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Show HN: Ducksboard, from nothing to private beta in four months
- Spines11 15y agoLooks good, how many people do you have working on it?
- wulczer 15y agoWe're two technical people and one biz.
- biaxident 15y agoLooks really cool. What are the main things that differentiate you from similar products like Geckoboard? Also it'd be pretty cool to get a list of all the widgets that you currently have.
- aitorciki 15y agoHi, glad to hear you liked it. To answer your question, our main assets are: * real time and continuous (even when the user is not connected) data retrieval. * a very polished UI. * mail reports and XLS and other formats exports in a near future.
- kaylarose 15y agoIMO you may want to re-think emphasizing "a very polished UI", currently Geckoboard's UI is much more "polished"[1]. Instead, play up the tangible benefits over Geckoboard (realtime, data export). [1]https://demo.geckoboard.com/dashboard/B6782E562794C2F2/ https://demo.geckoboard.com/dashboard/B6782E562794C2F2/
- redemade 15y agobeauty is in the eye of the beholder. I prefer db to gecko, it looks great. +1 on very polished
- markbao 15y agoInvite codes? :P
- wulczer 15y agoShort answer: we're ashamed (if you're not ashamed of what you launched, you launched it late) :) Long answer: we're inviting close friends first, expanding to people that signed up back when we launched the first teaser and then the rest. As soon as we see how well does it scale, we'll start sprinkling invite codes on HN.
- MatthewB 15y agoWell...this is definitely pretty. I am going to play around with the demo but I'd like an invite code as well if possible.
- dgurney 15y agoThis looks awesome. I rarely sign up for Show HN's but I just signed up for yours. I run a startup and it's inconvenient to hunt and peck between Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, etc to find this info. Good idea to bring it all together. Nice design too. Good luck with it.
- wulczer 15y agoThanks, we'll try to get you an invite as soon as possible but we're still in the "too embarassed to show it to anyone else than close friends" stage :)
- aitorciki 15y agoFor people asking for an invite, this is how we are going to share them: 1. The first batch goes to close friends. This is not favoritism, we just feel more comfortable sharing the rough edges with them :) 2. The second batch will go to people who helped us validating and testing. 3. Lastly, we will provide invitations on a first-come/first-serve basis (you can subscribe from the site's sign up form). We will give out the invites as fast as we can… but be patient!
- gavinballard 15y agoVery nice! I'm currently building our wallboard, so thinking about this space a lot recently. Are you planning on providing a means to create custom widgets?
- aitorciki 15y agoWe provide a write API where customers can send their own data. Any existing widget can be used to display those values. Custom widgets are currently our top priority. Expect it to land in the next few weeks.
- timjahn 15y agoI like this. A simple place to get a snapshot of what's happening with your stats across all channels. Hope I get an invite. :)
- k7d 15y agoIf I may ask, what were you considerations for having near 100% unit-test coverage even before private beta?
- wulczer 15y agoA very good question. First, we caught bugs (not even regressions) just by writing tests. More importantly, many time when we left code without tests, we found a bug in it later. We're not 100% sure it's been a good investment, but we're 90% sure. Second, because it wasn't that hard. With the tools available, writing tests that cover all of your code is not too painful. Third, in private beta we're sure we'll have to change things as we face scaling problems and get failure reports. We wanted to have these tests before we started monkeying around with code.
- k7d 15y agoThanks. Glad to see cool new services coming from Europe :) But you should think heavily about differentiating from Geckoboard. For one I would add some kind of Apple / Android appstore metrics. Geckoboard doesn't have those and I would be glad to pay you if you did.
- wulczer 15y agoThanks, we've taken note. Definitely something to think about. On a tangential note, our main objective is not differentiating from Geckoboard, it's creating the best online dashboard out there.
- paulnelligan 15y agoThis looks and feels great. Great idea and concept. I've already requested an invite. Best of luck!
- andypants 15y agoYour product looks like Geckoboard: http://www.geckoboard.com/ http://www.geckoboard.com/
- wulczer 15y agoYes, both are dashboards for online metrics, so they will necessarily be similar. We believe that our product puts the accents in different places. Two things we put much emphasis on are user interface and true realtime updates. We spent a lot of effort polishing the UI and making sure it's consistent and informative, we're using websockets to deliver updates as soon as our backend gets them. Check out the demos for both of them and pick the one that pleases you more.
- andypants 15y agoI like that your board is real-time. Geckoboard requires an upgraded subscription to improve update speed. Will real-time be a feature on all plans of ducksboard?
- wulczer 15y agoIt's definitely going to be included in all plans. To expand on that, we do real real-time. For services that provide real-time updates, like Twitter, you get notification in the exact same moment someone retweeted you or followed you. For custom widgets where you provide your data, it's the same. Your system pushes data to the dashboard and your dashboard shows it instantly. For services you need to repeatedly poll, we're doing as many API requests as their limits allow us.
- noodle 15y agoyour front page animation is broken in chrome (but not ff).
- wulczer 15y agoYeah, we found that after we already made the page public and didn't want to touch it right after launch. We have a fix that we'll apply in a few minutes. Thanks!
- kmfrk 15y agoYou should turn the "s" in Ducksboard into a duck (logo); if not, people like me will keep forgetting that the letter is there and remember it as "Duckboard". It's probably the easiest character to draw as a duck, so it's not going to be a big problem. :)
- troels 15y agoWithin the last couple of hours, I have received a newsletter from chart.io, Ducksboard and Geckoboard. Coincidence?
- dmarinoc 15y agoDon't know... we made it public a few days ago that today we will be giving invitations. Ask them ;)
- pmjoyce 15y agoMy attention was drawn to Streamerapp who also announced today! Welcome to the space :) http://betali.st/startups/streamer http://betali.st/startups/streamer http://www.streamerapp.com/ http://www.streamerapp.com/
- wulczer 15y agoOh, missed that one. It's a great day for dashboards and the more the merrier!
- dterra 15y agoHey Paul, Thank you! Still, we are a real-time platform, where you can build a real-time dashboard like Gecko or Ducks but it also adds collaboration to all this data in the system. We believe that collaboration systems shouldn't add a new data silo to the business, so you get all this data into Streamer, and can create real-time widgets to transform data into information or Vertical Streams where users can collaborate (like, comment, share). Also, we dont follow a format, any developer with knowledge about APIs, and Highcharts can build whatever they want (they dont need to follow our format). It's 100% node.js, socket.io and MongoDB and its a 100% real-time environment. We are very proud of what we have built, and although we may be on the same space, its a different target! Congrats on Geckoboard. Well done.