From helping a friend out to the birth of a business idea

It all started when Robin @Vinrob , the founder and CEO of ManyPixels (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/manypixels ), asked me for some help.

I have known Robin since we were kids we then went to the same university and stayed in touch. He knew my background in finance (PwC) and analytics (BI @ Lazada/Alibaba) and was eager to get my input.

What he needed was to get a clear and aggregate view on his entire business. Customers, subscriptions, payments, refunds, cancellations, churn, employees salary, operational expenses, revenues, profit, profit margin, ... it all had to be continuously updated in one and unique place, so that he could, in one click, know exactly how his business way going and (re)act accordingly.

I got to work and started pulling data from Stripe, Paywhirl, PayPal, a few custom spreadsheets and push it into an unique Google Sheet with the help of Zapier so that, whenever something happen (a new sale, refund, customer, payout, payroll event, etc) it is automatically recorded in the Google Sheet.

Once I had everything in the same place, I started build the data model that was then linked to Google Data Studio.

The final result was three customized dashboards built in Google Data Studio. You can have a look at it (with sample data) here: https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/1gPPvGbxxnydV7GoZZVqnC4hlmDfEzXL_

Robin loved it and asked "Why don't you do that for other startups?". An idea was born.

Over the next few weeks, I defined the proposition value and worked on my product => dashboard/business as a service (www.dashboardguru.io).

I researched the market and there is a ton of dashboard tools out there, whether it is for your subscriptions data (www.baremetrics.com) or your your marketing data (www.funnel.io, www.improvado.io) but none of them offer the level of flexibility and customization that a service does, at least that's what I am betting on.

Here is the value prop: we offer end-to-end and customized dashboard services to entrepreneurs and startups. We support hundreds of data sources and take care of the entire data pipeline, from the setup to the daily maintenance and from data extraction to data visualization. Everything is on us, a true hassle-free, done-for-you solution.

Obviously, we won't be using Zapier or Google Sheet anymore and will use proper database (AWS) and BI tool (Google Data Studio)

Companies outsource their accounting to an accountant, so why couldn't they do the same with their business intelligence?

What do you guys think?