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Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

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Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#31

Post by josephruscio »

sophacles wrote: post #28

I worked at a place doing network appliance stuff. We managed and developed the machines, and product to end users. A simple dashboard increased our effectiveness by an order of magnitude. Some simple graphs and deep knowledge of the code really really helped. Some data from other departments combined with this was amazing. A simple color coded call queue count told us there was a problem before the front-line tech s…

I generally paraphrase this effect as such ;-): "There is no aberration detection mechanism more sophisticated than your marketing guy glancing at a dashboard while drinking his coffee."

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#32

Post by philip1209 »

This type of dashboard is helpful, but for the business-types (and for personal encouragement) a simple dashboard of

# New Users Today # Returning Users % Conversion Rate in Last 24 Hours % Open Rate on Last Email Campaign $ Dollars Raised Today

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#33

Post by drcube »

MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #30

At any given time, there are a near infinite number of things your business "needs" to do: add a dashboard, A/B test your landing pages, test your database backups, fix your security holes, improve your customer service, add more metrics tracking, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. A big part of running your business involves looking at this list and picking the ones that make sense for your business, not what the bl…

I'd argue that having a well illustrated overview of your whole company helps you prioritize this list.

So put business and technological metrics on that dashboard. And then you can decide whether you should be focusing most on customer support, A/B testing, or that network bottleneck.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#34

Post by MicahWedemeyer »

drcube wrote: post #33
MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #30

At any given time, there are a near infinite number of things your business "needs" to do: add a dashboard, A/B test your landing pages, test your database backups, fix your security holes, improve your customer service, add more metrics tracking, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. A big part of running your business involves looking at this list and picking the ones that make sense for your business, not what the bl…

I'd argue that having a well illustrated overview of your whole company helps you prioritize this list. So put business and technological metrics on that dashboard. And then you can decide whether you should be focusing most on customer support, A/B testing, or that network bottleneck.

I won't disagree, but my main point is that everything has a cost. These blog posts often present what your business "needs" to do in a context-free manner.

If you are sitting on your thumbs looking for something to do, then definitely add a dashboard. If you're like me and have a backlog a mile long, maybe a dashboard isn't the best way to spend your time.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#35

Post by BryanB55 »

I'd also be careful to avoid vanity metrics. I think your time is better spent building a dashboard for actionable metrics. A map of all of your api calls might look cool but what are you going to do with that? I'm more interested in average customer life-time value, churn, customer acquisition cost, retention etc... I've been looking into using geckoboard for this as it seems like it would make setup go much faster.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#36

Post by pcopley »

MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #34
drcube wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that having a well illustrated overview of your whole company helps you prioritize this list. So put business and technological metrics on that dashboard. And then you can decide whether you should be focusing most on customer support, A/B testing, or that network bottleneck.

I won't disagree, but my main point is that everything has a cost. These blog posts often present what your business "needs" to do in a context-free manner. If you are sitting on your thumbs looking for something to do, then definitely add a dashboard. If you're like me and have a backlog a mile long, maybe a dashboard isn't the best way to spend your time.

I think the biggest benefit to the dashboard is (compared to something like A/B testing) it is much less iterative, so with the exception of adding another graph here or there, when it's "done" it's done. If you have the dashboard at all, it continues being useful. I've never heard anyone say, "Finally! We're done with our A/B testing! On to the next to do item..."

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#37

Post by pcopley »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #24
tomgallard wrote: post #3

I have to say, I'm in two minds about this. On one side- yes it's supercool to have a dashboard with maps and metrics and everything like that. And I can see it could be really useful too when something's going wrong. On the other hand, I'd be wary of building anything like this until I had a good number of customers, paying me money for a service. Is the product so complete (I would ask myself) and my users so happy…

maybe - I have taken the time to build a graphite/stasd setup. It is over engineered for now, but it grows and is really easy to add in new metrics. (there is even a fab file to install on ubuntu buried in github/lifeisstillgood/frozone) but, you are right - a dashboard that measures how the site is going is useful. One that measures cashflow, email conversion rates and more is more useful. Linking those into graphit…

As someone who has never used Graphite OR statsd, can you explain why you wouldn't want to do this?

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#39

Post by michaelbuckbee »

If you're interested in doing this, two things that have previously helped me:

Stashboard - Open source status monitor for elements of your infrastructure, run it on AppEngine

http://www.stashboard.org/

GeckoBoard - Dashboard as a service - Can be coerced into creating whatever kind of charts/graphs you want on a slick looking board, but is set to do polling of data which is less helpful for system operations stuff, but nicer for marketing, MAU/DAU monitoring, signups, etc.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#40

Post by lifeisstillgood »

pcopley wrote: post #37
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe - I have taken the time to build a graphite/stasd setup. It is over engineered for now, but it grows and is really easy to add in new metrics. (there is even a fab file to install on ubuntu buried in github/lifeisstillgood/frozone) but, you are right - a dashboard that measures how the site is going is useful. One that measures cashflow, email conversion rates and more is more useful. Linking those into graphit…

As someone who has never used Graphite OR statsd, can you explain why you wouldn't want to do this?

Graphite/carbon/whisper is a rrd like tool - you give it a number of ticks labelled with a certain metric (facebook.photo.upload) and it counts the incoming ones over a fixed period, averages them, stores the average and goes on and on. Then it draws you a graph over those periods

this is great for "what is normal" and "something has changed over past 5 mins, 5 days, 5 weeks"

some things you want on your dashboard are absolutes that don't vary well with time (cash on hand/ assets vs liabilities)

also the whisper database is awkward to query if you are not aggregating - so you cannot store which customers actually responded to which email campaign - that needs a real RDBMS

So it's really good for watching stuff over time - like you used to use tail -f for. But other stuff needs to be captured robustly and then maybe time graphed

tl dr

Some things are trends - you want to know easily and quickly which ones are going up, and when the trend goes haywire. Use graphite et al. other things are "action this day" - trend or not you need the email addresses of all users on the blue campaign.

Using UDP you lose a not insignificant number as well

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