The Productive Solopreneur — On Reporting
Dashboard tools to enhance your business bird's eye view on key metrics
Running a brick-and-mortar or online business requires keeping an eye on certain metrics. Depending on how you define success — or lack thereof — those metrics provide ways to make educated decisions, such as shifting gears to improve things that are not helping your business to strive.
This blog is a part of “The Productive Solopreneur”, a series of articles about tools that help Solopreneurs to stay sane and productive. If you are more into technical stuff, read “AppEconomy” series instead.
Depending on how you define your key metrics for your business, you need cheap yet effective ways to monitor sales, marketing channel performance, system status and more, without paying a hefty price on tools you use.
The scope of this blog is to suggest a variety of tools and services, you can leverage to build better dashboards to read through your key metrics. With that in mind, following are some tools you may need to pay a visit:
- Logging — logs are a gold mine of the health of your overall app. There are a couple of services that can help to better manage them. If you don’t want to pay, it is always possible to stream log data to your custom dashboard(if you still have time to write one).
- Uptime — A service that monitors downtimes. This service works better for tech and non-tech people alike. There are various services for the rest of us: StatusPage, Pingdom just to name a few. Whatever your choice is, you don’t want to learn about a downtime from a customer.
- Klippfolio — Data-driven dashboard based on various business metrics. In the same category as Chartio, Plot.ly, and Tableau.
- Google Data Studio — Uses the data Google Analytics platform with the ability to tag and report based on your business needs. You may also try Segment, or Heap Analytics if you find Google Analytics hard to work with.
- Baremetrics — Connects to Stripe and derives commonly needed by most companies. Things like monthly recurring revenue, churn and the list of failed charges.
- Visible.vc — Stakeholder Business Intelligence
- Pipedrive — Provides bird eyes view, and manages sales pipelines.
Thanks for reading, I hope this article helps you somehow. Small guys always spend conservatively while striving for a streamlined bottom line. I always welcome feedback, critiques or questions. Feel free to leave a comment or a tweet.
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