Startup/solo founders how do you currently track your business KPI's?
"What gets measured gets improved"
Not selling anything, just want to understand how business owners currently measure and track your KPI's across your business?
Do you have a dashboard that consolidates all numbers form Social media, analytics, marketing, sales, support, infrastructure... all in one place in real-time?
Was trying to find if there is a need for analytics as a service?
Thanks
Databox.com has a great solution for building custom dashboards. Give them a look.
Thanks Corey, Databox seems good. Do you use them in your business?
We provide this service to our customers through DataHero (www.datahero.com). Our customers use us to pull Hubspot, Salesforce, Intercom, Zendesk, Google Sheets, etc. all into one place with automated reporting and KPI dashboards.
Most business users are looking for lightweight analytics that do more than canned dashboarding and allow you to dive into the data to draw deeper insights, but without the complexity and overhead of a bulky enterprise solution. We've built DataHero to target that need.
Take a look and happy to chat further or collaborate.
Thanks Alex, glad to e-meet you here. I've heard of Datahero before.
Quick question, does DH enable to slice and dice, correlation, and other deep analysis across different applications data?
I use a bunch of tools.
Mixpanel for targeted usage information (and traffic).
Profitwell for financials.
Intercom for user stats as well.
Google for traffic.
Google sheets for financial modeling.
Google sheets to pull in all the data and compare.
There are tools that allow you to make custom dashboards. I find them limited and complicated.
There are so many different places to pull data from. Like I’m not so focused on social growth at the moment. For some, it’s their bread and butter.
There is a need. No doubt. The challenge would be which third party tools do you integrate with and how do you show the information in a way that’ll allow users to take action on it?
Thanks Daniel for your response. I can integrate most of the tools you mentioned and create custom dashboards with the KPI's your business require.
Can you please elaborate a little bit when you mean the tools give limited and complicated dashboards? which tools di you use?
Ah, it’s been over a year since I used the dashboard. I’ll try to see if I can dig up an old email somewhere.
As far as limited. Like, the point of a dashboard is to import data and draw conclusions from it right?
I’d want to stack MMR data on top of site engagement data and see if there are correlations.
I’d like to merge data points to look at problems in new ways.
Many dashboards silo the data so you can’t perform that kind of deep analysis.
Hence, Google sheets or excel.
You have a good eye for analytics David. Questions are spot on :-)
Please see if you can find an email to get an idea.
Agree silo metrics are not much of use. If we can find patterns, trends, and correlations between metrics that give a better picture of the cause and effects.
Is Gs and Xl enabling you to do deep analysis?
Here is my view on metrics: They do make sense (and we track them) but do not go too crazy on them, especially at the beginning.
Always being in "optimise" mode may not always be good. For example: Let's say you create a website like Indie Hackers and try to optimise for page views, maybe it is not the right thing to optimise. You may realise that sure your page views are going up, but the content quality is going down and so is the satisfaction of your customers.
The metric we track the most is "NPS" (Net Promoter Score). Each week, we ask a lot of our customers if they're happy and willing to refer their friends (on a scale of 1 to 5). We always try to improve that number. We also track our costs / revenues of course.
But for now, as a small company, the most important is to make sure "we optimise to make customers happy". Until we have fully understood why some customers are not yet happy, optimising for other things will not yield amazing results in my opinion.
Thanks Robyn, agree what you said. Can you please tell me how do you visualize your NPS score? is there is a report you run?
Also business chooses which metric to measure and track in real time ( in your case NPS) and I will create custom dashboards to pull that info on to a dashboard if it make sense
Baremetrics for financials, Intercom for user related statistics, google for traffic and zabbix for infrastructure.
My suggestion when you like to start this; there are many analytics solutions, focus your product on one or two key metrics that you are an expert in and find out the best way to show this metric but also (more importantly) the insight in how your users can improve on it.
So when your metric is churned users, give your users a way to measure it AND insights in understanding if their current KPI is good/bad/ok, and how to improve influence the metrics.
Actionable actions will be valuable for your target audience. In case of churned users, I can imagine that you add a service that allow your users to send questionnaires to their users to understand why users churned etc.
This is, I believe, where the true value is.
Thanks so much Reinder. Do you mean picking one or two metrics is better like Baremetrics only report on metrics related to revenue and customers from Stripe?
As you mentioned there are many analytics tools like Mixpanel, GA, Intercom etc to report various metrics. So my plan is not to develop a tool, but to integrate all of them and show KPI's important to the business on one dashboard in real time if that helps.
As a value-add, I can send a summary report every week on how those metrics performed.
Appreciate your thought?
As a small team your product can be either shallow and wide or deep and narrow.
So either a lot of shallow metrics from a lot of sources, or a few key metrics from a few sources, perfectly executed.
Especially when you start on a product with a customer base that is locked into that product (like intercom), you will probably be able to pick up a number of customers from their marketplace and extend your offering from there.
With regards to value-add, the value added should be in giving insights in the metrics, a report is one thing but how should someone interpret the data, what should be the next action?
Thanks so much for your inputs Reinder (by the way Placker is a cool tool).
I found there are many tools on the market that integrates to Intercom and pull data to show on a dashboard, few below
https://datahero.com
https://www.grow.com/integrations/intercom-reporting-tool/
https://statbot.io/
So there isn't much I can do in the report part.
But maybe there is an opportunity if I can interpret the reports and give the business owners a weekly summary and some actionable insights? is it worth trying?
The opportunity is your expertise, so when you are 'only' looking for creating a dashboard and you have no idea about what is behind the metric, don't do it. (or team up with an expert that does).
For example, when you are passionate about customer interaction, you will be able to create a meaningful dashboard for intercom that creates value to the users.
I'm an intercom user myself, I would love to be able to get more value from my intercom statistics. The solutions like you mentioned will give me some stats but I have no idea what I should do with it so it is not that valuable.
When a solution pop-ups that can tell me, for example, the number of users that need some extra love to convert to my product, this is a valuable tool.
The first step could even be to do this manually, give me access to your report and I'll create an actionable report for you, when this format works, you can automate it.
Thanks so much for your invaluable suggestion. Completely make sense. If the business can't interpret the meaning behind the metrics or don't know what action to take, the metrics are of no use.
I've emailed you. Please have a look