Tag: Twitter

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: 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!

The Perfect Social Media Dashboard: The Socialite

August 5, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Social Media is either something you love, love, love for your business or a complete thorn in your side! If you’re anything like us it’s a love fest with social media but we’re ok if you don’t love it so much, it certainly takes some time to devote to it to make it work.

On top of it all trying to track down what actually IS working and what isn’t is a real time suck, for us anyway. So when we really looked at what we needed to track here internally we thought “hmmm, if we need to consolidate our social media marketing metrics so does everyone else, let’s make a dashboard template!”

So without further adieu, simply click on Add Insights and Templates in the top of your Dasheroo menu and you’ll see this:

Select “Socialite” if you need to see your metrics for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube in an instant!

Click to connect all of your social media accounts and you’ve got a fancy social media mix of awesome insights. You can add to this dashboard if you think the insights we selected don’t meet your needs or add any other application that makes sense like Google Analytics Sessions or LinkedIn insights.

There you have it, a free social media dashboard in an instant!

Creating a Great Time-Sensitive Offer

June 15, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Dasheroo business dashboards pricing plan.

The Dasheroo pricing plan we’ve been working on, we think it’s a great plan!

A lot of us here at Dasheroo are marketers at heart, we’ve got it in our blood, hell our engineers are great marketers! So we decided to put the prowess to work with a great offer, an offer that spun out of a problem we have, the lack of a billing system.

Now while we would love to be free for all, our investors might not like a $0 return so we’ve been hard at work on getting billing in place. But in the meantime we’ve been giving away the kitchen sink for free.

So we’ve been hard at work developing what we think is a pretty cool pricing plan. Now you can look at what you’re getting for free and derive what a real value it has been.

Now that we know we’ll be releasing our billing system soon, we decided to get as many people “grandfathered” in for free at a great level of service as possible. So we thought we’d go out with a killer time-sensitive offer that actually ends today where everyone who signs up for Dasheroo by today will automatically get our Grande plan for free for 20 years.

Dasheroo tweet of their time sensitive offer.

We went mad Tweeting our special time-sensitive offer.

Sounds crazy right?

We Tweeted it every day.
We put it on Facebook.
We ran ads.
We included it in every newsletter

And here’s what we got out of it:

Since it’s time sensitive we got a ton of people signing up now, even if they won’t use it for a month or so.
We got a ton of people talking about it on social media
We doubled our user growth for the entire year in just one month

Does time-sensitivity work? It sure does, especially when you offer a ton of value. In our case it’s a great product for 20 years which is a $6000 savings.

Oh, have you signed up yet? Better get on it!

Twitter Audience Insights: Target Content for Twitter Followers

June 8, 2015 by Dasherooer·0 Comments

Ever wonder in advance what type of content you need to develop to get your Twitter followers excited? Well Twitter is now helping you. They recently released a ton of new analytics, Twitter Audience Insights which can help you decide what type of content to publish.

We took a look at Dasheroo’s Audience on Twitter to find out what to write about.

Not a surprise that Twitter followers like Tech and Marketing, but it seems we can Tweet a bit more about Leadership and Business news! Nice.

Also interesting that Dasheroo’s followers are into Drama and Comedy which we love too so we can start to relate Tweet and content to popular dramas and do some testing there.

Good thing we’ll be accepting Visa when we start billing! Also interesting to know that our followers like Premium brands.

Great to know that our followers are on iOS since that’s what we’re developing first. So now we can blog and Tweet about our iOS app and get the word out on Twitter!

I should also say that this new reporting provides a great way to target your Twitter ads too.

So there are just a few ideas on how we use the new Twitter audience analytics. You can bet we’re going to see how we can get this data into your Dasheroo dashboard too!

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

May 5, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

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!

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.

Amazingly, 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.

Looking at Business Dashboards a New Way - Mashups

April 30, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We all naturally tend to look at our business metrics in a silo. “What are my website sessions like?” Better go look at Google Analytics. “How many Twitter Followers did I gain last week?” Hop on over to your Twitter account.

Well, as we’re sure you are well aware of, we’re aiming to change all that. First, our business dashboards allow you to look at all your data from your apps, all in one spot. Yup, no more logging into all those various apps, all those tabs to find your data. All your data in one spot. That’s Dasheroo! OK, enough of the self-serving banter. But we really do hope this helps you make more well informed, data driven decisions to grow your biz.

Now, wouldn’t it be cool if you could look at data points from different apps, like Twitter Followers and Facebook Fans, together? You could instantly compare audience growth between the two. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see if your Google Adwords campaigns are also driving not just reported clicks, but also growth in over website sessions? Reese’s! (like peanut butter and chocolate…)

Looking at things this way, you can compare performance between a couple channels, or even see if there’s correlation between them. But if you have to jump back and forth between the two applications, or combine them into a Google Sheet for a custom report, chances are you might not get around to it.

Think about these possibilities:

Twitter Followers vs. Facebook Fans - what a great way to compare audience growth!
Facebook Likes vs. Twitter ReTweets - this can show you engagement comparison.
Facebook Engagement Rate vs. LinkedIn Engagement Rate - instantly compare engagement rate across these two networks. Which one is performing better?
Google AdWords Impressions vs. Google Analytics Sessions - wow, maybe your Adwords spend, in addition to driving tracked clicks, is also driving untracked users to your site. That might make your investment in Adwords seem pretty good.
Twitter Re-Tweets vs. Google Analytics Social Sessions - See if you social efforts and engagement is driving users to your website.
Facebook Reach vs. Google Analytics Sessions - another cool way to see if your social efforts are driving sessions or users to your website.

Here’s a sneak peek (shhhhh;)

Our new business dashboards with mashups!

Our new business dashboard mashups! Coming soon to a screen near you

Now, we need to be careful about the ‘ol correlation vs. causation conundrum, since you may not be able to absolutely prove that one outcome affects the other. But it certainly does give you more insight into how your efforts in one area may complement or help out in another, or if your performance in one social channel is way better than it is in another. Sound good?

We hope so! Because when we officially launch Dasheroo (yup, ripping that ‘beta’ sticker off) on May 5, you’ll get a 1/2 dozen of what we call ‘mashups’, which will give you instant insight into just those metrics.

We hope ya like ’em, and as always you’ll get a chance to tell us about other multi-app Insights…we mean ‘mashups’!

10 Amazing Uses for RSS Feeds in Your Business

April 17, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We just released the ability to use RSS feeds in Dasheroo. Sounds so 2007 doesn’t it? But the power of RSS for access to data is awesome. Yeah we’re geeks, but let’s not think of it as “RSS”, let’s think of it as not having to troll the web or click a million bookmarks to find the up-to-the minute data you’re looking for. So we decided to give you these 10 awesome uses for RSS feeds.

Let’s get ready to rumble with RSS!

1. Track your competition. Go to your competitor’s blog and see if they have an RSS link. If they do? Great. If they don’t you might want to try using the blog URL and adding a /rss to the end of it and see if that works when you create your Dasheroo Insight.

We like to see what the competition and industry is up to, compared to what we’re writing about!

2. Track your Tweets. If you’ve got someone doing your company Tweets for you and you want to keep a quick eye on what you’re saying it’s easy, especially if you have multiple Twitter accounts you want to monitor. Go to FeedTwit, sign in with your Twitter account, use that URL in Dasheroo.

3. Gather inspiration. If you write content for your company gather the URLs of the sites you visit to give you that information. For instance on Dasheroo’s Dataviz Friday we follow 538, Flowingdata and Information is Beautiful and republish their awesome content with backlinks to their site.

4. Track crazy nutty holidays. Perhaps you plan marketing campaigns around holidays, did you know that April 11th was Barbershop Quartet Day? You could run promotions around fun holidays you never heard of.

5. Track sports. Track the latest news from your favorite team, cuz let’s face it, it can’t be all about business!

A graphic of us tracking all of these amazing sites for inspiration on what to post, crazy holidays and ... hey, how did the SF Giants news get in there?

We track all of these amazing sites for inspiration on what to post, crazy holidays and … hey, how did the SF Giants news get in there?

6. Track the weather. Let’s say you count on business in another zip code or state. If local weather is preventing them from getting business done with you, that could have an affect on your sales. Go to the National Weather Service, at the bottom of the page choose the location you want to track the weather for. Then use the URL they give you for your Dasheroo Weather Insight! Make sure you’re diversifying your selling or your advertising from those locations.

7. Track Google Alerts. If you’ve got some alerts set up that mention you or your company you can get them into a feed. Just select RSS Feed in your Google Alert settings instead of email, click on the RSS icon and you’ll get URL you’ll need to put into your Dasheroo RSS Insight.

8. Track your mentions. If you use a service like Mention.com or Trackur, when you set up your alert, go to settings, manage your alerts and click on the RSS icon. Then take that URL and create a Dasheroo Insight for that.

9. Track your own blog. If you’ve got someone writing blog content for your company you might want to share it with everyone who is looking at your dashboards. Then your sales or customer service team knows what is being said when your readers ask about it.

10. Food. And because it can’t be all about business and sports, how about best recipes of the day! Food Network has a plethora of them! Use http://blog.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/tag/best-recipes/rss as your URL for your feed.

We’re hungry now!

There ya have it. Get on in there and have a blast with RSS, we are!

Why Your Inbox is Your Social Media Marketing Hub

April 1, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Our inbox is NUTS with social network emails!

We just got back from Social Media Marketing World #SMMW15, and it was great. We met a ton of people and learned a bunch. But we started to think about how old school email still plays a huge role in social media marketing even WITH all of the social media marketing we’ve got.

On LinkedIn, if you send an inMail or a connection request an email is sent to your personal inbox. You might not check LinkedIn but a few times a week but you’re checking your email all the time.
On Twitter if someone connects with you, favorites or RT’s one of your Tweets, guess what? You get an email! Then from that email you can follow that person back. One of the great ways to get in front of someone for just little work is just “favorite” their Tweet. They’ll also give you suggestions in your inbox for who to follow, thanks Twitter!
Pinterest lets you know if one of your Facebook friends joins Pinterest, they constantly mail you with suggestions of what your friends are pinning, or if any of your friends pins something to your board.
Instagram will give you email notifications if someone Likes or Comments on your photos if you set it up that way.
YouTube will email you when someone subscribes or when a channel you subscribe to uploaded a new video.
Google+ will tell you when someone has added you or remind you if you’ve been invited to an event.
Facebook, well, they just want to own the world don’t they 😉

Hey maybe we’re biased because we love email and founded and worked at VerticalResponse but hey, you can’t disregard that the medium is still rockin’.

Lessons Learned SMMW15: Don’t Bore Me

March 30, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

John on the U.S.S. Midway in San Diego at the SMMW15 show!

Team Dasheroo went to the infamous Social Media Marketing World (#SMMW15) conference with a BANG! We wanted to meet and learn from the pros and network with everyone who cared about social media since that’s what we decided to build business dashboards for first. Turns out it was about 3200 people that cared enough about it to spend a cool $1k per person. Fierce! Thanks to Michael Stelzner (amazing guy) and his awesome team for a fantastic show.

We went to a few sessions that really touted the fact that on social media you need to be real, you need to be fun and you need to be personable.

Be Real

Ann Handley, Marketing Profs, really drove this point home with dozens of examples of great companies that are being “real” on their websites and with their email marketing campaigns. It was all about being real as a business and people falling in love with who you are. Pretty powerful stuff and something we all take for granted. Thanks Ann!

Not more content, better content..get sassy! @annhandley #SMMW15

“Be fun!” says Sue B. Zimmerman!

Be Fun

Sue B. Zimmerman, The Instagram Expert, really drove this point home. Instagram as a medium is visual and should be fun but should always tie back to what you’re all about. If you’re an enterprise software company and you post pics of your kitty with no tie-in, it’s not good.

It’s all about a great bio and thoughtful content to be a success on Instagram! @SueBZimmerm an
Don’t overpost or underpost to Instagram, you’ll lose followers and engagement! @SueBZimmerman #SMMW15

Be Human

Ted Rubin who owns the hashtag #RonR, or return on relationship, had a fantastic session where he talked about how for him it’s personal with his content. He loves crazy socks, he takes pics of his crazy socks and posts them. People now come to expect images of his socks! Melonie Dodaro, LinkedIn expert, also had a few things to say about it as well.

Reach and frequency is great, but a community is power” well said @TedRubin #SMMW15
Interact, engage, look people in the eye, and build relationships. #RonR
Social has made marketing hard and tools make it look too easy. Don’t forget the people! Great session already with @TedRubin #SMMW15
Don’t worry about ur company LI page, focus on your personal profile. people want to deal with people, not a logo. @MelonieDodaro #SMMW15
Wanna rank high 4 ur profile on linkedin? Optimize keywords as a person not a ‘thing’ as u would on google. @MelonieDodaro #SMMW15

So bottom line? Don’t hide behind who you really are on social media and you’ll have a ton of fun with your followers!