DB Dash

Since the last update I've finished up the tech part which took far longer than anticipated (payment solution, packaging PHP code to be easily installable, licensing, documentation website, docker solution...). I've got my first sale. I've failed bringing more sales via Facebook and LinkedIn ads. Next I want to try

• Content marketing
• Targeting Magento and WooCommerce store owners
• Pivoting to SaaS model
• Trying to target freelancers
• Building a small, useful side project to drive traffic to the main site

Even though there's a few bugs still, and a few features missing, I think it's best to focus now on trying to do some more sales, as I'm not sure if i can replicate it again.

All the planned features for Beta are completed. Now, I am working on a way to distribute the app, which is taking longer than anticipated.

And there's work being done on the landing page, so that it shows updated information, like FAQ, the Setup guide, etc.

There is a community feature request site for DB Dash now, which I will share in the following weeks, one the Beta is launched.

Also, the stickers have arrived :D

Over the last month, I've been completing the features planned for DB Dash Beta. Here's a glimpse of what's done:

[x] Webhooks
[x] Widget reordering
[x] Public dashboards
[x] Improved sql editor and database browser
[x] Support for MSSQL and Postgres
[x] Chart options - change size and color
[x] Chart types - line and bar
[x] Many, many fixes :)

There's a few more features left, then some internal testing, and after that, it's Beta time!

Also, I ordered DB Dash stickers from StickerMule, so I have them handy to distribute to people.

With the FB Ad campaign over, here are the results of the whole funnel. :)

Impressions: ~30k
CTR: ~3%
Clicked "Early Access" button: ~12%
Filled out the survey: ~12%
Agreed to a call: ~42%

Overall I'm satisfied. The next step is to complete the Beta version (scheduled to be released in August), and run some more campaigns. I also want to focus on creating some content, a few blog posts per month.

The Facebook Ad campaign was running for a few days and so far 300 people have clicked the ad, which makes it about 2.5% CTR (which is good I think?). Then, almost 10% of visitors click the "Early Access" button (also not bad, right?). And of those, 12% filled out the form, showing strong interest in DB Dash.

My goal here is to get at least 5 - 10 people that will agree to talk to me about their pain points.

I had to come up with the ad content and design a catchy image, not easy! :D

Now the ad is live, and I'm waiting for some traffic. I plan to spend some $30 to test out my hypothesis that techy founders, CEOs and CTOs would be interested in DB Dash. If I don't get any results, I'll revisit the hypothesis, change the wording, audience, and see if I get better results.

I set up the following stack: Segment, Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Hubspot and Drift. So many tools! I doubt I'll use them to their full extent, and they do slow my page load time, but I want to try it out and see what kind of insights I can get.

For starters, I want to do customer research. As a first step, I have a landing page and it links to a Google Form survey that collects data about users and asks them if they'd be up for a short call / chat. That's my funnel for now - drive traffic to the landing page, then to the Google Form and then see the response rate. I want to track conversion rates at each step, and I can do it with the stack above.

I quickly built the landing page by using a template from cruip.com. When I say quickly, I only mean the editing HTML and CSS part. The content is way harder to compose, and I had been working on it on and off for almost a month.

Protip: always use Cloudflare with your websites, it's free for basic usage, you get an SSL certificate with no hassle, CDN and lots more!

It's official. I wasn't sure about the name, but couldn't come up with a better one, so when I saw the .io domain is available, I bought it. Say hello to dbdash.io!

Coming up with a name for my side projects is always both fun and frustrating. And then when I come up with a cool name, and see that it's taken, it drives me nuts! Btw, DomainsBot is a good tool for finding domain names.

I work at a software development agency Quantox Technology, where we have a lot of projects going on.

One day, I wanted to pull up the stats for one of our internal projects, to see how many users does it have, what's the revenue etc., and it was unnecessary complex.

As our Product Owner researched first how to setup Grafana, and then some other dashboard analytics tools, I got an idea to create DB Dash. A simple and easy dashboard software you can just hook up to any database and display stats using simple SQL queries. A little while later I had the rough idea sketched on a paper, and our PO had given up on trying to setup any dashboard software as it was complicated and way more complex than what we needed.