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.

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.