What are some good tools for tracking basic startup metrics (revenue, repeat customers, traffic)?

October 1st, 2013

In Paul Graham's July essay Do Things that Don't Scale, he talked about picking a given metric and working on growing it 10% a week. It's time a set up a dashboard for my company, Arithmetic.

I'm definitely aware of Google Analytics for web traffic, but I'd like to create a simple, visual dashboard where I can start tracking a number of things.

Chartio looks cool, but at $90/mo. is a little pricy and when I first experimented with it, it seemed a little complicated. I'm not a big fan of Excel, but I could certainly create a spreadsheet. Or is there something simple and cool waiting for me to check it out?

Matt Farnell

October 1st, 2013

mixpanel.

Sandeep Arneja Co-founder & CTO at ListenLoop.com

October 1st, 2013

If you are interested in tracking feature usage on your site without making any code changes, then try featurekicker.com. I personally hate it when I have to make code changes every time i want to track something.

Check out this video between 0:00 - 1:14: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bp_oeOsXA

Robert Faibish Mixpanel

October 1st, 2013

Mixpanel

Paul Travis Multifaceted Online Executor: Product Marketing to Program Mgmt. to Business Development

October 1st, 2013

Possibly Piwik instead of Google Analytics?

Anonymous

October 1st, 2013

If you are looking for a dashboard tool, check out Geckoboard. It's a dashboard that can pull data from a variety of sources.

Toren Ajk Digital Marketer

October 1st, 2013

Chartio looks interesting. You might might also want to checkout Geckoboard http://www.geckoboard.com/

Jay Cahill Tech Advisers Network - WPI School of Business at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

October 1st, 2013

I've had the chance to do a number of projects related to this of late and can say there are a lot of great tools for publishing dashboards on the web - I'm a fan of the Geckoboard UI.

FWIW - Before you jump in to one, I would spend some cycles modeling it in Excel. At a miniimum it'll help assure you're capturing the data you want to report and give you a relatively cheap way to model out your UI requirements for a web based dashboard.

Best of luck!

Mindy Nies

October 1st, 2013

Andy, try KISSmetrics. And then you can put that and whatever else you're using for analytics into segment.io

Todd Ellermann Experienced I.T. Leader, CTO, and Creative Entrepreneur

October 1st, 2013

Andy, If you write code or integrate with Chart.io at this stage of your business you get an B+ for engineering cleverness and D- for business decision making. Dump your data into SQL database, setup Excel Pivot tables and charts using ODBC datasource and get back to taking care of customers and making a great product! $.02 What data you collect is going to decide your fate, not how cool your dashboard is. Best of luck, -T ******************************************************************* Todd R. Ellermann VP of Engineering VirtualTourist.com Founder Webagogy.com Researcher Betterwebapp.com Personal: toddecus@yahoo.com 805-850-8044 cell ******************************************************************* Does getting an ASU MBA with existing UofA BSCE make me a SunCat? or a WildDevil? Go Cats! ...said with a Devilish grin ;)

Alex Murray

October 1st, 2013

It has a pretty big learning curve, but Qlikview personal edition is free and can be a good choice. Their demo site has some great examples that you can copy. The plus side is that, if you like it, it can be a great choice as an