Show IH: LightReports – Beautiful & simple reports to your inbox
LightReports enables you to automatically receive important metrics on a daily, weekly & monthly basis in a form of a beautiful & simple email report.
Idea
As I was working on several projects at once, I needed a simple reporting tool that would just give me a brief overview of the projects. No fancy multi-pane dashboard or real-time stats, just metrics I cared about on a daily, weekly & monthly basis.
Despite extensive searching, I couldn’t find a suitable tool. I found some great real-time solutions like Geckoboard, but I needed something "slower". I found some handy dashboard solutions, but I needed something more "automatic" in terms that I wanted the reports to come to me and not vice-versa. I found some useful reporting tools which did do what I wanted, but they almost exclusively went with Slack integration and I needed a more permanent and flexible medium – such as e-mail.
Transparency
I'm planning to publish a blog post series following a project through it's development including financials, metrics, tips & tricks etc. It will be primarily published on personal website sven.kapudija.com in a form of a blog posts, but I will also share the insights I receive here on IH as well. The intro blog post is already up - LightReports.
Feedback
Give it a spin and let me know how it works for you. Would love to hear your thoughts 🙌
Great idea!
I personally only use Google Analytics so I haven't stumbled on your problem, but I think this is a much better alternative to checking multiple dashboards constantly.
I love how you offer a free demo of report from the landing page. You decided to remove the free pricing option because you had that on the landing page, which sounds like a great idea to reduce your expenses on the free plan.
How did you come up with the pricing costs? What's your plan to get this to grow? How do you plan to reach more people?
Thanks shime :)
As for the demo/free plan you are right, it did simplify things quite a bit on our side, however we are still planning to do a 14-day free trial when time will be right. Reason being that the demo is MUCH MORE powerful when you see your metrics, your data, your performance each morning. We hope that 14-days free trial will be convincing enough for some number of customers to stay and pay for the plan after those 14 days expire.
Pricing costs are something that I estimated based on my experience of buying software (both as an individual and as a business) and generally reading and learning from others. LightReports is a B2B tool so I believe that lower prices than this would be a bit too-low and as if you, as a business, can't spend $15 or $30 on something that you and your team will use on daily/weekly/monthly basis it is simply not for you (yet).
The plan to grow has several directions, I'll definitely write about all of them but direct sales are the first, should be the fastest and most productive/persuasive as I'll present clients with their custom-kinda-branding emails, their data-points and most importantly, their unique benefits (eg CEO will have different requirements than head of marketing) which should be more convincing than just the demo on the homepage which only has tools in common.
Thanks Sven!
Yeah, it seems that custom metrics are your most powerful feature so allowing free users to use them makes sense. Pricing also makes sense since it's a B2B.
Looking forward to reading more about your adventure with this product!
A quick personal suggestion. You said you want to be transparent, open like groove, baremetrics, buffer, etc.
I'm not so sure that it will work anymore. The novelty isn't there anymore, I doubt you'll the same impact as few years ago that made your company unique and customer trusted you more.
Sharing the revenues also brought companies traffic and attention, which helped them grow, but today I think you'll get the most attention from a crowd that will become competitors because it's a tool that can be copied not so hard. I remember how many Baremetrics competitors appeared, but Baremetrics had that "novelty" advantage of being the first few adopting the "open startups" movement.
Most on this forum won't agree with me, that's ok, but personally I don't think being transparent will bring you too many benefits these days.
Definitely the impact won't be the same as for the first-movers, but it isn't supposed to be. I am doing it for several reasons, content marketing being just one of them. I definitely wouldn't rely on it as a source of growth.
Pure financials aren't that interesting to me as there is no background how you got there, if you told me you have $10M MRR I wouldn't get much out of it (for myself), except that you are small/medium/large company.
The goal for me is to get better at writing, maybe receive some outsider tips & tricks, share some knowledge/how to's in terms not "this week we have X users and $ revenue" but eg. "Cold emails that work" or "Right way to read Google Analytics" or whatever. Something that is applicable to larger audience and be beneficial to them, not just "LightReports made this, LightReports made that". LightReports is just a medium through which I will try to share ideas/knowledge.
tl;dr agree with you on pure transparency/financial standpoint, however there is a bit more to it, at least inspires to be :)
This is awesome! I really appreciate the simple design and general UX. This isn't something I will use right now, but your pricing is on point.
Are you on Product Hunt? If not you should post this there.
Thanks Leandro :)
It is not on a Product Hunt. Yet :)
Will be sometime soon 🙌
Looks really good and tons of integrations.
Have you validated the idea?
Thanks crysper!
Originally I needed something like that to exists so I started from there.
I did a few customer interviews beforehand and some of them are actually using some reporting tool/scheme. One of them did their in-house solution which was essential barebones version with plain text, later they upgraded it a bit with some tables so it's easier to read. They also did the dashboard in admin panel etc. - but their motivation for email reporting was that they wanted their team to be informed how the product/company is going without requiring them to do anything, like for example logging into admin panel to see the stats. All they (the team) needs to to is open their email.
Another one (CEO) used the old-school manual method where someone from his team would assemble all the information he needed for a day/week/month and delivered that to him in some format. Usually that were Excel spreadsheets. He calls it "CEO report".
That being said, there is much more work to be done in terms of idea validation and exact angle, but according to the past interviews I believe I'm onto something :)
Yea man, it's a great idea and after this post, i'm pretty sure you'll hit 10k/month pretty soon.
These automated stuff, that require little involvement and benefits are shown immediately, like analytics, are easy to sell and promote. The market is also huge.
Hey I think this is a great idea. I could see this being helpful with my wife's blog once it matures some more (the price point doesn't make sense for it right now since she doesn't make much profit), especially the Instagram and Pinterest integrations.
One piece of feedback: when I was trying to view the example reports on Safari (iPhone 5), it would not let me scroll down to see the rest of the report.
Thanks for sharing!
Tnx lwilli! As for the Safari bug - could you confirm that happens only when you click on some integration (eg Instagram), then you view the report, close it, and view it again? So it's only blocks on the second try with the same integration? That is something that will be fixed.
It seems to be happening even on the first try. For example, when I select Pinterest and Instagram and then click "Previews report" I can only see the following text:
"Good afternoon! Hope you had a good weekend. Here is a summary of what happened on your website last week.
Total number of followers is 989 which is 4.3% more than week before."
Followed by a little Instagram logo. However, when I try to scroll, it doesn't do anything (actually it looks like it is scrolling the homepage in the background).
Damn you, Sven. This is so useful. :)
Google Analytics reports are terribly broken. In my previous company I was so desperate I wrote an R script to get the information I needed using the googleAnalyticsR package, wrap those data in an HTML email template and fire that email to my personal inbox on a weekly basis (w/ a cronjob).
Very rudimental but it worked. (Will open source when I find the time).
Next step is to allow users to actually pick up what metrics they're interested to see. E.g. Ticket on a specific topic from Freshdesk/Zendesk, specific metrics/conversion rate or sessions fluctuations on specific pages on GA, etc.
Anyway, this is great.
--L
Haha thanks Leonardo 😆 I believe GA reports improved a bit over time, but yeah, currently it's screenshot of the site, wrapped into PDF and sent as an attachment.
Next step for you or for LightReports? :) When you register with LightReports you can actually pick & choose what are you interested in (exact metrics etc.) but for the sake of convenience and ease-of-use the homepage demo doesn't have that feature.
Hey Sven great product. Could you share more about the Custom integration option?
Hi Steve, sure!
Custom integration is meant for custom metrics that exist only within your application code/database. A lot of use-cases are covered using 3rd party integrations like Google Analytics, PayPal etc. but for example we (for LightReports) have metric "Demo emails" which describes how many people sent themselves demo email from the homepage. That exists only in our database so we needed to provide some way to expose that and include within reports.
On the technical side, custom integration is currently facilitated through REST API interface - you provide us with data-points names & endpoints and we do the rest. For example you say to us on link
https://api.example.com/v1/users/statsyou can find theNumber of users, so we then use that as a data-source, instead of some 3rd party integration (like Google Analytics).There is also an option to use direct read-only connection to your database, although that comes with some security risks so currently we do not support it.
Yo, re: transparency, you should start with your TOS/privacy statements, which are legalese and don't make it crystal clear what your stance on our business data is. This is the first concern of any real business. I love to see human-speak, clear language outlining exactly what you do and plan to do with all this data. Is it protected, stored, destroyed immediately, encrypted?
Definitely will do that as soon as possible. Both in ToS/Privacy and on the frontend/site itself so it's prominent as other features. Including data storage (usually those are OAuth tokens), just-in-time data retrieval & compilation for report sending etc.
This is dope! Have been wanting a slackbot that does this same thing for a while. Excited to try it out. Anything we can do to help?
Thanks Andrew :) I guess the best thing would be to give it a spin and let me know how it works for you :)
This is very well executed from what I can see. It is also a great concept for everyone from indie hackers like myself to business entities who want insight across a lot of channels.
I will also +1 the Medium integration.
Glad you like it :) Definitely will take a closer look at that Medium 😄
Does Medium have a public API?
On the first glance, they have their v3 API, however it does not provide any insights about statistics/usage.
There is always an another way (ie scraping with permission) like some other SaaS providers do for other purposes (dashboards etc.) but need to think about it.
This is an awesome app that saves people time. My only request is to add Mailgun and Medium to integration if possible.
Glad you like it 🙌
What would you like to see in Mailgun and Medium integration? As in which data-points, what "scenarios"/layouts? Asking to get a better understanding behind it.
Mailgun - the same or similar stats as Mailchimp
Medium - the same or similar stats as Facebook
LightReports and The Basetrip are great ideas and the frontend looks awesome... Congrats, Sven!🙌
Thanks pedrod, glad you like them :)
Would be interesting to figure out how to integrate with and then configure reports from microstrategy, cliq, tableau etc. Totally see the value in the service, thanks for sharing.
Tnx AKLobo! Can you expand a bit on the topic of reports from microstrategy, cliq & tableau? Targeting a bit enterprisey and figuring out how to configure/generate reports from their quite vast/complex systems as opposed to just simple data from eg Facebook Ads?
well... I think you'd have an instant enterprise app if you could pull some of the data sources being used in sales and marketing dashboards like tableau.
The sales cycles might be slower but the potential scale you might get by landing a client like Intel or a major pharma co would be pretty interesting for you as company (Im thinking whales instead of minnows)
Nice idea! What are your plans for the custom report feature?
I am building out ScrumGenius - https://scrumgenius.com , and scheduled summary reports are on our roadmap and these kinda reports are exactly what I am looking to do!
We collect lots of data on for team communication, I want to be able to offer sentiment analysis and also offer graphs from our numerical values in reports too.
If you have a indie hackers special offer for a budding startup - I would love to chat more :)
Custom report feature is currently imagined as your custom metrics through REST API (or directly via MySQL database, although that is "a bit" risky from security standpoint so we will see about that one) so you can have your internal metrics delivered to you.
I believe you are asking about customization in terms of look & feel aka whitelabel solution? Don't have anything like that in the pipeline, but is obvious benefit for larger customers/plans which require custom branding and/or removal of LightReports branding etc.
Sure - would love to chat - ping me at sven@lightreports.com 🙌