The problem with Admin Dashboards (And the Solution!)
Hello everyone!
I've run several B2B SAAS and recently I even manage to have an exit on a small ad-tech software I've built. This is the story of what I'm building next and why.
In every company I run, I always had the desire to have a good Admin dashboard. I believe that it's vital for any business, yet very few have one.
I never wanted anything special, just somewhere where I could see how many user signed up, issue refunds, change a user status and other small things like those. Ideally I wanted to give access to a VA in order to outsource a few tasks, and it had to work very well from my smartphone.
I never manage to find a solution which fits the criteria above. Mainly because the available solutions, and their respective problems were:
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Built it my self. This is great because I would have exactly the features I want, I wouldn't have to share any data with anyone. However I barely had time to build the core product, I didn't have time to manage & update an entire different app from scratch.
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Share my data. Maybe I could have built a small admin dashboard with something like Google Data Studio however they require you to share with them direct access to my database and it's something I really didn't want to do. Plus it's still quite hard-coded and I could never really have what I wanted.
The problem with current admin dashboards and by consequence also the reason why almost no-one has one is that they require you to share all your data and they will never be "built for your" every business is different so every dashboard must be different.
That's why I've built Zero.sh. Zero.sh is something in between. I've build all the infrastructure to power a very solid dashboard including things like caching, user authentication, different blocks, etc. However you can write your own micro serverless functions to fetch the data from where you want and how often you want, no need to give DB access to anyone or any access at all.
You can try and see what I mean simply trying to build a new block at https://zero.sh/play
I understand that this might sound complicated, but if you don't have currently an Admin Dashboard, I would love to build you one for free using Zero. It would be a great exercise for me and I'm sure it will be really beneficial for your business as well.
Interested? Leave a comment below and I'll personally build you the best admin dashboard you have ever seen!
This is interesting and I like the idea of being able to keep zero.sh access to my data limited to my lambda functions and read access only.
Just to be clear I would be able to submit data/changes to a lambda function for actual editing?
And until you pay for a private board all boards (including editing the data like in the first question) could be publicly accessible?
I haven't looked into this sort of thing at all; you mentioned Google Data Studio, I might clarify/expand on how you are different from other options. I'd find that helpful!
I'll keep this in mind as I get closer to needing something like this.
Hi Kevin,
Untill you pay, anyone with the board link will be able to view it, not edit it. (This is for public boards, testing etc.)
Each block has a small function, the result of that function will build a table/chart/markdown etc. Functions are stored directly on Zerø, so you don't need any lambda yourself.
The best way is to create a free account, it will clone the example dashboard in your account and you will be able to edit each block and see how easy it is.
I'm also happy to schedule a call and build something for you. You can really build almost anything on top of Zero.
Let me know!
Costantin
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but from your original post "change a user status" I envisioned being able to change data in my own db from the zero.sh board, that would still be visible and usable until I pay for a private board?
But if I wanted to pull in some data from my db I would call my lambda function. Maybe obvious, but I'm just putting together in my head how it would work.
You're saying I could interact with other api's without having to do anything on my end, got it.
c3js.org, very cool, noted that down too.
Yes that would still be visible and usable until you pay. Anyone with the board link will be able to view the board and interact with it, so for example submit a form which changes the user status.
And yes, you would call your lambda function (or any backend you might have) and return for example a list of users, Zero will build a table of all your users. Then when you edit a row it will send a post/put request back to your lambda function (or any other backend) with the new data.
So the data editing remains in your backend while all the data visualization like forms, charts and tables is taken care by Zero (together with caching, user management and a few other things)