Our first dashboard (took us long enough!)

Something simple I did last week that gave me a huge morale boost...

For months, I've been tracking one metric for our M&A intelligence platform: how many deals we've pushed live in the platform.

That's because we need a critical mass of deals for the platform to provide insights.

We've tracked thousands of deals (7,147 as of right now) over the last couple of years. These are all online businesses that have sold for 6, 7 or 8 figures. Now we're fleshing out and double-checking the metrics for each one, then publishing it in the platform.

So I've been digging into AirTable daily to check the count. But last week, I found a way to make this tracking way more fun and motivating...

📊 I created a dashboard that tracks this metric automatically, shows us how many deals are live, and displays it prominently.

The dashboard also shows us dozens of other stats we're interested in, like how many buyers are live in the platform, how many deals we have sale price for, how many deals we've written stories about, etc. (I'm including one of those in the image below.)

But that high-level number — how many deals are live — is the most important, because it helps us measure when we're ready for users.

📈 I've always loved dashboards for sharing information with a team. But it didn't occur to me until now to create one for this project, because it's just me and our data editor tracking this.

Yet now that we have a visual tracker, I can't believe I didn't do it sooner.

It's super motivating to see progress in a dashboard, and it helps me remember that even amongst all the opportunities each day, making this number climb is my top priority right now.

I keep the dashboard open on my second screen, so I can watch it climb every day. This alone has boosted my confidence; it reinforces the progress we're making.

Our data editor finds it motivating, too. And she now has visibility into all sorts of metrics that are important for our goals. Even for a small team like ours, this is helpful for staying aligned.

🚀 Don't underestimate the power of visualizing your core metrics on a dashboard everyone can see. Even if your everyone is just a team of two.