the keywords in it as well (https://www.dasheroo.com/google-sheets-dashboard).

2. Inbound Links: We’re working off of a spreadsheet of sites that make sense to have us on them linking back to our site. The more quality inbound links your site gets the better your rankings in the search engines.

3. Contributed Content: If you’ve noticed, I’ve been writing for business.com while Janine has been writing for Inc.com. That list of publications we contribute to is going to grow in the coming months and you’ll see some great articles on sales, marketing and overall leadership. It’s a ton of fun and Dasheroo gets links from sites that have some great domain authority.

4. Linking Within our Domain: We’re linking between articles on the blog where it makes sense, we’re linking from the blog back to those landing pages and we’re linking between pages on the same domain. Google likes this and it makes sense to drive traffic to other parts of our site.

Back to work time!

Google Gone Wild: Meet Your New Google Dashboard

August 10, 2015 by Dasherooer·1 Comment

We’ve talked about the Marketing Maven dashboard and the Socialite dashboard template but have you heard about the Google Gone Wild dashboard template? It’s awesome and gives you one place to go to, to give you the perfect Google dashboard for Google Analytics, Google Adwords and Google Sheets all in one place. Enough Google?

First go to Add Insight in the top navigation bar of your Dasheroo account.

Click on Templates and choose Google Gone Wild.

Connect your accounts for Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Google Sheets.

And you’ve got yourself one great Google dashboard in just a few minutes.

Of course you can customize it to your liking by adding other applications or Google Insights that we didn’t include in the template but we think it’s a pretty cool way to look at as much Google as possible. One more thing, you can expect more Google products and insights in this dashboard coming soon!

Is there too much Google, really?

Startup Lessons Learned: Have Your Investors & Advisors Work For You

August 6, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

So you raised your financing and brought a couple impressive folks on as advisors or board members. That is awesome! But, it’s more than just money and names - your investors and your advisors are there for you beyond that initial commitment, and they need to be. But not necessarily if you don’t ask, as these are very busy people juggling tons of different priorities. If they’re good, they should be juggling, right?!

We’re very fortunate to have an A-Team supporting us here at our business dashboard startup, Dasheroo. Sharp investors, and seasoned and insightful board members and board advisors. Plus they are all fun as hell to work with! In this Startup Lessons article I want to show you the diversity of our advisors and investors and what they provide depending on what we need at specific times.

Just a sampling of their many contributions over and above their money:

Matt Holleran - General Partner, Cloud Apps Capital Partners (Board Member): Cloud Apps is our lead investor, and Matt is our board member, along with me. Matt is the ‘King of Connections’. The ‘Open Sesame’ of strategic business contacts. He seems to knows everyone, and everyone has huge respect for him. When I needed an intro to one of the largest social media publishing platforms, well, he was visiting with the CEO that weekend! Plus he is excellent at helping position our value within the perfect context of each potential partner we discuss. Thay type of value you just can’t buy.

Judy Loehr - Venture Partner, Cloud Apps Capital Partners (Board Advisor): Well, where do I start? Judy could be the CMO at damn near any company in the galaxy. So it’s more of a ‘where’ do I ask for input issue. Early on, it was helping establish and vet out our Go-To-Market strategy and pricing approach. Now it’s helping navigate the waters of a very large CRM company we’re beginning a strategic relationship with.

John Jantsch, Founder & CEO Duct Tape Marketing (Advisor): John regularly speaks at social media and marketing conferences around the world. And writes lots of great books. OK, so what does John do for us? He continually provides us with proven, down to earth, practical ideas and feedback. Recently, he advised us on our soon-to-be-released agency pricing (we listened to every word), and we are busy working on ways to have a tight Duct Tape - Dasheroo relationship. We love John because of his never vague, always immediately valuable and pretty easy to implement ideas.

Walter Kortschak, Managing Partner Kortschak Investments (Investor & Advisor): Walter is a large investor and advisor. We’re starting to scale, plus I need advice on the metrics and growth we need to show for a potential B-Round of financing in 2016. Who better to get insight from than a guy like Walter? He was an original investor in MacAfee and helped them achieve super stardom, and has also invested in big-scale companies like Twitter, Evernote and Lyft. So he knows the ins and outs of scaling a successful global business. And again, no ‘pie in the sky’ where it’s not warranted. He has decades of experience and no ego. As we grow, Water will be an even more valuable go-to on building enterprise sales and overall growth of our business.

Maurice Werdegar and Rob Glasser, Western Technology Investments We are honored to count these guys in as an investor in Dasheroo. I liked these guys from the get go; they have a no B.S. attitude and pragmatic approach to helping create successful businesses. We caught up a couple days ago, and they are now going to introduce us to a bunch of their portfolio companies. And if we decide to consider venture debt, they are the highly respected firm in the industry.

Janine Popick, board advisor and Dasheroo CMO. Well, first she grew leading email service provider and SMB darling VerticalResponse into a 1,000,000+ SMB success before she sold it. So she knows a thing or three about the SMB market - how to acquire and retain them. And, I mean this in a good way, lots of ‘in the trenches, here’s what NOT to do’ lessons that only a long-time successful entrepreneur can teach you.

Bottom line: each of these folks has played a huge part in Dasheroo’s growth and we’ve benefitted from quantifiable, measurable value out of them so you need to incorporate them into your business:

Have a monthly or quarterly meeting with them with a shortened version of your board deck talking about all of the things you accomplished with one slide: Where You Can Help.
Include them on a weekly or monthly progress email so you’re “in their face”. We add all of our investors and advisors on a weekly email called Track Our Startup. Maybe they read it and think “hey, I can help this week.”
If you’re coming up on a big decision (like pricing or a legal issue) where one of them has expertise or experience with it, reach out on that specific item.
If you need to meet someone very strategic to your business look them up on LinkedIn and see if they’re connected. Then ask for an intro! They can’t read your mind, you have to do the research.

So remember - it’s easy to do all the work to get an investment and advisor team together then go about your business and forget to reach out for help to grow and make their time and money pay back to the largest extent possible. And these people are B-U-S-Y, you cannot expect them to have you top of mind, you have to be the one reaching out.

Now all of that said, we are truly fortunate at Dasheroo in that all the folks I mentioned above DO proactively reach out to help!