There's been a lot of discussion on business dashboards here and elsewhere recently particularly since software house Panic blogged about their internal dashboard [1]. These dashboards tie together up-to-the-minute information on the various aspects of your business such as outstanding support requests and emails, project status, sales/revenue metrics, web analytics, infrastructure status etc and put them all in one place for easy consumption. I know that BCC Patrick (patio11) is a big fan (so much so that he built his own [2]), others too have mentioned how useful they are.<p>I thought it might be useful to offer a hosted dashboards for businesses so I began working on one that would consume data from some common APIs that many businesses - particularly startups - will be plugged into. The service will launch into a mvp beta in one month with about a dozen APIs including Google Analytics, Basecamp, Commission Junction, Pingdom, ChartBeat & MailChimp [3]. One thing it's not launching with is a custom data upload facility but I've got a pretty good idea of how that's going to look and it'll be added shortly after.<p>The question I'm asking today - what are the most important metrics to your business and how do you currently track them?<p>[1] http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/ and discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1177227<p>[2] http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/dashboard-on-a-shoestring.htm and discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189203<p>[3] http://www.geckoboard.com (you can register your name to be part of the beta)
Runway remaining.<p>The only way you will fail is to run out of cash.<p>Buying a fancy new iMac = shortening the runway.<p>Acquiring new customer = lengthening the runway.
I run a number of different websites, so being able to see multiple Analytics and Adwords accounts in the same place would save some considerable time, as would being able to see various affiliate accounts.<p>With my private investors hat on, bringing together various datasources that I check on a regular basis would also be amazingly useful.<p>Obviously different businesses have different requirements, but I can certainly see niche markets for bespoke dashboards/status boards.