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Dasheroo, Inc. |
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May 25, 2015 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Online Business Dashboard |
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Co-Founder & CEO
Dasheroo, Inc.
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – May 25, 2015
CEOCFO: Mr. Hingley, would you tell us the idea behind Dasheroo? Mr. Hingley: The idea behind Dasheroo is making it easier to use data to grow your business. It is a simple concept but very challenging to accomplish due to the thousands of business applications out there like Salesforce, Facebook, Google Analytics, Marketo and more. There are more than 10,000 cloud business apps out there today, and it’s growing. That makes it increasingly difficult for business owners and managers to get their hands around all that data, get access to it and make it easy to understand for them take action across their organization.
This idea has been bubbling up over the years. Years ago when I started my career, there were only a handful of apps and metrics to base decisions on. But we all know that’s changed; there are now more than 10,000 business apps out there, and tens of millions of users. A typical SMB uses 15 or more apps! So that can turn ‘big data’ against you if you don’t have an efficient way for the business to access it.
A couple years ago, I hopped back into a tech company I started with my wife several years ago. They needed help boosting sales and marketing. So, I started a meeting and focused the team on the key metrics driving the business. Everyone entered their metrics and reports into a shared Google Doc so we could all work off it. And it worked! But soon I realized it still wasn’t efficient enough - it was taking too long for folks to create their charts and update the doc, there wasn’t enough transparency behind the numbers, and ‘why should we have to wait until the weekly Tuesday meeting to view and act on this information?
So I looked around for a solution and when I couldn’t find one I liked, created my own. It’s start-up #3 for me. And I think and hope it can be a great solution for companies around the world.
CEOCFO: What have you figured out to allow everyone to do this? Mr. Hingley: We think we’re off to a good start. Dasheroo is an online business dashboard. What that means is we make it possible for any user in any size business around the world to easily connect their apps and have all of that important information accessible in one easy to use, intuitive business dashboard. You no longer have to login to Google Analytics or Twitter or Facebook or any of the number of other apps out there that businesses use to run their business. It’s all in one place, accessible anytime, from any device. So, when all those reports are in one spot and easy to access and easy to understand, people will make use of it to act on the data, to collaborate with their teams with what is driving the business, and to make better informed decisions to grow the business.
CEOCFO: Is this a unique concept? Mr. Hingley: There are several business analytics tools out there, and there are some good ones. But many are very expensive, very I.T. or Business Analyst reliant. That limits the ability to serve the global market. So we built Dasheroo from the ground up to be extremely easy to set-up, use and get huge, immediate value from. Plus, we have a ‘business freemium’ model which means most users will never have to pay for Dasheroo, and only will as they grow and need more features or more reports. That opens us up to the millions of businesses globally. So we feel that yes, we are very unique. And we are passionate that every business in the world needs a business dashboard. And we want Dasheroo to be that solution!
CEOFO: Where were the stumbling blocks? Mr. Hingley: Probably less stumbling blocks (so far) than with the previous 2 start-ups I’ve launched. That’s largely due to our team--we just have great people. That said, it’s always easy to under estimate solving what seems to be a simple problem. If you think about it, bringing in all of the disparate apps into one dashboard may seem relatively simple. But since there are about ten thousand apps out there, each app has its own data structure and its own sets of technical standards or limitations on what you can do with that data. The biggest challenge has been in getting our hands around two things: 1) which are the most important business applications to focus on, and 2) optimizing our technology to bring all that data into our business dashboards that makes immediate sense and is completely intuitive.
CEOCFO: Is that something you knew or understood from working in the industry before that perhaps a novice would not realize is important? Mr. Hingley: I would say yes without a doubt. I have three co-founders so there are four of us, all with many years of experience both in startups and in running and growing businesses that target the SMB market as well as enterprises globally. Fortunately, between the four of us we were able to figure it out much more quickly than I could have myself, whereas someone without this experience may not have been able to as quickly.
CEOCFO: If someone is using Dasheroo and they are going to Facebook, is it going to look like Facebook? Mr. Hingley: We respect the look of Facebook’s reporting, and all the other application’s native reporting, but what we aspire to do is bring that data into a clean, consistent format in our dashboards. We find through user testing and user feedback that it really helps folks across the company more easily understand the meaning behind the data. Think about it this way – if you were to look at the native Google Analytics reporting and then look at the native Facebook reporting to see if you can spot any correlation, it’s very difficult since the format of their reporting is completely different. With Dasheroo, your reports – we call them Insights – are designed in a consistent, clean format that allows the user to immediately understand the meaning behind the numbers; many users say we eliminate the ‘intimidation factor’ that results from so many different reports and formats.
CEOCFO: How does an implementation work? Mr. Hingley: It’s not an ‘implementation’ per se. This is a SaaS based tool, all in the cloud so it’s super easy and fast to get up and running. We do something called ‘mom testing’. For instance, James one of our co-founders and our VP Engineering, had his mother, who is not at all technically savvy, create an account and set up a dashboard. She has a Facebook and Twitter account and she was able to set up her dashboard in less than five minutes. Here’s how simple it is: go to dasheroo.com, sign up for a free account, all you need is an email address and password.
Our goal is to make it extremely easy for even the novice as well as the sophisticated user to be up and running five minutes. If you are a novice user, you might not know exactly what you should be looking at in the first place. So we have recommended dashboards we call ‘Templates’. With just a couple of clicks, we build a dashboard for you with the most important Facebook and Twitter numbers and metrics. We have 5 of these pre-built dashboard templates now, with more coming. They are very popular.
If you want to customize your own dashboards, we make it easy to do that as well. Just choose your application, then select the reports you want and you are done. So it’s really built for anyone, from novice users to folks more comfortable with data. Also, it ‘s free, with no credit card required. Many users will never pay for Dasheroo, but over time, as they grow and want more reports and more advanced features hopefully they’ll be happy to pay a modest amount, starting at just $25 per month for an unlimited number of users.
CEOCFO: What could be the downside? Mr. Hingley: Every business in the world needs a business dashboard. We are not out to replace the native applications. For instance Google Analytics is a fantastic application and we use it regularly here at Dasheroo. But most people do not understand all of the complexities of the Google Analytics reporting systems, nor do they need to understand. So if they are intimidated by a business applications reporting, they’ll probably just ignore it. They will probably just decide not to go in and even deal with it because it is too confusing and time consuming. We insert this most important information in our dashboard system but we will not answer every question that Google Analytics does but we are complimentary. We like to say use us for your top-line information but occasionally you will need to do a deep dive and have to go back to that native app and that is fine with us. I cannot tell you why anyone would not need this. We already have users in eighty different countries and we are already seeing traction and the interest and the happiness and immediate gratification.
CEOCFO: Do you see areas of the world where there is more interest? Mr. Hingley: So far, we definitely see areas of concentration. Most applications are consumed in the US and then you start to go to the English-speaking countries. We are big in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. Currently, about 55% of our users are in the US. Canada and UK make up about 15%. And the balance is spread pretty evenly around the world, with Western Europe and Southeast Asian countries well represented.
CEOCFO: Do the things people look at surprise you? Mr. Hingley: Not really, at least not yet. We currently connect with 16 business applications and they are the most popular ones, including Google Analytics, Twitter, Facebook, Mailchimp, Survey Monkey, Salesforce & LinkedIn and provide pre-built reports.
What is interesting is the user feedback we get. Like I said, there are so many business applications out there, we get requests for new apps every day. So, I get surprised because we will get requests almost daily for apps that I may not have heard of!
Our solution is to launch what we call a ‘developer console’. What this means is that we have built a robust, easy to use tool that will allow just about any developer in the world to be able to connect to any application and build dashboards for our users. That lessens the reliance on us to connect to all those apps; we’ll have an active developer community that our users can tap into for that. We’ll launch this later in 2015.
CEOCFO: You announced a financing of $3.25 million. How will you use that money? Mr. Hingley: We’ll use 80% of our A Round financing to invest in hiring exceptional people. A very small amount – 8% or so – will be spent on very targeted marketing activities, and the balance will be used for business operations. One of the many benefits of a business freemium model is that users help grow your business, and you don’t have to rely on expensive marketing and advertising campaigns.
CEOCFO: Why pay attention to Dasheroo? Mr. Hingley: You need to pay attention to numbers to grow your business. Since that’s what we help businesses do, they should pay attention to us! We believe that we will have the best business dashboard solution based on the best user experience. Plus, we take out all the risk – in 5 minutes any business can have a great dashboard, and it’s free. Since we spend a lot of time listening to our customers we feel we are in-tune with how to make it easy for any business user to understand their data better and what impact marketing is having on their business. We like to remove all the obstacles possible but we are also focused on growing with our users. Plus, we are big proponents of always adding more value to existing users, so we have lots of features in the works to grow with our users as they grow. |
“Every business in the world needs a business dashboard. And we want Dasheroo to be that solution!” - John Hingley
Dasheroo, Inc.
Contact: John Hingley 415-840-2304
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John
Hingley