Capture key performance data and share your story with your stakeholders using Visible

Originally published at siftery.com.

Visible integrates with applications you already use to run your business like G Suite, Salesforce, Stripe, Mixpanel and more to help automatically capture all of your key performance indicators and leverage all of your stakeholders in one platform.

They transform, normalize and centralize all of your KPIs and then visualize that data with accompanying context to create an engaging report.

Gerry Giacoman Colyer interviewed Michael Preuss, CEO at Visible to know more.

Can you tell us about what you’re working on? What is Visible?

Visible is a stakeholder data reporting platform used by over 2,000 businesses. We help keep all of your team members, investors and stakeholders engaged through beautiful reports.

Why are you building this? Was there a particular source of inspiration?

Visible was started by a group of entrepreneurs and investors. As investors, we had no great way of understanding what is happening with each portfolio company. We wanted to make sure our portfolio companies could leverage us as much as possible to improve their chance of success by helping with any near-term opportunities or problems.

As operators, entrepreneurs and executives we weren’t happy with the current data reporting tools on the market. We wanted to create a truly valuable product for the operator. Too much time is spent on cobbling together data/reports and we believe your time can be spent in higher impact areas. We want to help re-allocate time to be spent on decision making, improving outcomes and delivering a story in a more compelling way.

How is Visible different from what already exists in the market?
What’s unique about what you’re building and why do you think companies should use Visible?

There are three big differentiators when it comes to Visible that makes us unique in my opinion.

1. We continue to strive to be “data agnostic”. We want to connect to your key performance data wherever it lives. That could be in Google Sheets, Salesforce, Mixpanel or any other cloud app you might use to run your business. We started as a form that you would type data into and have evolved to create a frictionless as an experience as possible.
2. We want to give you the tools to tell the story of the data. Dashboards may give you a quick idea of a trend but don’t tell the real story of the data. Dashboards without context can be very dangerous. We want to give our customers the chance to tell their story by adding context through annotations, Updates and more. We also try to be “medium agnostic”. You can send an Update full rendered in an email, to a PDF, through a shareable link, to Slack…well you get the picture.
3. Business user friendly. Having a great looking product and user experience is table stakes these days. We want to make sure anyone that can use a tool like Excel or Salesforce can use Visible. You don’t need to involve data scientist or engineers to get the full power of Visible.

Who are the top competitors in your space right now?

It depends on problem you are trying to solve but there are tools like AngelLoop and FounderSuite on the investor reporting side and then tools like Google Data Studio, Power BI and Amazon Quicksight for internal BI reporting.

How are your customers using Visible? Could you share a few different use cases?

Investor Reporting — Investor reporting is our bread and butter. This is how we get started. CEOs, founders and finance professionals are the ones typically using Visible for investor reporting. They are connected to integrations like Quickbooks, Xero and Google Sheets and providing a monthly investor update that may go to investors, board members and team members. We also have customers using it for fundraising as well! One of our customers, Unbouce is a great example of this.

Internal Reporting — Our fastest growing use case. This is used by companies like Skyscanner, Braxton Brewing and many more. They connect to our suite of integrations and product dashboards and weekly updates for their internal teams. We see internally reporting being used by managers of sales & marketing teams, finance and ops team and support teams.

Client Reporting — This use case is still developing but is very promising and exciting. A quick example: Lessonly uses Visible to share data via our updates feature back to their large enterprise clients each week with how they are utilizing Lessonly and making suggestions for the following weeks. Typically we see client reporting being handled by a customer success professional sending one update per week to each client.

Have there been unique use cases for Visible for that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

We actually have a church in New Zealand using Visible to report data to their congregation. We thought that was pretty cool!

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Content has been a steady source of new customers for us. It is something you have to invest in early and make sure to keep a strong cadence. They initial returns will seem small but over time they continue to compound and pay dividends.

Keep customers happy! We pride ourselves on great support and a great product. It isn’t a growth hack per se but customer & word of mouth referrals are by far our best channel for new customers.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

When we started Visible we were serving and selling to too many masters. We tried to be a tool that could be used by companies, investors, investors investors (LPs) and more.

We looked at the market and decided to focus on where we can win and that was with company reporting. We removed a lot of functionality and churned some early customers on purpose. Those decisions weren’t easy but have paid off big time.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

I think if you surveyed our customers they would say Google Sheets was a total game change. Spreadsheets are the most common “programming language” in the world when you think about it. Spreadsheets can be used for just about anything and use by just about anyone.

Our Google Sheets integration has helped unlock so much for our customers it has been huge. We were just accepted as one of Google Clouds technology partners which is pretty exciting.

Salesforce has also helped us move the product up market and helps us understand how the best SaaS company in the world operates.

Integrations are huge for us. We support 10 directly and another 750+ (via Zapier). We’ll continue to invest in improving our current integrations and launching new ones.

What are the top tools that you depend on to run the company and how do you use them?

Segment — Segment has been instrumental in helping us track our event data in our application. It has been incredibly impactful in understand how our customers are using Visible and helping us make better product decisions.

Intercom — Intercom is the pulse of our customer base. We can see how our users are using or not using Visible and dynamically message them. We can triage any support request easily and supplement that with their new Educate product. We’re huge fans.

Trello — We use Trello for just about everything. From Product Management to managing users on a trial, Trello keeps everyone on the same page.

G Suite — Gmail, G sheets and Google Calendar are major productivity tools we love using. This should be pretty self explanatory ;)

Slack — If Intercom is the pulse of our customer base then Slack is the pulse of our company internally. Just about everything flows through Slack. Our intra-company email has gone to about 0%.

Visible — I know this is cliche but we use Visible every week for our reporting internally to the team and monthly to our investors.

Do you use Visible and recommend them? You can do it here https://siftery.com/visible?recommend.