My partner and I finally released our first serious project and we are looking for feedback
Hey everyone 👋
After a few months of hard work, @belatent and I are super excited to open the doors to Chartbrew, our first serious project that we invested quite a bit of time in. We first released it at the beginning of the month, but we're slowly building the courage to share it with more and more people.
🙏 We're reaching out to the Indiehackers community as we desperately need some feedback, especially now at the start.
Chartbrew is a web app that was born out of our desire to easily visualise the data in our databases. There were all kind of tools for monitoring MRR, visits on your site and so on, but we couldn't really find a tool to suit our needs of just generating charts from our own data we were storing in databases.
Chartbrew was built to fill this need. It lets you create charts from your own data just by connecting your database (soon APIs) to our service. We take extra measures to make sure your connections are secure at all times. Have a look here how a public dashboard looks.
You can create your own dashboard where you can see all your charts and arrange them how you want. You can work in a team as well and you can even make your charts public to the world - useful for any company that wants to be more transparent.
At the moment our service supports just MongoDB connections, but @belatent and I are working hard to add support for APIs, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Firebase asap. We will send updates over email when we support new connections, so feel free to register for a new account to stay up to date.
Will really appreciate your feedback and support! 🙌
Cheers 🍺
Raz & Kate
Great idea guys! I like it!
Did you consider ability to add data from file (.csv) for example just to generate nice looking charts in website? Also is it any way to download/generate pdf file with this charts?
PS. Is data stored once/ synchronized every x time or querying database every time someone refresh page?
Good luck :)
Hi Michael, thanks for dropping by 👋
Great questions!
We don't currently have the option of generating charts from .csv files in our roadmap, but it's definitely going into our list now 🤓
Downloading the charts is something we are going to look into quite soon.
Regarding the data, yes, we store the charts configurations in our database so we don't send a lot of requests your way. The requests are being sent only when you manually refresh the data as the dashboard admin, or if you set a custom time when you want your charts to be updated automatically. ✌
Really practical and great price point for me. I like the landing page - great graphics, colors, explanations. I like the 'supporting soon' section.
I run some analytics for clients and have been looking for a visualization tool that is cheaper and easy to use. Right now I create my own charts in spreadsheets. Signed up but will need MySQL before I can progress.
Hi Courtney,
Thanks for your comment!
We are currently working on MySQL connection and expecting to release a new update in a couple of weeks :)
We'll let you know as soon as it's out there.
Yay excited to hear it!
A wealth of fabulous comments and feedback here, Raz & Kate. I've been following IndieHackers on Twitter for a while and meaning to signup with this inspiring community. Finally got around to doing just that. So my first post is just to let you know that I'm going to give the link to Chartbrew to the guys I'm on a gig with. They are using PostgresSQL and may be interested in adding data visualisations to their app. I haven't read up on your revenue model yet but guess that's explained on your website. Good luck!
A great honour to have your first comment and a warm welcome to the IH community, as you can see this community is one of the best around!
Postgres support is coming soon, so we appreciate your support 🙌
We're basically offering monthly subscriptions with 3 tiers that unlock certain capabilities. We're just launched so the pricing and model might change slightly in a few months depending on what feedback we receive.
I use AWS CloudWatch religiously and love the ability to add charts from any of the sources. This product takes it to another level where I can add arbitrary sources with little effort and has more charting options.
I really love the thought concept here and I'm looking forward for when you offer some API integrations.
Super Opinionated Product Feedback (take it with a lot of salt):
✅ Hover state on charts.
✅ Responsive charts (I view charts a lot on my phone while in an uber).
✅ Decent onboarding workflow.
✅ Adding first chart workflow. I also like it how you're catching users to add a connection if they don't have one.
✅ Very surprised you had team member support already, useful for adding a non tech person to view some custom report I don't feel like building.
✅ Support button opens live chat, may just want to have suggestions also going to live chat with a preconfigured message.
🌶 When choosing connections, give me an option to just pay if I want MySQL.
🌶 Make use of columns for the fields when entering Mongo credentials (and assumingely the other connections too).
🌶 UI seems a bit fragmented, sometimes buttons are inline, at the bottom in a wide format, or have a different color than other buttons. I often have to reorientate myself after going from page to page.
🌶 Is a public dashboard just always there? This UI could be improved here where you let the user explicit create a dashboard and determine to set it public or private. That way theres cognitive reassurance. You would also be training the user at the same time to create more dashboards (which each time gives you an upgrade chance).
🌶 I didn't realize the hierarchy until playing with the site over time. This can be improved with breadcrumbs or navigational indicators. I'm assuming it goes like: account > projects > dashboard.
🌶 Not a big deal, but it's easy to guess other user/account IDs since they're exposed in the URL as incremental numbers. At least when it comes to a service ingesting data, it just makes me pause to think about security for a second.
🌶 Settings and notifications are grayed out and inoperable. I'm assuming you're still working on it, but as a user, I find that odd.
🌶 Manage the team section wasn't intuitive to reach, I didn't even know it existed until I clicked the logo.
Again, please take this feedback as my opinions only. I literally could be wrong on every point.
Congrats on the launch 🎉 and good luck with future iterations ✌️
Hey Mat 👋 You're awesome, this is a gold mine of feedback!
They are all very good points and I'm going to stop on a few:
Your idea about having an ability to create new dashboards is amazing! We didn't think about this before and at the moment we just have the main dashboard and the public one where you can place individual charts. Also good pricing strategy for dashboards as well.
The navigation seemed a bit off for us as well, and we plan to improve this quite soon. We'll have a think on how we can use the elements that you mentioned.
Interesting to hear that the ID in the URL makes you think about security. The IDs are not used at all for security reasons and we use them just for navigating, but the fact that you thought about it, makes us think about how we can change that. Maybe using short unique hashes instead?
Thanks for taking the time to use Chartbrew and to write this nice piece of feedback! 🙌
Hey Raz,
It was a pleasure writing this up and feel free to HMU for another round in the future.
I'm thinking of a URL-safe short unique hash. I've seen a lot of implementations that have
publicIdas a property or column internally, and then create an index for that. Other implementations simply generate a hash foridinstead of managing 2x unique identifiers. Priority wise, it's not that big of a deal. I might be the edge case because I'm always looking for patterns.-Matt
This one looks really amazing! 😍
I would love to use it right away, but I'm surely missing the Firebase integration (and MySQL for another, but not so important, project of mine). Do you have an ETA for Firebase support?
How can I subscribe to updates? Didn't find anything therefore on the page, or I simply overlooked it.
Hey Sven 👋
Glad to hear that you're interested in our project 🙌 We don't have a clear ETA for Firebase since we're actively working on API and MySQL connections (but we might just push firebase forward now haha).
There's no updates form on our page (maybe we should put one?), but you can sign up for an account and you will receive updates about new connections that we're going to support. You can also dm me on Twitter with your email address or send me an email (links on my profile here) and I'll add you to the list ✌
+1 to collecting e-mail addresses! On a couple sites I did contract work for, the e-mail signup was used more than account signups.
It will also help people curious about the site but not ready to commit, a kind of "remind me later" thing for users. And if you get good results, you could always write some custom code so they can auto-create an account by clicking an e-mail link since it's already confirmed :)
Very good point, we'll add that very soon 😁
Thanks a lot, you got a mail. :-)
Hi there,
I just checked your website and product. It's quite interesting. Your user interface is very clean.
I have just one feedback for you. Have you tested your web app for cross-browser compatibility across different browsers?
There are many online tools available for cross browser testing like LambdaTest.com, Browserstack, Saucelabs etc.
Nice! I’ve been in need of a tool like this so this is very welcome! Looking forward to support for Postgres and Firebase
Hi there, just wanted to let you know that we managed to add support for Postgres on chartbrew.com
Feel free to give it a try if you wish ✌️
Awesome to hear that! If you haven't signed up for an account yet, feel free to drop me an email at razvan{at}depomo{dot}com if you want me to keep you up-to-date with when we're going to launch the support for postgres and firebase ✌️
Does this not require that the database is exposed on the internet? In many corporate setups that would never happen.
We do realize that we're never gonna be able to target corporates, at least at this stage. We actually don't expose the database connections to the internet. You can interact with the database just through our system and we control who can have that interaction (team owners and admins). As with everything, this doesn't mean the system is 100% secure, but we do our best to make sure everything is protected.
Sorry. I don't understand. Where does the data in the graphs come from? If not my (the user's) database. Therefore my database would have to be exposed on the internet to be accessable by your software or am I missing something?
Ah, I misunderstood your initial reply. Yes, the database must be accessible over the internet for our app to be able to retrieve data from there. We plan to improve a bit on our documentation on how to whitelist our IP address to be able to protect the DB with a firewall and still use our service.
The idea is great, I think as per your Trello board embedding will probably be the most important thing. The website design is awesome, I really like the visual style, but please consider changing the font (what is it?) on the headers/large text, maybe it's just me but the character set just just seems too wide - just my 2pence!
Thank you for your feedback, Amin ✌ The font is something we haven't look too much into and we kind of chosen one that looked good at that time. We will definitely come back to this and experiment with others. The current font is Nunito Sans
It looks really really cool!
I don't have a need for it right now, but I could suggest you guys take a look at domo.com for inspiration which is to my understanding providing a very similar product to yours.
Best of luck for your baby!
Looks great, years ago I wanted to make a Drupal specific version of this. You could consider supporting predefined configurations for specific CMSs e.g. Drupal, Wordpress, Magento as these all have defined schemas for things like users and content types. That way users could get value from the first moment, without any config or setup.
Hey Neil,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts :)
That's an excellent idea! We will surely look in that in the future development, as it can really broaden the target market and make it even easier for the users.
Hi we have a chatbot with mongodb as the backend and would love to try this but, its strictly an on premise installation with no network
We currently don't have a solution to allow our users to install our platform on their systems. The main premise of Chartbrew is to keep charting simple without having our end users install things and writing any code.
cool, best of luck for your new project
my friend and I also start our new project
<a> http://www.whyit.in/sacred-games-season-2/</a>
Awesome, Good luck with your project as well 🙌