If not a dashboard, then it's periodic reports... Or reports pullable on demand.

There's got to be a way to measure things and plan for the future, and reports/graphs/etc help a lot with that.

I think reports are necessary, but a dashboard really helps everyone see at a glance how things are going.

If your up-time graph looks like a heartbeat monitor, everyone knows what that means.

Likewise for active customers being a downhill slope when viewed weekly.

Most of the time, those graphs are just going to give you happy thoughts, but sudden spikes or dips, or worrisome things like those above... Well, you can SEE them and they mean more, especially to non-technical types.

Yes, absolutely every startup I've talked to creates their own dashboard or dumps some results to excel periodically. And I've talked to a lot of them, as my company is addressing this issue. (chart.io YCS10)

I think that will change shortly.

Is there a way I could try out chart.io? I'm looking at a bunch of options here and what you guys seem to offer looks pretty compelling.

Yep. email me at dbeyer@chart.io and I'll bump you ahead of the beta list :)

Yes. My company (RJMetrics) sells BI and dashboard software to web businesses. Our biggest competitor by far is internal development.

Probably. Google Chart API is golden.