Dasheroo, with nifty thumbnails so you can see what type of graph or chart it is before you choose.

Last week we were under fire (well, we put ourselves under fire) with QA and tidying up our business dashboards for an Alpha release.

Under the category of “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel”…

Our lead developer took the number of times we have to ask for data from our data partners (Facebook, Google, etc.) to get you your data and decreased them by over half! That’s a good thing since they put up some serious limits before you have to talk to them about why you need to raise it.

We got our app off of our demo environment and onto app.dasheroo.com. We’ll be banging on this this coming week to make sure everything works dandy like it did in our test environment. That reminds us, we need so start paying Amazon Web Services now since we were using a buddy’s account to host our application. Thanks Nick, we’ll buy you killer sushi when you come to SF.

We’ve been testing what our app looks like across iPhones and iPads. Not bad, comments don’t really work but you can certainly see your data! The screenshot on the right was taken on an iPad.

We’ve been getting our Support page ready for primetime, and we’ll be getting a real tutorial from Austin over at Zoho on best practices for using Zoho support.

Under the category of “It’s always sumpin’”…

In order to host our app in a secure environment (SSL) we had to be “legit.” That means we needed to be listed and verified on yp.com or a site like that. We listed Dasheroo with our phone number, then yp.com calls us to verify, then we put in a code they give us so they know it’s us and poof! We’re in and now we’re secure. ROADBLOCK REMOVED!

It turned out that the task of making thumbnails of each of the Insights you preview before you choose was a real pain in the a*s! So we had our creative guru take a whack at it so Mr. Dev Stud could move onto making stuff work! ROADBLOCK REMOVED!

Facebook made a few sneaky changes which made us think that we need really good error messaging depending on what Facebook does on their end that might screw up data displays on our end. ROADBLOCK REMOVED!

We’re going to launch to 20 lucky people next week, we’re getting even closer.

Last week we took our lead developer out to dim sum. Since we live smack dab in the middle of the land of dim sum we thought it was appropriate, plus we don’t get to hang out that often so it was extremely cool. And what better place to go than Hang Ah the oldest dim sum house in the U.S. right? We musta had about 10 dishes covered with spicy black bean sauce. Yum. We digress. We need a dashboard for the number of times we hit up this place.

Ok, last update, we told you all about our ongoing QA with our data feeds for your business dashboards, and with each passing week we get even closer to our Alpha release it’s time to batten down the hatches. We’ve been getting alot done on the backend of our product to support our scale.

We started to measure the data we get back from your data providers using a Dasheroo Custom Insight.

One of the coolest things we did was used our own Custom Insights to develop some nifty internal reporting. For instance, we need to know how many times our servers talk to Google’s and Facebook’s to bring your data into your dashboard. Both have these nasty limitations that we need to be aware of and optimize for. Now we can easily see how close we’re getting to hitting those limits.

In other breaking news we’re at over 3400 Facebook Likes, and engagement continues to increase. We’ll even be launching with a Facebook Engagement Insight, that’s news. We’re over 460 Twitter followers. We’ve been actively posting to Linkedin and we’re pinning some fun charts to Pinterest. You need to check them out for a laugh.

We got our startup listed on Betalist and they KILLED it for us. Thanks guys. We got THE most traffic and the most leads then we ever could have hoped for. We highly recommend it.

Onward and upward this week, we’ve got a ton to do.

In case you missed the last edition of Who Charted?

We thought we got a ton done last update, but this past week was nuts too! Tough with the World Cup going on! With us trying to launch this to you as an “Alpha” in June we’re tying up a ton of loose ends here at Dasheroo.

• QA TIME! We’re making sure all our our data sources for your business dashboards are giving us the proper data timely. Speaking of that, we’re diving into an issue we’re having with data that Google Analytics is presenting to us. Sometimes Google delays data for 3rd party partners like us and we’re trying to make that delay is short as possible.
• We tied our website to our application, this is going to help you a ton when you just want to quickly login and get access to your data.
• We’re at over 3100 Facebook Likes, engagement is going great, over 400 Twitter followers. Because we’ve been actively posting to Linkedin our traffic from Linkedin has doubled to 3.7% of overall traffic! And we’re pinning some fun charts to Pinterest. That all said, we did this nifty thing where we replaced our blog comments with our Facebook comments so they all appear in both places.
• We got our demo ready for our first meeting this week.
• We’re getting ready to get our first user (other than us!) on our product this week.
• We set up our welcome email so you can feel all warm and fuzzy when you sign up, plus you know what to do.
• We’ve been testing our end-to-end Zoho support plan so that when you submit something you want us to know about, we get it and know what to do. This includes loading our FAQs into Zoho Support so you can get access to those quick questions you might have.
• We’ve reviewed our SEO for our Dasheroo site and we applied to DMOZ and Yahoo! directories to get the word out.
• We listed our startup in every startup beta and beta announcement site we had the time to do! Crunchbase and Vator made the list!

On top of all of that one of the team members is out on vacay this week and two others are going the following but we’re not going to let it get in the way of getting something out the door. We think it’s important to get as much feedback as possible before we let it out to the masses. Your input is certainly gonna help that!

Track all of our updates!

This week we did a ton of bug fixing (what software companies allocate a ton of of their time to.) Is it sexy? Not so much, and why are these online projects so damn buggy? We’ll tell you, with all of the browsers, email clients, age of browsers and mobile devices that we use today to get our information, there is a TON of QA for every freakin’ permutation that needs to go on behind0-the-scenes. And can we catch it all before it hits your computer? No way. Sorry in advance on behalf of all software developers out there.

Customize your Insights!

But what’s cool about bug fixin’ is you know that no one is gonna send us an email about THAT one we just fixed. Might intro another one into the mix but, why go there?

Ok, we’ve got a nifty drawer for you to input your comments on for each Insight. And now you can customize the description of each Insight. This way if you share an Insight with a co-worker or client, they know exactly what they’re looking at!

We’ve started our list of FAQs so that if and when you get stuck, we’ve hopefully thought of the answer to the question you might ask. We’re starting to build out that knowledgebase now.

For those of you who are keeping track of our business dashboards scorecard we’ve tackled Insights for Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Facebook Insights, Mailchimp and your very own Custom Insights. Whew! That’s a lot of work. And the list is pretty long. We’re probably going to get it out in front of a few of you with just those to start with.

More to come! See our past progress, it’s fun with business dashboards.

Our new charting gives you the ability to track different variables on multiple axes!

Last week we told you we got further along with our deep dive into Adwords Insights for our business dashboards. Well TA-DAAAA! We got ‘em! Now you’ll have access to a bevvy of Adwords info at your purdy little fingertips.

What else happened?

We changed charting software from Charts.js to HighCharts. Why is this cool? So you can have two variables on one graph. Fancy.

We attended Subscribed, we LOVE the guys at Zuora who put on this show. More on that tomorrow.

We also worked on the “What’s Your Gig” part of our website. It’s pretty cool, you can get a quick view of what your own dashboard might look like depending on what you do in your biz.

We’re posting funny charts all the time, our latest is based on that amazing rock singer Meat Loaf. We’re up to over 2500 likes on Facebook and over 400 Twitter followers so make sure you’re following us. We’ve also got hundreds of early access people who have signed up so make sure you’re on the list before we close it!

Last week was great but we had a stellar week this week at Dasheroo with our business dashboards and we’re pretty excited.

Add comments on each Insight so that your teammates know what’s going on.

Our amazing developers went haywire going to town on our backlog of open issues and boy did we make huge strides.

All This New Stuff In Just ONE WEEK!

• Copy a dashboard so you don’t have to start from scratch
• Comment on a particular Insight which fires an email to those who share it so everyone is in the loop
• Submit support issues in our application so that we can fix them
• Make your dashboard public by sharing a read-only link
• View in Presentation/full screen mode in the event you need to put it on a big-ass TV
• Create your own dashboard and Insight descriptions, so people you collaborate with know exactly what they are looking at
• We now have an “Insight Library” window so you can easily see all of the Insights we have available to you

The Geekier You Are, The More We Love You

• You can now create a custom Insight from a URL, so if you’ve got data in-house you can pipe it into your dashboard
• We got the Adwords API approval (not without it’s trials and tribulations)!
• We are tracking events so we know how our customers are using (or more importantly are not using) parts of the service

Flashy Stuff Since We Don’t Have a Product to Give You…Yet

We’re up to over 2400 Facebook Likes and we’ve been boosting some mad posts like crazy! We’ve got close to 400 Twitter followers, a ton of Pins on Pinterest of Funny Charts and we’ve been posting on Linkedin. Make sure you get our stuff from one of these channels please. Since we don’t have a product yet we’re pretty creative with content on how you need to be measuring your biz. Fortheluvagod tell your friends about us we need it. Sound too desperate?

We are trying to get a few of you into the product by end of June - beginning of July to kick the tires for us and tell us what you like what you don’t. If you’re in that bunch you’ll be hearing from us soon. If you’re not, it won’t be long before you get your own chance, and guess what? It’s gonna be FREE!

Keep a close eye on your Facebook Fans daily!

This week we had more gains in our startup progress! We are so excited about what’s been going on at Dasheroo with our business dashboards. We’ve got our past “progress reports” since we started for you here.

Our developers took another break from developing “Insights” (we like this word better than Widgets) and worked on other parts of the product. Speaking of Insights we were having issues getting access to the Google Adwords API but GREAT NEWS; we got accepted and can get you your Adwords data in a snap.

In the meantime we’re working on cool stuff like copying a dashboard and enabling you to input dashboard descriptions (so that nosey boss will know exactly what they’re looking at!)

On other fronts we’re working on getting our Zoho support site coupled with our business dashboards application, so that you can easily get help when you need it. We’re also working on the website so that we can give you a “resources” section where you can get more help for your business, and depending on what your role is in your company you can see how dashboards might work for you.

On top of it all we’re close to 1900 Facebook Likes, we’re on Linkedin now and close to 400 Twitter followers! More great charts on our famous Who Charted, and the great blog post, Tips for Writing Great Title Tags.

We’re getting closer to getting this in front of you stay tuned.

Send invites to ask people to join your organization and share your data!

This week was yet another stellar one here at Dasheroo. Our crack team of developers took a break from doing Dashboard Insights and dove into starting to make the rest of the product work!

We now have an “Organizations” link so that you can be a member of your company’s business dashboards as well as others. Great if you’re a consultant managing multiple customers. You can also send email invites since we got our mailing system up and running as well.

Next up? Adwords Insights. They are a persnickety bunch over there and want all kindsa information on “Why” you need access. That’s ok, we’ll get there. We’re also going to revamp our “Comments” and give you the ability to comment and give descriptions on a specific Insight so when that nosey boss starts to snoop around you’ll be prepared!

Marketing

• We now have a nifty new website that replaced our placeholder site. It’s a great start to a site that we can populate with features as we get more of ‘em.
  

  Loving the new site!

• Over 1700 Facebook Likes, going for 2000, help us get there!
• Over 350 Twitter Followers
• 60 blog posts including the ever-popular Who Charted series and a great one on 5 Rules of Thumb for Testing…scintillating!
• We now own 4 positions on Google when you search “Dasheroo”.

We sent out our first Welcome email to our Early Access list. We use that great Email Marketing company VerticalResponse, you may have heard of them;-) Oh and if you’re not on the list get there fast!

Next up? We’ll be working on our Resources section on the new website where we’ll store glossaries on various data partners (Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics) and some free tools.

Onward and upward, eh?

See the demographic makeup of your Facebook Page visitors. Also you’ll see that with the Facebook icon in the corner you’ll always know what data you’re looking at!

As usual we got a ton done this week. We are deep in the mode of creating Insights as you know from our previous posts. We’re finishing up our first stab at Facebook Insights and moving on to Adwords. But before we moved on we got yet another nifty Facebook Insight. We also decided to start to use the branded colors of our Partner’s Insight so that you’re familiar with what you’re looking at.

• We’re up to 1400 Likes and 310 Twitter followers which is great!
• We’re publishing to Linkedin now in addition to Facebook and Twitter which is driving more traffic to our site and blog. (Great content btw!)
• We’re working on a new website now, hopefully to be launched next week.
• We’ve got TONS of leads for our early access list. We’re going to cap it soon. ARE YOU ON IT??

We’ve got some financial experts looking at our business model in the coming few weeks. That’s pretty cool, we’re smart and everything but these people know their stuff!

After Adwords the rest of May will be focused on nailing collaboration, first-time user experience and connecting your third party accounts to your business dashboards on Dasheroo so you can get data into your Insights.

Last week we told you how much we worked on our Google Analytics Insights, our beloved developers decided to give GA a rest and move onto Facebook. What did we get? More Insights! We took a stab at delivering a nice graph of a bunch of Facebook metrics together, see what you think. We’ll be doing a few more before we move on!

One example of how we’re thinking of putting all your Facebook Engagement data in one Insight.

What else you ask? We worked hard at making sure we’re pulling the right data for you in all of our Insights!

Our team is building these so fast it’s tough to keep up.

We also posted some great nuggets about what to track in your e-commerce system, and calculating the value of an email address. Pretty cool.

We also got a sneak peek at a website to replace our placeholder site. It looks awesome! Even better we’re trying to make it super easy for you to log right in and get dashing!

On top of all that we got some great people signing up interested in being lab rats for our business dashboards so make sure you get on the list!

We’re killing it on Facebook with engagement rates of over 1% and upwards of 1200 Likes. We’re started to start letting the cat outta the bag when we created a Linkedin page of who is behind all of this mumbo jumbo.

Next up? We will ATTACK Adwords so look out!!