Search Results for: "Track Our Startup"

Track Our Startup: Tracking Internal KPIs + Customer Success

September 29, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

What are we working on? What aren’t we working on is more like it! As for product features we’ve had a bunch of stuff in the hopper. If you recall just a few:

Competitor Dashboards - we’re very close with these, look for them in a week or so!
Google Campaigns and Goals
Hashtag tools for Instagram Analytics
Exporting a data dashboard to a PDF so you can send reports, we’ve seen this work on our test servers and it’s very, very cool.

Features Further Down the Road…

Always more integrations with more apps
Speaking of more integrations, we’ll be helping get outside developers developing dashboards of their own with our internal tools
Ability to have an ADMIN user manage multiple users for agencies and larger teams
The ability for you to build your own custom insights for your data dashboard!

Customer Success

Alf, our VP of Customer Success was tasked with documenting our user’s journey and all of the touch points we already do as well as all of the ones we need to add and change. When it’s in a nifty data visualization it’s so much more clear where there are opportunities and improvements to be made. He’ll be working closely with Jenny to refine it and start acting on all of the things to make the customer experience the best it can be.

Bring on the Traffic!

Traffic was a bit flat this week due to just 2 blogs and referral traffic down. It’s what you get when you don’t write content for two week. THAT won’t happen again :-).

Speaking of traffic, we’ve been working on a mammoth SEO project. What we do know here is that SEO is a journey, not a destination, that’s for sure. And since we have to deliver reporting on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for you, we need to do if for us too and traffic driven by SEO is a huge KPI for us to keep a close eye on. Thanks to SEMrush and Moz we’ll start to work on getting those search results and traffic to spike.

Mimi will be attending Constant Contact’s OneCon next week, it’s where Constant Contact Solution Providers and Authorized Local Experts from all over the world are invited to network and learn from each other, Constant Contact executives, and small business experts. Seems like a cool networking thang.

What was I thinking? The two days I planned for a company offsite in Austin (where half of our amazing team resides) is the day after Formula 1, Austin weekend! Way to go, John!

Ok, more next week. Don’t forget to watch out for this week’s Startup Lessons Learned. Should be “Don’t book a meeting in Austin the day after F1” LOL.

Track Our Startup: We Survived Dreamforce + On To Q4 Growth

September 22, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Even though about 6 of us were rotating around a booth schedule and a bunch of meetings at Dreamforce we still managed to work on some serious new features.

Dreamforce ’15

We had a great Dreamforce event here in San Francisco, thanks to everyone who stopped by and said hey! Josh and I had an 8am speaking gig in the Marriott Marquis. We thought there would be crickets at that hour but it was standing room only, great job, Josh!

Four days just “might” be a bit long for a trade show but we tried to make sure we got the best of our spend on this show. For those of you who don’t know, we built a “component” for Dasheroo dashboards using Lightning App builder so you can get your Dasheroo dashboards right in your Salesforce account. Right now it’s only for mobile, but hopefully soon you’ll be able to get them right on your desktop instance of Salesforce.com.

Feedback from the show attendees to Dasheroo? People were pretty happy that there was an easy, lower-cost alternative to Domo, Tableau and Wave which was cool. Some businesses even said they use us alongside those more expensive products to get a quick snapshot of how the business is really doing, then they use those tools to drill into an issue in more detail. Nice, huh?

Bonus? James came up from our Austin office so it was awesome to see him. Since we’re a distributed company we don’t get to see our peeps face to face as often as we’d like, so it was great to all who came out for it. AND everyone donned their fancy new Chucks so we were pretty happy about that. Sorry about your blisters, Jenny!

Newbie on Board

It’s been a while since we hired a new person, so now meet Alvaro Tijero our newest addition to the team here in the Bay Area. He’s no stranger to this group, he used to work with us in sales a lllloooonnnngggg time ago at VerticalResponse. You and Mimi will be a fierce sales team!

On To Q4 growth

We’re going to focus pretty hard on growth for our business and that means rapid integrations, going deeper on some existing integrations and figuring out any triggers to get ya’ll happy about paying. We’re pretty jazzed to give the service for free but when you can get the value you need out of what we provide we hope you’ll pay a modest amount for your business dashboard.

We plan on getting the team together for a day in Austin next month. It’s going to be great to see everyone and get us all on the same page as far as the milestones we really need to be hitting. Can’t wait.

If you haven’t read my Startup Lessons Learned for last week it’s pretty cool: Your Weekly Ops Meeting, you might need to revisit it! I’ve also got an article on Business.com entitled: Help is On The Way: 5 Easy Things To Automate in Your Business.

We’ve got our monthly board meeting to get ready for next week and a ton of catching up this week so I’ve gotta run!

Track Our Startup: New Release! Shopify + Google Analytics Ecommerce Dashboard

September 10, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Dasheroo's Google Analytics Ecommerce Dashboard

Our own Google Analytics Ecommerce dashboard, get one for yourself!

We’re releasing so many features and integrations so fast we can’t even keep up! Anyhoo, it’s true, we just released Google Analytics Ecommerce and Shopify dashboards to get closer to rounding out a payments/ecommerce dashboard suite (with Stripe and PayPal dashboards already in the wild and Shopify on deck.) We really need your feedback on these integrations if you use these products, we’re always looking at making them better.

Just 7 short days to Dreamforce (#DF15), Salesforce’s annual event here in San Francisco. If you see someone wearing these Chucks ->, chances are they could be on team Dasheroo so stop us and say hi!

Josh and I are practicing our dry run this week for our demo at 8am (early!) on September 16th, since Dreamforce is free I’m sure you’re all going to be there rooting us on, right? Please? Hello out there?

I just saw Nivi put out a note on Basecamp about a hashtag dashboard, how cool is that?? We still have competitor dashboards we’re working on and Google Campaigns and Goals are in the works. Like I said, gettin’ hard to keep up, our product and engineering teams are awesome!

Alf and Jenny have been working hard at diving into Customer Success to make sure that at every decision point a user has, the path we’re offering them to take, just makes sense. Customer experience is our #1 focus, if that doesn’t work, we won’t be set up for success.

JP and I have been working on a marketing plan for the rest of the year. With so many moving parts we have to nail down who is doing what. Janine has been busy getting some marketing help from people to help us write. This should really help with our SEO efforts.

Finally I’ve been gathering information to start talking to folks about a B-Round investment. Our amazing Series A round folks CloudApps just launched their own company with an oversubscribed round and we need to make ’em proud by going aggressively after a B round which means kicking in the growth machine.

Track Our Startup: Dreamforce ’15 Countdown is ON

September 1, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We’re in release heaven here in Dasheroo. In just a month we’ve released PayPal, Stripe, an iOS app plus a TON of under-the-hood much needed stuff that you don’t see but it makes the expectation you have the things should just work, happen.

15 Days to Dreamforce 15 (#DF15)

We selected our booth (ok “pod”) right next to MixPanel and VistaPrint at Salesforce.com’s annual event here in San Francisco! And you can bet we’re wearing our orange! We’ll be demoing something pretty nifty at DF15 so stop by if you’re there. You can get free expo hall passes here we’re told.

Upcoming Dashboards and Insights

We’re hoping to add to our ecommerce-billing-payments dashboards with a Shopify dashboard in the coming weeks. So those of you selling stuff and using this great tool for your shopping cart will be able to see your metrics.

We’re diving back into our Google Analytics Dashboards and coming up with insights for Google Analytics E-commerce Insights. We’re sticking with the question “how much am I making off of my marketing” dashboards. Following onto that will be Google Analytics Campaigns and Goals insights. Now you’ll be able to see right from Dasheroo if all of those efforts you’ve been working on are paying off in terms of sign ups or cold hard cash!

My new scintillating business.com article is out entitled Who Are You? Why Ignoring Your About Page is a Terrible Idea and Janine wrote her new Inc.com article, 3 Ways to Move Your SEO Needle.

Talk to you in a week for more of your business analytics updates!

Track Our Startup: iOS Mobile App Released + Stripe + Dreamforce!

August 25, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Dasheroo's mobile app for business dashboard

Go to the Apple Store and download your free Dasheroo iPhone app now!

Releases abound here at Dasheroo! The all-new Stripe dashboard feature released and we couldn’t be happier. Our Dasheroo iOS business dashboard mobile app is finally released as well. Now you can easily view your dashboards on your iPhone. Android to come soon. Get to the Apple Store and download it free! I told you about the 6 new projects we’re working on and we’re still working those. I can’t even keep up…

Sales are starting to roll in since we launched billing a short time ago, while Mimi closed a few larger deals.

We’ve been writing like crazy. My new business.com article is out: How The Power of Conversation Can Grow Your Business. It’s a great example of how actually talking to people makes great sales. Startup Lessons Learned: Be Fluid and Pivot! is out. I talk about the importance of being able to change on a dime in any business, especially startups. Janine writes another good one for Inc.com; When To Inject “Fun” Into Your Customer Experience.

We’ll be exhibiting at Dreamforce in a few weeks, that’s Salesforce.com’s annual event. Josh and I are busy getting together our presentation since we’ll be demoing theatre style at the conference!

We’re going to Las Vegas for OneCon, a three day event in October where Constant Contact Solution Providers and Authorized Local Experts from all over the world are invited to network and learn from each other, Constant Contact executives, and small business experts. And since we’re an integrated partner where you can get your Constant Contact dashboard free right in your Dasheroo account.

In our never-ending attempt to gain placements in the SERPS we’ve got a new landing page for the keyword “small business dashboard”. We’re making pages for all of the keywords we want to be found for.

John at Dasheroo

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.

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!

Track Our Startup: PayPal + iOS + Android

August 4, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

The long list team Dasheroo worked on in our release last week.

Features we worked on for last week’s release. Our developers are busy!

We’ve been busy doing weekly releases to get some features and back-end bugs fixes from our billing release. We’re working hard on the next few releases so that they’re customer-facing and we get you some of the features and applications you’ve been requesting for your business dashboards. We’re a week closer to releasing PayPal dashboards so that you can track things like revenue, refunds, upgrades, downgrades, recent activity and a host of other great payment metrics for your business.

We’ve been busy working on an iOS and Android apps so you can easily view your dashboards on your phone without mucking up your dashboard by fat-fingering your insights. We’re kind of at the mercy of Apple for the iOS app so look for more news on that in the coming weeks!

We’re gettin’ out there…

Dasheroo iOS app…it’s coming.

My Business.com article Always Be Selling: The #1 Priority for Every Entrepreneur is (hopefully) an interesting read, plus I site the classic movie Glengarry Glen Ross!

JP wrote an Inc. article How to Use Influencer Marketing in 5 Steps to Increase Traffic 10-fold. We’ve done this at Dasheroo and will continue to use influencer marketing. Read it and see how it could help your business.

Do you know What’s Really Important in a Google Analytics Dashboard? We break it down for you in this easy article and all you need to get started is Dasheroo, shocker huh?

We wrote a great article on how we uncovered a secret target customer for Dasheroo, and that great customer target wrote an awesome review on us!

Track Our Startup: Billing Launched + Stripe & Paypal Dashboards On The Way

July 28, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Nice Tweet from a Dasheroo user for our maintenance window message!

Now that our billing release is out (and we can now answer that age-old question “how are you guys gonna make money?”) we’re moving on to diving deep into new integrations as well as re-visiting existing applications. We do have a bet going on when the first person to purchase is going to happen, we’ll announce that one as it happens…hopefully soon.

Hey we even got some love for our “classy” notice when we had to take the app down for this change!

Now we’re just waiting and watching to see that all things work properly. We did get our first few purchases…WOOT!

Oh and under the “Cool App” category James set up Status.io which redirects you to our new status page so you’ll be able to see if there are any issues with our service!

New Stuff We’re Working On

Nivi is looking at payment platforms Stripe (since that’s what we use in our own billing system) and PayPal for our next new business dashboards. So you’ll be able to track revenue, refunds, upgrades, downgrades, recent activity and a host of other great metrics for your business.

She’s also looking at building a very cool competitive dashboard so you’ll be able to see your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram followers vs. your chosen competitors.

Gettin’ The Word Out

I’m pretty psyched that I’m now a featured contributor for Business.com, you can see my first article To Venture Capital or To Not Venture Capital? You might find it useful.

LanchingNext and Onboardly included us on their sites. Thanks guys, or in the case of Onboardly should I say “girls”. Renée, Heather and the team are killing it helping startups market and they gave a nice shout out to our new CMO (caveat my wife) Janine Popick.

Speaking of, Janine penned her latest Inc.com article: Checklist: 8 Must-Have’s for Managing a Distributed Team

All of our newbies are coming up to speed with their respective responsibilities. Jenny on customer success and Kyle with developing integrations and Nivi running with product integrations. Great job guys,

Track Our Startup: Billing + GetResponse Email Marketing Dashboards Launched

July 21, 2015 by Dasherooer·1 Comment

Ok, so we’ve been talking about our huge billing project for months. We’ve been trying to think of any scenario and corner case that might happen as we ask for customer’s money, because we want to eliminate any potential confusion. So……

Billing Launched!

For any startup, the ability to bill a customer is a huge milestone. Anyone can offer a great product for free, but will users pull out their credit card to get access to more features & functionality? We’re sure going to find out.

We feel that our free Tall pricing plan is great for many small businesses and non-profits who need a quick data fix. For more advanced users and maybe larger small businesses that may need more bells and whistles, we offer the Grande Plan (virtual branding hat-tip to Starbucks) which gives a growing business more dashboards and more insights they can track. Hey, we feel that the more access to actionable data, the more you should be growing right? Let’s all share the wealth!

A big up to Josh for PM-ing the crap outta this project, and to Andrew and James for their awesome ability to think through all things billing and then code this stuff. And to Alf for getting ready to answer the myriad of questions that may arise, as well as making the site understandable (huge user interface stuff going on here). Everyone had input on how to price our offerings, and we went back and forth as you might imagine.

We’re starting to think about how referrals are handled from a billing and payment perspective so stay tuned on that. We’ve had lots of interest in this area.

What else did we do? GetResponse email marketing dashboards launched to round out SEVEN email marketing providers.

Dasheroo Google Analytics dashboard of Sessions

Look at the Yellow part of the Dasheroo Google Analytics Insight, crazy good!

Marketing - READ THIS!

As you know Janine Popick came on as CMO, happy to have her! Check out her article: 5 Reasons I Decided to Dive Into a Startup on Inc.com. It’s pretty cool.

Check this out: this past week we were lucky enough to get an article written by @SteveStrauss CEO of @TheSelfEmployed. He mentioned us in his USA Today small business column. That’s great.

And it gets better…

What was weird was a few days later we got a huge spike in Google organic search traffic. Weird because we weren’t spiking for any of our keywords. Sooooooo….

Dasheroo featured on USA Today on an elevator screen!

This is proud Art taking a pic of Dasheroo in an elevator on wife Jenny’s first day at Dasheroo!

Here’s what we found: our own Jenny’s husband Arthur, was on an elevator here in San Francisco and saw Steve’s mention of us running on Captivate, those TV screens that hold your attention in elevators. It was on the screen for 2 minutes at a time over the course of three days and we GOT FLOODED with users. Whoa. People took pictures or remembered and searched for us on Google and signed up. Incredible!

One more thing, we have a listing on GetApp and we need reviews, can you give us one? It won’t take long, promise!

Board Meeting

I’ve got my monthly board meeting this Thursday, and it won’t be BORING. I’ve been getting slides ready for that one since it’s been 6 weeks since our last one. For a change we’ll be having it in a hotel lobby that doesn’t get used. We’ll see how that goes.

Side Note - One of the Coolest Tools Ever

Alf found GifGrabber which is a FREE way to make a video (no sound) that replays. It takes about 20 seconds to understand and create a video. So you’ll see these gifs of how-tos in our help. Awesome, thanks Alf!

Platform First

Not to geek out here but James and team are building out a pretty significant part of Dasheroo, our Developer Console. This is “the app that builds our app integrations and insights” so to speak. What’s very cool about this is that if a business doesn’t see an app they want to make a dashboard of, they can build it themselves (or get a developer to do so.) Point is, the team has done a lot of work behind the scenes to get this up and running and we got an awesome demo of it this week. More on that as we plan to launch, but we’ve had a plethora of inquiries about this from various business that want access to our API. It’s coming.

Whew, more next week, check out my Startup Lessons Learned if you’re up for it!

John at Dasheroo.