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13 Comments

Dashboard in MVP?

So I'm finally to a point where I'm ready to go live with my first project. The only thing I don't have is an admin dashboard (which would only be used by me). I'm wondering if it's worth delaying until I have a dashboard in place, or should I just launch it and manage things directly in the database for now and build the dashboard later? It's built with Laravel and I plan on using Forge, if that impacts your opinion.

Anyone launch without a dashboard who regretted it later because of the extra pain it was until you had one?

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    Since you've built your project with Laravel, check out Laravel Nova. It’s an administration panel you can install on top of your project. It's easy to set up and has a great metrics feature.

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    I would just launch the MVP.

    Maybe you could build a dashboard really fast with something like Retool - https://tryretool.com/

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    I would say, launch without the dashboard. MVP is minimum viable product. If you don't need the dashboard and you can do background things manually, then do that.

    I didn't even have an end user admin dashboard when I launched my product. However, I have a very high touch B2B product with a 3 month sales cycle.

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    Launch. I'm still doing stuff in the DB 5 years in! 😂

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    What do you mean, specifically, by "launch"?

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    I created a really minimum dashboard, super ugly, with the info I need to know about my users. I have been adding some numbers and checks (things like "OK" in green, "NO" in red), so I can communicate with my users to fix some stuff. I see it as the beginning of a "customer health dashboad".

    Also added some buttons, for actions too complex or time consuming to do directly in the database (disabling users for example).

    I think the correct idea is to build the minimum you need. And you probably wont know what do you need until you launch, so launch and be ready to add stuff as needed

  7. 1

    In my opinion, it's easy to go down the spiral of always thinking of that next feature to add-on and your brain would try to find any excuse to justify getting it done.

    I would just jump straight to getting eyeballs and customers. There's nothing to view in a dashboard if there's no activity anyway. =D

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    I would just go live If there is no impact on the customer / user. The quicker you are live, the quicker you will see if your idea will work.

    That being said, if you wanted a quick and easy admin panel in Laravel, have a look at Voyager. It is pretty easy to install with a few composer commands, and a bit of digging around. It is a reasonably usable / decent looking admin panel.

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      Will voyager work with the node express and postgresSQL based app to ?

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        I know Laravel can work with postgres which leads me to think that Voyager would play nicely with postgres as well - although, I have always used mysql myself. Node.js - not sure!

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          Any self hosted solution?

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    This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

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