This is the latest in our series of featured business dashboards, which highlights the interesting and different ways our customers are using Geckoboard. We hope that you will be inspired to try new ways of using your board, visualising your data and designing your dashboards.
We had a great chat with Andres Gottlieb co-Founder of Vendly, a social, local and mobile marketplace that allows users to get to know the people they are buying from, making transactions a social experience. Vendly was founded in 2011 and it has offices in Chile and USA.
Introducing Andres
How did you find out about Geckoboard?
Andres: “We have a very strong background on metrics, I am a Computer Scientist and my co-founders and very data driven too. From the very beginning, we started thinking of various mechanisms that we could start using to collect data from users. We started with the basics, like Google Analytics, and then we moved to Flurry and Mixpannel, which would give us data on how people were using our app. We started noticing that we needed to centralize this information and asked ourselves, ‘How can we visualize this data in a simple and understandable way that helps us use all this information to make quick and straightforward decisions?’ One of my co-founders worked at Telefonica, (The largest Telecom company in Latin America) and they used Geckoboard in its very early beta version. So after that experience, we thought it was the best option for us at Vendly”
How do you think Geckoboard has helped you to improve decision-making throughout the business?
Andres: “We are currently focusing on four major metrics: new users, new products, sold products and general interactions. All of these are encapsulated on Geckoboard so whenever we turn to the dashboard we have this really good picture of what is going on today, what happened every day of the last week and weekly since we went live. Geckoboard has been our main intelligence dashboard. It has helped us clear up all the noise and to stick to what really matters on a daily basis.”
“We are constantly building, measuring and understanding what is going on with what we do. With that in mind, Geckoboard has been fundamental to understand performance and how that correlates to our actions. It’s been very useful to have something visual that everybody can see and discuss”.
How do you go about choosing the right metrics to display on Geckoboard?
Andres: “Most metrics are useless unless they have an objective behind them, a reason to exist. We started with the basic stuff, like how many visits are we getting, how many people are clicking certain stuff. At the beginning, we were measuring pretty much everything, around 300 metrics that we were gathering but very little of those are business driven metrics. We are now working to polish the metrics we use so we can always act upon them, this is a continuous process”.
What would your advice be to other start-ups and large organizations that haven’t started using this kind of technology to improve their decision-making or that are interested in leveraging their current efforts as a data-driven organisation?
Andres: “Decisions need to be made taking data into account, they can’t be only from the gut level. A lot of decisions may be made based on experience and what you think is the right thing to do, but we now have the ability to see the impact of everything we are doing in a real time basis. I think a solution like Geckoboard easily lets you make decisions with facts in hand, and less in the traditional way of doing it because ‘this is the best thing because it worked in the past’. Geckoboard allows everyone to make decisions based on empiric data, at a minimal cost”.
At Geckoboard we believe in making data visible and approachable. We count with a fast growing list of third-party integrations that you can immediately access in order to start leveraging data visibility in your organisation. Simply put, identify your key metrics and let us do the rest.
Thanks to Andres and the team for such great insights. We would love to hear your stories, too. Let us know if you would like to be featured on this blog.
Geckoboard.
About Vendly
Vendly is a simple mobile marketplace for you and your friends to sell and buy anything from each other and everyone else. With a simple 3 step process, you can snap, share and sell anything, creating simple one-page listings for your vends, just using your mobile phone and existing social networks. You can even offer rewards so your friends or anyone can help you find buyers for your vends, increasing your chances of selling. Vendly is still in Beta and working hard to make everything happen as soon as possible!
