Tag: Weekly Progress

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: New Release + Nice Conversion Rates

June 2, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

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

Release Summary:

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

Great job guys!

Next Up?

For your business dashboards pleasure we are working on:

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

Conversion Rates

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

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

Hiring

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

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

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

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

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

May 26, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiring

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

iOS!

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

Billing

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

Videos

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

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

Track Our Startup: 28 Days to Launch Business Dashboards!

March 31, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Your YouTube data right in your Dasheroo business dashboards!

We have been heads down getting ready to launch, and boy have we been working our dashy little butts off! We’ve got about 3 more releases left before our big launch (our stake in the ground for “hey, we’re here and we’re real!”)

Ok, here’s the rundown:

Next Release - YOUTUBE!

We’re gearing up for our next release this week (we try to do them every two weeks) and this one includes:

YouTube Insights - Recent videos, most viewed videos, engagement, views by video and more!
RSS feed - This cool widget will let you track feeds of content you want to keep an eye on.

We’re also always fixing bugs and working on stuff that you can’t see to make Dasheroo more robust for your business dashboards.

Next Up - Facebook Ads Insights? Perhaps!

We did some initial data-gathering for our next app integration for Facebook Ads since we’re having some issues with Google+. We’re not there yet but look for more deets on this next week.

We’re also going to be changing our calculation for Twitter engagement, adding Favorites to the score since that’s how more people are looking at it.

And we’re knee-deep in figuring out how to give you a great interface for bundling apps in a dashboard!

We handed out a buncha Moo biz cards at #SMMW15!

#SMMW15 - Social Media Marketing World, San Diego

We went to this amazing show that highlighted the fact that what we’re doing is so necessary for small businesses, agencies, consultants and more. We heard from @tedrubin @meloniedadaro @kimgarst @marismith, @jenns_trends, @suebzimmerman @lutzfinger @joepulizzi and one of our faves @ducttape that social media marketing is growing and has never been better for businesses to get them to prosper. Check out the first in a few posts about the show.

We also wanted to get Dasheroo in front of a lot of pretty influential people in the industry as we’re getting ready for launch, and we were really successful at that.

Our Newest Addition…Josh!

We just announced that our buddy Josh Feinberg is joining Team Dasheroo. Why do we love Josh? Well this team has worked under his Product Guru-ness for the last 13 years so we’re super-excited to have him on board as a co-founder. And no we don’t only hire people with J-names.

Track Our Startup: 35 Days to Launch + New Insights

March 24, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We’re tracking our own launch plan with the Dasheroo Google Sheets integration!

Last week we told you we released our new Google Sheets integration for your business dashboards. We hope you get in there and check it out, we’ve seen a ton of users already using it to track things like sales, revenue, task lists and more.

New Release: Insights + 60-Day Date Ranges!

In an effort to make our current Apps more robust in most releases we try to give you more ways to view your data or more data to view! In this release it’s a bit of both.

Facebook - Since we’re sure many of you love to see Facebook Likes, Shares, Comments and Clicks in one Insight, sometimes it works better visually to see them individually, so we split them all out to give you four separate Insights.

Highest engagement and Recent posts Insights now display more than five.

Google Analytics - Pie chart for Social Sources and Top Sources by Medium & Device Type.

Twitter - Highest engagement and Recent Tweets Insights now display more than five

For many of our Insights (not all) you’ll now be able to choose a date range of up to 60 days, up from 30. For lotsa technical reasons, this is a tough problem to solve. Some of our Insights will not support the date range so you might get a message for those in particular.

Launch - 35 Days and Counting

This past week we’re knee deep in our launch deets. We even have a Google Sheet we’re tracking to.

We’ve got a ton of marketing to do, a new website, and doing about 2-3 releases more until that day to make it a real wow for our users. Thanks for all of the awesome feedback.

Speaking of feedback, John has been emailing anyone who signs up asking them why they chose to sign up and where they heard about us. An astonishing amount of people want to give that feedback right away so we’re pretty excited about it.

Next Up

We’ll be trying to get as many features in as possible which includes, but is not limited to (sounded all legal there didn’t we?)

More Insights for our current apps
YouTube Analytics
Facebook Ads
And a few other surprises we’ll tell you about as we get closer to launch!

Austin (nothing to do with #SXSW)

We moved into our Austin office, now James can stop talking to himself! Just kidding James. We welcomed Court our QA guru and Andrew, our amazing platform engineer. They’re busy setting up their development environments and getting to work on helping to pull in features for the launch. We’re so happy to have them as part of the team!

Our Austin team, hard at work!

John is still shaking the money tree and getting closer than ever to close the first round of funding…GO JOHNNY! We’re also hiring developers in Austin (we’ll talk to you wherever you are though) and a Content Marketing/Social Media guru anywhere. Tell your friends!

Track Our Startup - Google Sheets Launched for Business Dashboards

March 18, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

While some of you may be at South by Southwest #SXSW us Dasherooers have hunkered in the bunker to deliver you a stellar new application you can add to your business dashboards….Google Sheets, TA-DAH! And one of our founders and two of his teammates even LIVE in Austin and they’re not there, THAT’S how dedicated we are.

Here is a great example of the new Google Sheets integration in Dasheroo; the top app requests we get in a leaderboard Insight and a pie chart Insight, awesome, huh?

WE know we’ve been working on it for quite a bit of time but it’s a hard problem to solve and we wanted to do it right. So get on in there and let us know if we nailed it. Go here if you want the Sheets Deets.

Next Up? YouTube!

On another note we’ve been sniffing around YouTube’s API (that’s the way we can bring data into your Dasheroo dashboard) and we’re beginning work on adding that as a next application. We’re pretty excited about it since there have been a ton of requests from users to look at their YouTube views and engagement.

Gettin’ Ready to Launch

You know launch is upcoming when you’ve got a calendar with deliverables and NAMES next to each with a date. As of today we’re 45 days from when we take the “beta” label right off of the logo. We’re also gearing up for a new site and some other great things we need to wait to talk about as we get closer!

Office Space in Austin

We secured office space in Austin, very cool since we’re building out a team there. If you know of any great developers or a content marketing person in the Austin area, tell them to email us at [email protected].

Track Our Startup: We Met, We Ate, We Conquered

March 3, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

Uchi restaurant in Austin with team Dasheroo.

Two bottles of Wakatake were harmed during this dinner, and our co-founder John photobombed us!

What a week it’s been. The team came together for an awesome full day meeting in that great city of Austin, where our co-founder James resides with his awesome family. BTW, it was our awesome board member’s idea. Dang, that’s a whole lotta awesome!

Everybody gave our board members an update on the product, where we’ve come since beta (did you know we released 15 times in 15 weeks since then?) and where we’re going.

At the meeting we talked about:

When we’d rip the beta label off the product.
What we’ll be giving for free (which will be a lot!)
What other apps we’ll be offering up
What nifty features we’ll be offering (this stuff is pretty exciting although a bit nerve racking for the team)
Our back end systems for scalability so we can handle a lot of customers concurrently
All of the pre-and post launch activities, PR, trade shows, etc.
What people we need to hire (A new A++ developer starts in 2 weeks and we just got a full time QA star!)
Where we’re at with funding - and it’s so very close!

We can’t believe this was on the wall when we got there! Our kinda town!

Whew! All of this will be consolidated and you’ll know where we are on the road to launch in the coming few weeks. We’ll also be releasing new apps and Insights on the road to launch. No need waiting to give you some great new features and apps for your business dashboards, right?

Kudos to James for many things, two of which we’ll mention here: giving us a nifty color-coordinated gantt chart for how he sees his team (of now 6!) delivering what we think is going to be a kick-ass product for you. Secondly we are forever indebted to you James for bringing in amazing BBQ from Stiles Switch BBQ. We’re converts.

Finally, all the way from San Francisco we come to Uchi, perhaps the best sushi we’ve all ever had. Wow. Finally finally, we love you Continental Club. Don’t know how that Dasheroo sticker got on the wall but man it really spices up the place!

(*Sticking stickers on walls is not condoned by Dasheroo.)

Track Our Startup: Austin Here We Come!

February 24, 2015 by John Hingley·2 Comments

We’ve been talking about Google Sheets for a few weeks now, it’s finally in QA and we’re banging away on it. What does that mean? Here are a few “what ifs” we ask the code:

What if there is an empty cell in a sheet, how do we handle that?
What’s cool about this Insight? It’s our own Google Sheet of what applications you’re requesting!
What if a user doesn’t put a value in the x-axis?
What if there are 40,000 rows of data?
What if the user doesn’t understand what we’re asking you to do?

All of these and hundreds more “what ifs” get vetted by our team but it’s tedious and it’s what we need to do to make sure you get what you need when you’re looking at your business dashboards.

What else are we working on?

All hands are on Sheets, we’ve had a ton of sick days, (took a few of us “out” for a month!) but we’re still working on a few other Insights. As you can see with the graph we’re showing (it’s in Google Sheets by the way ) we’ll be looking at Google+ and YouTube next to see what requirements are. We know Pinterest is a biggie but rest assured if you’ve requested Pinterest, we’ve applied to be an official partner. More on that as we hear from them.

John is busy shaking the money tree and having some great meetings with potential future partners. We’d love to tell you who but unfortunately for us, if we tell ya we gotta kill ya and that’s just not good for anyone.

We’re pretty stoked about going to Austin for our board meeting. We’re looking to build a team out in Austin because we like those nice people, what they eat and their music. Plus they’re just damn smart!

Gotta get back to QAing Sheets!

Track Our Startup: Working on Google Sheets!

February 17, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

While some of you were wooing your significant others on that Hallmark-fabricated holiday Valentine’s Day, we were busy with a flurry of excitement around our new Instagram business dashboards as well as lots more new users!

Speaking of, we had the best week ever for sign ups and engagement. The Google Analytics Marketplace really went wild sending us good people that like what we do. Our engagement metrics increased by over 10% which is awesome. Oh, engagement to us is that you’re in our app looking at your stats.

Next up is going to be Google Sheets. We’ve talked about how difficult this one is because there are so many ways businesses use Sheets, but we really think out of the gate we’ll get something really valuable for you Sheets users.

More excitement? Our team has moved Sheets onto our “staging” environment (fancy name for the server it goes on before it goes “live”) so we can get knee-deep into QA-ing this thing. We’ll be looking to release this by next week.

We’ll also be revisiting Facebook and Twitter for some new features, one is the ability to look at more than 5 posts when you’re looking at your most recent posts.

We’re working on a way to inform you that we’ve got new features and fixes (they come out all the time) so when you “refresh” you know what new stuff you’ll be getting. So we’re working on a way for you guys to know what’s going on more than an email.

We were able to sync our Salesforce.com org to our new Zendesk org so that we can start to track all of our communications with you through one interface. Hopefully this will go smoothly as we roll it out, but you know how software is. Also, to that guy from Zendesk who sat right in front of us on an empty beach this weekend…Boo

We are working on bumping up the ability for you to look at data outside a 30-day date range. On our staging environment we’re testing a 60-day range which is awesome!

We’re still working on closing up a round of funding. We’ll announce who, what, where and when, as we launch this sucker, but it’s pretty exciting!

And lastly and most importantly, we’re getting ready for our first board meeting in Austin, but more importantly the tasty BBQ.

Track Our Startup: Instagram Business Dashboards + More!

February 10, 2015 by John Hingley·0 Comments

We’ve got Insights for all of your Instagram metrics!

We released Instagram for your business dashboards and we’re stoked! You’ll get an overview, follower numbers, Likes, comments and more. Go check them out and add them to your dashboards.

We released a few new Insights for your Google Analytics Dashboards, too. You’ll see Social Sources as a line graph and New vs. Returning Users as a pie chart, fun!

Working on Stuff…

We’ve been wrestling with Facebook a bit. Some of their data is returning to us wonky so we needed to fix the Gender graph. Also New Fans are currently one day behind, we’re working on making that an up-to-the-hour update. Sorry about that.

Our email inbox runneth over with new app requests!

We’re also working on giving you more of a custom date range feature so you’ll be able to choose date ranges outside of 30 days. Hopefully we’ll slowly roll that feature in the next few weeks.

We’ve been getting more requests for new Apps! We love this so keep ’em coming.

We’ve reached 930 Users and we’re not technically “live” yet, this is awesome. That coupled with over 13,300 Facebook Likes and over 2,500 Twitter followers, we couldn’t be happier. Thanks for all of the social love everybody!

Sheets!

Our dev team is hard at work building out our upcoming Google Sheets integration. This one will be great since there are so many different ways people use Sheets for their business. Can’t wait to get this one live and into your hands since it’s been a very popular feature request.

The whole team has a meeting with a really awesome VC this week, it’s the 2nd one! He’s interested in coming into the round that we’re working on now. We’ve also got some mad love from friends and family so we’re pretty excited about that part too.

Plus, we finally got listed on the Constant Contact Marketplace, and the Google Analytics Partner site and we’re already getting new Users!