Dashboards for Startups

You probably take the dashboard in your car for granted. But imagine cars without dashboards. How would you know how fast you’re going? How much gas is in the tank? If something is going wrong with the engine or tire pressure? (A reluctant “thank you” to that pesky check-engine light.) The fact is that your car dashboard - that compact, carefully crafted little view above and through your steering wheel - is absolutely essential to the successful operation of such a complex machine.

Now consider that you are currently driving another complex machine - your startup. How can you expect to successfully navigate the challenges and obstacles on the road before you without a dashboard? How will you make quick, informed, data-driven decisions? How will you steer the business, stay on the right road, and keep the wheels turning? In addition to your own usage as a founder, you also need to report to a variety of stakeholders on the status of your “vehicle” - your board, investors, and other team members also need to stay informed and make good decisions. A dashboard is almost as essential for your startup as it is for your car. In fact, considering the speed a typical startup moves, and the agility required, some would argue that a startup dashboard is more essential.

Why dashboard?

“Measure everything of significance. Anything that is measured and watched, improves." - Bob Parsons, CEO, GoDaddy.com

The list of benefits a good dashboard and business intelligence (BI) strategy provides your startup is long and proven:

Visibility
Accountability
At-a-glance understanding
Warnings and trends
Identifying strengths and weaknesses
Streamline, data-driven decision making
Show progress toward goals
Provide “True North” and focus on what matters
Inspire & direct action
Same-page team cohesion
Motivation
Easy reporting to outside audiences
Time-savings, less ad-hoc reports
Improve culture and real-time performance

^{Image source: Grow.com}

Doing dashboarding right

Good dashboarding is one part art and two parts science. It’s easy to make the mistake of displaying too much data, or too little, or useless data, or, worse yet, confusing data. But if you get it right, dashboarding can be transformative to your company and provide you, your executive team, and your investors with a new level of data-driven confidence, speed, and direction. Here are a few things to keep in mind when implementing an effective dashboard strategy:

Think “action” first. Fight the urge to litter your dashboard with “vanity metrics”. Instead, make sure that each metric informs a single actionable decision; something that needs to be corrected if the news is bad, or amplified if the news is good. Measure things that are truly meaningful and contributive toward real progress.
KISS,S. Keep it small and simple, Stupid. Less is usually more with dashboarding. Remember you are trying to summarize things and provide at-a-glance indicators and alarms of key metrics that need attention. You are trying to cut through noise, not make more of it. As Avinash Kaushik states in his article “Five Rules of High Impact Web Analytics Dashboards, “If your dashboard does not fit on one page, you have a report, not a dashboard.” He continues “This rule is important because it encourages rigorous thought to be applied in selecting the golden dashboard metric. It acts as a natural barrier to cramming in too much information, makes data presentation easier, makes the dashboard more understandable.”
Design for a single audience. A “one-size-fits-all” dashboard almost always ends up ignored as a “one-size-fits-no-one” failure. Instead, make each dashboard targeted and built for one specific audience. The CEO will need something different than the senior management team. The CMO will want different data than the CIO. Engineering different than Sales, different than Customer Support. Investors and Board members have their own metrics to cover. You get the picture. Don’t throw together so many mixed-audience metrics into one dashboard, effectively making the dashboard 80% noise for every individual. Split it up into multiple dashboards by audience(s). Here are some suggested audience segments you might consider:

Executive Team
Board of Directors
Investors
Internal Teams

Finance
Development/Product
Marketing
Sales
Customer Support

The Lobby (Yes that TV in your waiting room)

Provide context. Are the numbers reported in your dashboard metrics higher or lower than expected? What action should be taken? It’s hard to say without something to compare them to. Always try to find some meaningful context against which to compare your numbers: an industry standard, a business goal or milestone, year-over-year performance - something. If you are having a hard time coming up with the comparative context, you probably need to do some more planning, or you are dealing with a pure vanity metric and should skip it.
Provide answers (when you can). Or if not answers, at least provoke valuable questions that lead to valuable answers. Good dashboard metrics will often pose questions. Great dashboard metrics will anticipate those questions and be able to provide answers, allowing an audience to “drill down” as needed. NOTE: This principle will possibly conflict with the KISSS principle previously listed. If, in attempting to provide answers, you find your dashboard becoming too large or complex, err on the side of KISSS and leave the detailed answers for follow-on efforts or reports. It’s more important that the dashboard clearly and instantly highlights actionable indicators and questions than to provide every answer.
Feed it good data. Effective dashboarding usually takes top-level buy-in (that's you) and some thought/effort to keep data clean and build systems and processes that provide good clean data as a source. The “Garbage-In-Garbage-Out” principle applies to dashboarding big time. Feed your dashboard questionable data, and you'll have questionable results and make questionable decisions. Often a company needs to make some significant choices and changes in technology and processes just to generate and collect the data needed to feed a good dashboard metric. More often than not, this extra effort pays off, and the dashboard even becomes a forcing factor for creating or improving a process that needed measurement and tweaking anyway. In other words, if you have a process or system that is not producing dashboard-quality data, you probably need to fix that first anyway.

“Without a systematic way to start and keep data clean, bad data will happen.” – Donato Diorio

What to measure?

"That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially." - Karl Pearson

The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or metrics you should be measuring vary depending on your business model, stage, and the current focus of your business. Below is a quick shopping-list of common metrics to consider. If you aren’t familiar with the terms, they are all pretty Google-able. Copy/paste away. (We will likely drill down into a few of these in future blog posts.)

Common Startup Metrics

Net MRR
MRR Expansion Rate
Net Promoter Score
Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Churn
Funnel Conversion Rate
Customers by Category
Revenue YTD
Net Profit Margin
Debt-to-Equity
Top Accounts
Sales Team Leaderboard
Conversion Funnels
Ad Traffic to Leads
Social Media Engagement and Activity
Customer Service Ticket Resolution
Email Marketing to Leads

^{Image source: Klipfolio.com}

_{Image source: Klipfolio.com}

Dashboards for Keating startups

Building and reading dashboards are a large part of what we do at Keating. We rely heavily on data to make decisions and provide timely, pointed advice to our clients.

For each of our clients, we provide a web dashboard showing a history of their basic financial metrics. These are designed to give the highest-level overview of their current financial positions, pulling data directly from their web-based accounting systems like QBO, Xero, NetSuite, or Intacct for near-real-time data visibility. We use these dashboards as the centerpiece of our monthly review and planning consultations each month. They are also extremely handy and popular in board meetings. Here are the most common and useful elements of our standard monthly finance reporting dashboards:

Current Cash Balance
Historical Burn Rate
Runway
Revenue Growth
Expenses
COGS
Profitability (or path-to)
Consolidations

_{Source: https://grow.keatingconsulting.com/ - Anonymized sample data}

Actuals versus projections

If a client has a financial model with projections (and they ABSOLUTELY should), we can map real-time data over the projections to show how the startup is performing against expectations. Each month, we discuss any deltas against the projections, analyze the cause of those deltas, and discuss how to address those deltas to either get back on track or update the projections to match reality. Talk about actionable metrics - these conversations often change the entire course of a startup’s direction.

^{Source: https://grow.keatingconsulting.com/ - Anonymized sample data}

Industry-specific metrics

Each industry or business model adds to the list its own set of KPIs - from professional services, to manufacturing, to biotech, to consumer applications - that help define and drive success.

SaaS and Subscriptions

For our many SaaS-related clients, we often add specific metrics relevant to a monthly or annual subscription business model:

Customer Churn
Revenue Churn
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Acquisition Cost
Months to Recover CAC
CAC:LTV Ratio
Customer Engagement Score
Qualified Marketing Traffic
Leads by Lifecycle Stage
Lead-to-Customer Rate
Customer Health Score

^{Image source: Klipfolio.com}

E-Commerce and Hardware

For e-commerce clients, the following KPIs are common additions:

Unique Visitors
Total Visits
Page Views
New Visitors
New Customers
Total Orders per Day, Week, Month
Time on Site per Visit
Page Views per Visit
Best Sellers
Checkout Abandonment
Cart Abandonment
Return Rate
Gross Margin
Customer Service Open Cases
Pay-per-click Cost per Acquisition
Pay-per-click Total Conversions
Average Order Value
Facebook new Likes
Twitter Retweets and New Followers
Amazon Ratings
Email Open, Click, and Conversion rates
Referral sources: percent from search, direct, email, pay-per-click, other
Time to ship
Returns
Orders by location (map)

Keating transparency

We even include a section on each client dashboard showing full near-real-time visibility into our own activity and billings on the account by their entire Keating team. We strive for transparency, cost-efficiency, and to avoid surprises; dashboarding lends itself perfectly toward those goals. Our clients can see in real-time the work being performed, by whom, and the associated costs.

^{Source: https://grow.keatingconsulting.com/ - Anonymized sample data}

Eating our own dogfood

Besides implementing dashboards for our startup clients, we use dashboards ourselves to monitor and improve our own performance. Many metrics we use pull from multiple API-based data sources or systems and overlay data-points to measure ourselves and tell a story.

^{Real photo of the real rotating dashboard in our lobby}

The dashboard in our lobby consolidates various high-level datasets from our time-keeping software (Harvest), project and tasking software (Asana), team/HR platform (Lattice), CRM (Hubspot), NPS scores (Promoter.io, Hubspot, and various Google Sheets) to let everyone see how we are progressing toward common goals important to our company mission ("We grow startups."). This dashboard is visible to all visitors to the office as well; we want them to see that we “eat our own dogfood” and actively monitor our own performance.

Our Client Success team has its own dashboard to monitor metrics representing how we are meeting and optimizing our service expectations for each client. It combines data from Harvest (time/hours), Hubspot (service tickets, client status, sales pipeline, NPS and email send-outs), Asana (onboarding, offboarding, special projects, and other tasks), and various Google Sheets (everything else) to highlight overall client satisfaction and to help identify opportunities for us to improve and expand (or contract) our services.

Our Executive Team has its own dashboard that pulls real-time data from more sensitive systems such as our internal accounting platform (Xero). We study it multiple times a week to compare revenues to targets, staff utilization (Harvest), department activity, client activity, receivables, and discounts or non-billable time that may represent an issue that needs attention.

Our Marketing and Business Development teams have a dashboard that highlights activities and trends that help optimize efforts and inform operations on what the pipeline looks like for staffing optimization.

More and more, we ourselves are figuring out how to let KPIs and data inform our own decisions, and dashboards have become a central part of our daily routines. We have gotten pretty good at dashboarding, and our own experiences have started to visibly contribute to our startup clients’ success.

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Let us show you what a good dashboard can do to help grow your startup.