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Show HN: See how your startup stacks up against others in your space

13 points by paulsingh ↗ HN
website: dashboard.io

I've been thinking about this idea for a while now and finally got around to building the prototype this weekend.

The idea is that you'd drop my JS snippet on your site and I'd start building the "AARRR" table (which I'm actually building this week but imagine slide 4: http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version).

Basically, the system will build that table out for you and then show you how your startup stacks up against others in your space.

To be clear, I'll never share your data with anyone. So, if you're a "hosting" company, I'd show you your AARRR table and then show you how the average "hosting" company's metrics look.

Feedback? Thoughts? Concerns?

11 comments

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carbocation
Google Analytics does this ("benchmarking"), at least for traffic information (time on site, visitors, etc). Admittedly I don't think they do a great job of it, but are you aware of their offering, and can you explain how you'd distinguish yours from theirs?
paulsingh
Yep, Google's benchmarking is cool but doesn't help much when you're trying to figure out how you're doing as compared to other startups in your space.

I'd like to fix that with this.

pearanalytics
I see this competing more with Kiss Metrics actually. Especially since they went all expensive on us.
paulsingh
Actually, I don't see them as competitors at all. If you really want flexibility/configurability, go with them. I just wanted this to provide a baseline and put some of McClure's stuff into an actual tool that anyone could use.

Someday, I imagine that I'll have a set of public pages where you can actually see "baselines" of what basic conversion rates look like for saas/hosting/consumer/whatever companies.

Fundamentally, I just want to see a bit more transparency. Startups shouldn't have to operate in the dark.

sibsibsib
are you planning on adding some kind of tour? I'd like to see screenshots before diving in.
pearanalytics
I'm very interested in this, but even just to auto track funnel metrics. If you can show me other startups in my space, that's just icing on the cake.
ra
Sounds very neat. I just gave you my email in the signup.
pmjoyce
Sunnytrail [1] offers a service for SaaS providers to track key metrics once they have paying customers. However, they don't (yet) offer the most interesting part of your idea, comparing results against others in your industry.

It's a fascinating and a non-trivial problem you're addressing here and I'm interested to see how you approach it. Get it right and it could add huge amount of value.

The three toughest challenges as I see it:

1. Standardising metrics across a broad range of different business stages, verticals and models to provide a meaningful number (compare apples with apples).

2. Helping users to identify appropriate metrics from each of the AARRR categories. I.e. indicative and actionable.

3. The perennial problem of identifying unique users so that the behaviour of new or repeat visitors can be accurately measured prior to signup. IP addresses are not reliable (NAT & dynamic IPs), cookies can be flushed and potential customers have opportunity to access a service from a variety of devices - I know the folks at KISSmetrics put a lot of work into this.

[1] https://www.thesunnytrail.com/

edited for readability

paulsingh
Great points -- I've got some serious work ahead of me. :)

Near-term plan is to spend this week building out the reporting interface and spreading the word.

For #1 & #2, I'm hoping that using Dave's AARRR methodology will allow me to apply a somewhat consistent framework across a variety of startups.

For #3, you're absolutely right -- it's a big problem (and I haven't even thought about it yet).

So, any chance I can get you to try this on geckoboard itself? :)

pmjoyce
Sure, I'm open to that, let's talk offline.