Geckoboard: “It’s Chartbeat For Everything Else”

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/03/geckoboard/

by lachyg • 15 years ago

28 12 15 years ago

lachyg• 15 years ago

Congratulations on launching, Paul! Huge accomplishment. How did you get the coverage on TechCrunch?

pmjoyce4• 15 years ago

Thanks Lachy! As for how I got coverage on Techcrunch, I got an intro. Given that our initial target market (tech startups) are their core audience, I thought it would be a great place to announce the launch.

dchs2• 15 years ago

Congratulations on the funding too! I remember trying this out when you floated it on HN a while ago. Nice one!

pmjoyce4• 15 years ago

Thanks! The quality of feedback I got from my Ask HN post back in July was pretty incredible.

Since then I've spoken to a number of regular HNers who continue to use the product and provide feedback and again, been bowled over by just how helpful people are.

dchs2• 15 years ago

Great to hear! :)

joelhaasnoot• 15 years ago

Love the product, have been testing it, but the idea of paying hundreds of dollars a month for the services that there are APIs for, and then another $9 a month doesn't appeal to my bootstrapped startup at this moment in time. And there's no free plan...

patd• 15 years ago

This reminds me of what beebole.com wanted to do. They seem to have pivoted from that idea.

jgrahamc2• 15 years ago

Looks interesting, but I don't understand the pricing model at all. If I want to give all my 16 developers access to a company Geckoboard I'm paying 16 x $X for that, and if they want access from their laptops and iPhones it's even more. And they'll also be logging in from home. So that's even more devices.

I assume Paul is here: what's the thinking behind that?

I could imagine paying for integrations with specific services and I could imagine paying extra for different update speeds, but this client level licensing looks prohibitive for my use.

pmjoyce4• 15 years ago

Hi John, to say there was some deliberation on the pricing model would be a gross understatement. I sweated over this for some time but ultimately it came down to looking at the data on how beta testers were using the product, a number of pricing surveys with different user groups and one-to-one chats with individuals.

The most common use case was users hooking it up to a cheap netbook plugged in to a HDTV in the office or displayed on a 2nd monitor. In this case most small companies would use 2 devices max, a machine to configure and another to display. Perhaps unsurprisingly larger companies used it on more HDTVs (some use upward of a dozen) but they would rarely have more than one dashboard.

However, there are certainly a number of different use cases. Solo users, SMEs, large enterprises and agencies all have different usage patterns and finding a one-size-fits-all is almost impossible. I evaluated 'per device' to be the least bad option based on the data at my disposal. That said, it's early days and there are no sacred cows here, I'm always open to suggestions.

jgrahamc2• 15 years ago

Very interesting. This makes a lot of sense to me because that's probably how we would end up using it (we have an in house equivalent called, jokingly, Boiled Parsnip) that it visible on two monitors in the office.

The thing I find restrictive is that sometimes you'd want people to be able to access it to get status information while on the road or at home etc.

Have you thought about a 'simultaneous users' model. I could imagine paying for something like that where I know I've got say three monitors set up (two here in London, one in California) and then I could allow up to three other people to log in temporarily if they needed to.

allenp• 15 years ago

Everytime I see something like this I wish I had a startup/company/job where I could be actively referring to a dashboard to make sure things were humming along.

Geckoboard: “It’s Chartbeat For Everything Else”

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