Track Our Startup: Neil Patel Speaks Dashboards + SME Ink!

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Team Dasheroo is heading off to ICON16, Infusionsoft’s annual event in Phoenix. We’re pretty excited to see all of the great Infusionsoft customers and all of the amazing sessions that are going to be held. No doubt there will be a lot of folks who need dashboards for all of those metrics. If you are going to be there let us know!Neil Patel - SEO Pro

We’re teeing up our next round of premium apps, HubSpot is on the way!

We Got Some Press!

Thank you to Neil Patel for your article 75 Content Marketing Tools You Can’t Live Without AND Engage Like The Pros: 27 Social Media Tools You Ought to Use. Holy moly we got some great traffic to our site and some great signups. We are loving you right now Neil. Neil is just an amazing quality individual that WILL help you with your SEO and marketing in general. Check him out.

Janine wrote a great article for her Inc.com column 5 Phrases Great Leaders Never Say and I was lucky enough to be published in Social Media Examiner How to Prospect Using Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. It’s got about 3,500 shares already so it’s doing pretty well IMHO.

We are knee-deep in talking to investors and strategic partners, discussing the importance of business dashboards, more on that as it develops. It ain’t easy out there right now for a startup but we’re sure trying! I’m getting back to it now.

Track Our Startup: Easy Onboarding + Custom Data Dashboard

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You may have heard that we have a Zapier integration that we’re pretty happy about. Why? We’ve got a ton of great users who want us to integrate with their applications but we just can’t do it all. So with Zapier, you can take a trigger from any app that they integrate with and point it to a Dasheroo graph…voila! You’ve done the integration yourself.

What Else is Going On?

We released a new onboarding process. We wanted to do a few things with it, namely make it easy to understand, easy to connect your data dashboard to  your data sources and easy to get to a custom data dashboard!

Now when you first come in to Dasheroo you’re met with the following screen designed to get you to the right place as well as highlighting our custom data feature for your dashboards:

Dasheroo data dashboard onboarding process

We also wanted to make it easier to find our custom dashboards – Now when you add an insight or connect to a new data source you’re met with a new screen:

Dasheroo custom data dashboard

So you can easily get your data into your dashboard from our Push API, a webhook or our new Zapier integration. Pretty cool, huh?

We’ve also redesigned our template gallery where we’ll be adding even more dashboard templates for you to start off with.

Dasheroo dashboards template gallery

You Want More? 

We launched with Infusionsoft dashboards, and since those insights are only included in our paid plans (not free!) we’ve decided to give you a free month so you can kick the tires. You need to use promotion code: infusionsoft-trial.

We’re planning an integration with Hubspot soon, we’re not ready yet but we’re working on it. We’ve also got Sendgrid you’ll be able to add to your dashboards as well.

Janine wrote a zinger for Inc. “The Door Isn’t Always Closed, ‘No’ Just Means ‘Not Yet‘”, she got published 0n Relevance.com for “3 Tips to Securing Inbound Links” and I got a piece on Business.com for “Nail Biting, Be Gone: 3 Ways to Avoid a Big Mistake When Making a Big Decision“. Check ’em out, they’re worth a quick read.

We’re planning on raising another round of funding. We’ll let you know how that goes. The environment ain’t great but we’ve got something great going on, at least our users think we do! We’re even thinking of extending our A round to get the right folks in.

We’ve got another board meeting to get ready for this week, here we go.

Track Our Startup: New Insights + Dasheroo Dashboards On the Appexchange

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Dasheroo Dashboards on Salesforce AppexchangeThe Dasheroo steam roller keeps rolling! As you know we announced yesterday that we have an app on the Salesforce Appexchange and we’re pretty stoked about it. It gives any Salesforce user the opportunity to stick Dasheroo dashboards in a tab in their account. Pretty cool huh? Get It Now from the Appexchange and if you like us please give us a review!

New Insights for Your Dashboards

We always want to revisit applications we integrate with to see if we need to keep adding to them, especially if our users give us the feedback that they want them. So we did and in a week or so we’ll be adding Facebook, Instagram and Google Analytics along with a Stripe insight to the mix, you’ll be really happy about them.

We got the team together to go over our focus for the next year, get as many users to the site as possible (inexpensively), pay close attention to “who” is using us, follow up with potential high-value contacts and build for the scale of the future. Great questions were asked and we’re marching forward to grow.

I was really excited that the Product Team got together and created a real Product Calendar (and it goes out pretty far!). We’ve got our roadmap nailed for the first quarter at least so it’s a great thing that we all know what we need to work on.

Ink!

Janine wrote a great article you need to read, 12 Great Content Ideas in 12 Months for Inc.com. It’s jam-packed with amazing ideas so check it out. We also got some great mentions by blogger and marketer Anna Fatlowitz, How I Doubled My Instagram Followers in Two Weeks, and Afton Negrea, How to Create a Social Media Routine that Rocks. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We’re at Dreamforce + Lightning App Builder + New Features On The Way

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It’s the first day of Dreamforce and it’s starting out to be awesome. With keynotes from Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com; Julia Hartz, Eventbrite; John Collison, Stripe; Boylon Slat, The Ocean Cleanup and so many more, plus the 150,000+ attendees here all over San Francisco, it’s pretty exciting.

However the level of douchbaggery that goes with any show like this increases with a huge increase in attendees. You know the guys who’ve been buzzing around big events like the Salesforce event for years that think they’re super awesome and they’ll tell you just how awesome? “I’m speaking at the blah, blah, blah keynote, here’s who I am and what I do and I don’t give a rat’s ass who you are and what you do.” Those types. Ewe! Spoke to one a day ago, like that, and when I tried to get a word in edgewise to actually introduce myself, he just kept  on steamrolling me. I did break out “Oh great to meet you too; my wife here was the first partner ever of Salesforce.com at VerticalResponse, yeah the most downloaded app for years and years I’m sure you remember her.” No response, don’t even think it registered with him. Wait, did I just become one of “them”? No.

But, how does he know we couldn’t be a great partner or customer?! Isn’t the point of these shows to network and make deals?

Anyhoo, along with those types, there’s lots of really cool people and a ton of awesome new apps to see. Plus, some great and familiar faces like our friends at Salesforce, InsideView, Campaign Monitor, VerticalResponse, Zuora, & Full Circle Insights.

We’re lucky enough to be asked to speak tomorrow on Salesforce’s new Lightning App Builder Salesforce Components Imagebuilt on the Salesforce 1 Platform. One of our engineers was able to build Dasheroo as a component right in the mobile version of Salesforce which is really slick. Way to go Alex! We’ll be at the Marriott Marquis on 4th St. in San Francisco at 8 am Wednesday the 16th. Check out our fancy press release here. This is an expensive show so we’ve got to get the most out of it.

New Stuff

Last week Josh went through our product roadmap for our Platform and it’s pretty cool. Some notes below:

Features On Deck and/or in QA:

  • Competitor Dashboards
  • Android App
  • Google Campaigns and Goals
  • Hashtag tools for Twitter and Instagram

Features Further Down the Road…

  • More integrations with more apps
  • Speaking of more integrations, helping get other developers developing dashboards of their own with developer tools
  • Ability to have an ADMIN user manage multiple users for agencies and larger teams
  • Exporting a dashboard to a PDF so you can send reports
  • The ability for you to build your own insights!

Dasheroo in The News

Dasheroo got a nice mention on the  Hooklead blog, 5 KPIs to Track on Your Dashboard, John’s Business.com article is out, 6 Rules for Following People on Twitter. His awesome Duct Tape Marketing Article hit, 3 Smart Templates to Use to Generate Leads, and Janine’s Inc.com article, is out: 5 KPIs to Measure Weekly Will Uncover Gems of Data,

We were nominated for Small Business Influencer Awards by Small Biz Trends! These are so cool. When voting starts we’ll be asking you to help us out!

Track Our Startup: PayPal + iOS + Android

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The long list team Dasheroo worked on in our release last week.

Features we worked on for last week’s release. Our developers are busy!

We’ve been busy doing weekly releases to get some features and back-end bugs fixes from our billing release. We’re working hard on the next few releases so that they’re customer-facing and we get you some of the features and applications you’ve been requesting for your business dashboards. We’re a week closer to releasing PayPal dashboards so that you can track things like revenue, refunds, upgrades, downgrades, recent activity and a host of other great payment metrics for your business.

We’ve been busy working on an iOS and Android apps so you can easily view your dashboards on your phone without mucking up your dashboard by fat-fingering your insights. We’re kind of at the mercy of Apple for the iOS app so look for more news on that in the coming weeks!

We’re gettin’ out there…

Dasheroo's iOS business dashboard.

Dasheroo iOS app…it’s coming.

My Business.com article Always Be Selling: The #1 Priority for Every Entrepreneur is (hopefully) an interesting read, plus I site the classic movie Glengarry Glen Ross!

JP wrote an Inc. article How to Use Influencer Marketing in 5 Steps to Increase Traffic 10-fold. We’ve done this at Dasheroo and will continue to use influencer marketing. Read it and see how it could help your business.

Do you know What’s Really Important in a Google Analytics Dashboard? We break it down for you in this easy article and all you need to get started is Dasheroo, shocker huh?

We wrote a great article on how we uncovered a secret target customer for Dasheroo, and that great customer target wrote an awesome review on us!

Track Our Startup: Billing + GetResponse Email Marketing Dashboards Launched

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Dasheroo's business dashboard pricing plan.Ok, so we’ve been talking about our huge billing project for months. We’ve been trying to think of any scenario and corner case that might happen as we ask for customer’s money, because we want to eliminate any potential confusion. So……

Billing Launched!

For any startup, the ability to bill a customer is a huge milestone. Anyone can offer a great product for free, but will users pull out their credit card to get access to more features & functionality? We’re sure going to find out.

We feel that our free Tall pricing plan is great for many small businesses and non-profits who need a quick data fix. For more advanced users and maybe larger small businesses that may need more bells and whistles, we offer the Grande Plan (virtual branding hat-tip to Starbucks) which gives a growing business more dashboards and more insights they can track. Hey, we feel that the more access to actionable data, the more you should be growing right? Let’s all share the wealth!

A big up to Josh for PM-ing the crap outta this project, and to Andrew and James for their awesome ability to think through all things billing and then code this stuff. And to Alf for getting ready to answer the myriad of questions that may arise, as well as making the site understandable (huge user interface stuff going on here). Everyone had input on how to price our offerings, and we went back and forth as you might imagine.

We’re starting to think about how referrals are handled from a billing and payment perspective so stay tuned on that. We’ve had lots of interest in this area.

What else did we do? GetResponse email marketing dashboards launched to round out SEVEN email marketing providers.

Dasheroo Google Analytics dashboard of Sessions

Look at the Yellow part of the Dasheroo Google Analytics Insight, crazy good!

Marketing – READ THIS!

As you know Janine Popick came on as CMO, happy to have her! Check out her article: 5 Reasons I Decided to Dive Into a Startup on Inc.com. It’s pretty cool.

Check this out: this past week we were lucky enough to get an article written by @SteveStrauss CEO of @TheSelfEmployed. He mentioned us in his USA Today small business column. That’s great.

And it gets better…

What was weird was a few days later we got a huge spike in Google organic search traffic. Weird because we weren’t spiking for any of our keywords. Sooooooo….

Dasheroo featured on USA Today on an elevator screen!

This is proud Art taking a pic of Dasheroo in an elevator on wife Jenny’s first day at Dasheroo!

Here’s what we found: our own Jenny’s husband Arthur, was on an elevator here in San Francisco and saw Steve’s mention of us running on Captivate, those TV screens that hold your attention in elevators. It was on the screen for 2 minutes at a time over the course of three days and we GOT FLOODED with users. Whoa. People took pictures or remembered and searched for us on Google and signed up. Incredible!

One more thing, we have a listing on GetApp and we need reviews, can you give us one? It won’t take long, promise!

Board Meeting

I’ve got my monthly board meeting this Thursday, and it won’t be BORING. I’ve been getting slides ready for that one since it’s been 6 weeks since our last one. For a change we’ll be having it in a hotel lobby that doesn’t get used. We’ll see how that goes.

Side Note – One of the Coolest Tools Ever

Alf found GifGrabber which is a FREE way to make a video (no sound) that replays. It takes about 20 seconds to understand and create a video. So you’ll see these gifs of how-tos in our help. Awesome, thanks Alf!

Platform First

Not to geek out here but James and team are building out a pretty significant part of Dasheroo, our Developer Console. This is “the app that builds our app integrations and insights” so to speak. What’s very cool about this is that if a business doesn’t see an app they want to make a dashboard of, they can build it themselves (or get a developer to do so.) Point is, the team has done a lot of work behind the scenes to get this up and running and we got an awesome demo of it this week. More on that as we plan to launch, but we’ve had a plethora of inquiries about this from various business that want access to our API. It’s coming.

Whew, more next week, check out my Startup Lessons Learned if you’re up for it!

John at Dasheroo.

Cool PR Service: Help A Reporter Out (HARO)

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Screen Shot 2014-12-13 at 12.57.32 PM

This is an example of one of the three emails you’ll get a day for opportunities to be included in articles.

We subscribe to HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and we love it. HARO is owned by Vocus and it’s a free PR service. Yes, free.

How does it work? Each day you get an email of articles that reporters need your help with. You answer their questions and perhaps you’ll be a part of their story you never know. The queries for articles are broken down by categories like Business, Biotech, Entertainment, etc. and you get them emailed 3 times a day.

Sometimes you don’t know the publication you might be a part of so you kind of answer blind other times they tell you exactly the publication it’s for.

Screen Shot 2014-12-14 at 7.06.01 PMTwo good stories?

We’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that this all should result in traffic from new inbound links and recognition. We went to our Dasheroo dashboard to find out:-)