Welcome to the space guys, it looks like a great product, I've signed up for the beta and I'm really looking forward to checking it out. What follows is by no means meant as a slight on the creators of the product, it looks like they've done a sterling job and I wish them every success.
I launched an almost identical product (in terms of functionality) http://geckoboard.com into private beta a little over a month ago and have been steadily improving it since then (adding a bunch of new APIs including Freshbooks, GitHub and an API with the ability to load custom data to your status board). Despite being first to market, accumulating a couple of thousand beta testers and reaching out to TC we only get a one line mention in the article. Getting on Techcrunch et al. is not the be-all and end-all but as a single founder outside of Silicon Valley situations like this reinforce the notion that you're swimming against the tide.
It's inevitable that sort of thing happens but it really does go to show one of the prime benefits of joining YC; the exposure and access you get is second to none and the best leg up a startup could hope for.
This is my experience as well with Active Interview. We've been around for about a year, and I even personally pitched our working product with paying customers to PG at SXSW in March. He shot it down immediately. But yet, Hirehive gets front page Techcrunch treatment just a few weeks ago. We're not in the valley and didn't go the YC route either.
But in the end while I think there is an initial marketing benefit, it still comes down to how hard you scrap and acquire customers in the long run.
I think for most of the coverage, TechCrunch is more interested in the fact that the company is backed by Y-Combainator than the product or idea. There's tons of great products, companies and ideas that just aren't sexy enough for a page view driven news site.
I spent some time working on a dashboard project (with the view to it becoming a start-up). I wanted to blend Panic style eye candy with something you could throw in a load of api keys (pivotal tracker, git hub, Google analytics, etc)
I abandoned the project mainly because the size of the addressable market is too small. I don't think Startups will spend $hundreds a month on this and there are only so many companies even interested in dashboards.
I've seen lots of BI tools used for creating dashboards in Fortune 500s given that most of the data is secure in random databases, mainframes, etc - the most popular of late is QlikView.
As a BI tool QlikView is a different animal to what's being proposed here. QlikView is a fully interactive BI tool designed for use on the desktop. Dashboards like Leftronic are designed to show key metrics from all over the business to a wide audience either via a large screen or a secondary or tertiary display on the desktop. Once it's set up and operating users shouldn't need to interact with it a great deal other than glancing up to check on part of the screen they're interested in. Much like you would use the dashboard of your car when you're on the road.
Fortune 500 companies tend not to use Pivotal Tracker, Git Hub, etc.
The money they spend is because they want custom integrations but that's not the company I wanted to launch. I wanted to build an 'off the shelf' dashboard you plugged in yourself.
And it is true that many startups don't care about dashboards - I'm surprised at the number I know who don't really have any visualization or tracking of their velocity, Constant Integration failures (if they even do CI), unit test fails, code commits, server health, etc.
I can't speak for companies that are using those tools internally (you can ask @danpodsedly who's using Pivotal Tracker in-house for example).
I know that for our development projects (www.xtremelabs.com) with F500 companies, we do use Pivotal Tracker and Github, and they are typically ok with it.
Before we joined Y Combinator, my co-founder and I had plans to build a Panic-style status board. Then we realized that status boards were not our core competency and we dropped the board completely to focus on our primary task at hand. I love that I can pay Leftronic for a fully customizable, fantastic-looking board – this way we can make our product and track it, too!
BTW, I've seen one of these boards in person and they're really slick. I can think of a hundred ways these could be hugely motivating (have a dial tick down based on bug-counts, have a meter showing avg user engagement, etc).
I'm not quite sure what they're offering besides "software that makes it easy for companies to aggregate data" and “People pay hundreds per screen for our visualizations.” I could imagine that it's a subscription-model for the web service that gathers and displays the data? But hundreds per screen sounds high
Is the professional services part a significant one? The mention of YCombinator, Cloudkick and WePay make it sound like they setup the whole thing.
We have a number of big screens hanging in our office. We loop an ugly powerpoint with stale messages. Regularly, I walk by the screens and wish we had a Panic-style dashboard for key metrics. Of course, we could build our own, but we always seem to have more important priorities (like our own products). Even thought about a startup opportunity in this space- if we would like it, we're probably not alone.
I've signed up for the beta and I'm very interested in the product details. Wish them the best of luck.
Thanks. We received an overwhelming response and we are actively sifting through all the signups. Please be patient and stay tuned for a response from us.
We demoed a similar product we are using internally at gameplanapp.com called fergie and demoed it at the Singapore ruby brigade meeting a couple of months ago. Definitely not pretty but it has a plug and play architecture for different stats to track.
We make software that drives the displays. The dashboards are fully customizable through our website. We have a simple API for collecting the data that needs to be monitored.
"Leftronic develops web-based visualization software optimized for large screen displays. Our API makes it easy - just push individual data points and our application tracks, parses and presents the data."
It looks like they provide an API for you to submit your own data, and then they make a personalized web application dashboard that you can display on a display.
I have a nearly identical startup on the east coast but it's more of a side business at the moment. Almost any good programmer has the chops to make one of these, it's just really hard to turn it into a business. Pricing is the hardest part. So... I'm guessing they aren't going to let you know. As far as the average startup guy, it's probably not affordable. I only sell to places I know have money to burn.
I launched an almost identical product (in terms of functionality) http://geckoboard.com into private beta a little over a month ago and have been steadily improving it since then (adding a bunch of new APIs including Freshbooks, GitHub and an API with the ability to load custom data to your status board). Despite being first to market, accumulating a couple of thousand beta testers and reaching out to TC we only get a one line mention in the article. Getting on Techcrunch et al. is not the be-all and end-all but as a single founder outside of Silicon Valley situations like this reinforce the notion that you're swimming against the tide.
It's inevitable that sort of thing happens but it really does go to show one of the prime benefits of joining YC; the exposure and access you get is second to none and the best leg up a startup could hope for.