Customer facing dashboard - request for feedback
We're a startup in the early stages and getting ready to launch our product soon. We're developing a solution that allows you to easily build embeddable components for your customer-facing dashboard. This includes things like forms, data visualizations, and tables. It's kind of like retool, but specifically designed for customer-facing portals.
We've noticed that many companies end up hiring entire teams just to handle their dashboard, even though it's not their main product. It requires a lot of maintenance and constant tweaking. And for startups, creating a dashboard can be a major time drain, not to mention the lack of resources, both in terms of time and money.
That's where Formity comes in. Our goal is to be like an extra engineer for your team, taking care of your customer-facing dashboard. You can source all the data directly from your database. Project managers and team members can build and edit blocks without constantly having to bother the engineering team. The engineering team simply needs to embed the code afterward.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on our idea. We're also on the lookout for some building partners. If you join us, we'll provide a white-glove service to help you launch your dashboard super quickly. We can learn together and make improvements along the way.
This is our landing page https://www.formity.dev/?utm_source=indie-hackers - still a work in progress but should give you the idea.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We're excited to hear from all of you! :)
Loving the idea and the landing page! The animations are smooth! The text align of the cards in the "Your out of the box dashboard team" section look a little weird to me though. I'd center the "h3"s with text-align: center. Note that some paragraphs have more left margin than others too.
Hope your startup does well!
Thanks for the feedback :)
It would be great to clarify what specific problem(s) it solves for the customer-facing dashboards. I had the need for customer-facing dashboards at a fintech startup working with banks, and the problem was harder than it seemed.
I'm not fully sure if this is effectively a UI library so you don't have to build your own charts and graphs. I.e. is it an alternative to D3.js-based libraries?
Or is this an entire dashboard app with pre-built widgets of charts and graphs? If yes, is it managed or do I need to deploy it somehow? I.e. is it an alternative to Graphana, Kibana/OpenSearch?
Does it come with data middleware? I would feel anxious connecting a third-party app directly to my database with a connection string. Also, I probably have several data sources. I.e. do I need to have something like Dremio, Databricks, Starburst or a home-grown data lake somewhere in AWS?
So, the words "customer-facing" tripped me as it made me think of all the pains of building customer-facing dashboards where the actual UI wasn't that hard to build (for me, given my d3.js experience) compared to the rest of the stack. Like, I'm not sure if there is a dichotomy of UI components into customer-facing and not-customer-facing.
Thanks for the feedback! These are really great questions.
The best analogy is Retool, except Formity is meant for customer-facing apps instead of internal tools.
Take the example of, say, a bar chart. You can connect to your DB, write a SQL query, and then visually configure the chart itself similar to how you’d do it in Google Sheets or Excel.
Or, say you have an onboarding form after the user creates their account. You can create the form in Formity, embed it into your app, and then have a non-technical user (eg. a PM) iterate on it after that. Everything is versioned so you can go through local dev or a remote dev env before hitting production.
I totally hear you on the anxiety of connecting a third-party app to your data. One thing I can say is that you can control what the app can ready by creating a separate DB user, similar to how you’d set up a BI tool like Mode or Looker. In terms of writes, those are done via webhooks right now, so we don’t require direct write access to your DB.
In terms of the need for this for customer-facing apps – our previous experience is that the components in customer-facing dashboards are simple enough to build once, but we’ve seen teams that iterate frequently waste a lot of engineering time hand-coding things like forms, charts, and tables to make what are essentially copy changes.
Hope that helps clear things up. Let me know if you have any more questions!