London-based business dashboard Geckoboard today announced updates to its platform, which allows companies to pull in data from different services to create analytics dashboards. The company is adding a Widget Editor to its developer platform, which will allow developers to create widgets for their platform and make it available to Geckoboard’s customers. Previously only Geckoboard’s team (and select partners who used the API) could add integrations, and they already have over 30 widgets available for services including Google Analytics, Twitter, Salesforce, and Basecamp.
The company’s platform lets customers, including Groupon, SecondMarket and Atlassian, pull in data from a variety of services and display it as widgets in a visual dashboard, so they can see metrics like their social media followers, traffic, and sales. While tools like Google Analytics have metrics dashboards, Geckoboard pulls all data sources into one place so companies can track them to get a real-time view of what’s happening across all their tools (dashboards are refreshed every 30 seconds). Geckoboard co-founder and CEO Paul Joyce said in an interview that today’s widget editor launch was in response to customers wanting the ability to integrate with any and all services they used.
“What we’ve been told is that it’s great to integrate with the data sources that people need, but as soon as you integrate with 65 percent of people’s requirements…they still have that same problem of needing to check multiple sources of data to get an overview of their business,” Joyce said.” One of the most important things for us has been increasing the number of integrations and doing that in as easy a way as possible.”
He said the main issues with building integrations in-house is that they had to understand the metrics customers would want to pull from each app, understand the API, and develop a robust integration from there. And they did have an API, but it required building a custom solution, which not many companies were willing to do.
Today’s update means that developers or businesses using Geckoboard’s platform can now create widgets for their services, which they can then allow customers to tap as one of their data sources. Launch partners include Klout, Woopra and Infusionsoft, meaning that Geckoboard’s over 1,400 customers can now add those sources to their dashboard. The Widget Editor lets developers code, debug and preview the widgets, and the company says it takes less than an hour to complete a widget, which would then be available to Geckoboard’s customers within days pending approval.
“What the widget editor does is it allows us to say ‘look, you guys know your API better than anyone else, you know your customers and their key requirements better than anyone else, we can help you to come up with a key set of visualizations, and you can create that for your customers,” Joyce said.
The company’s customer base is varied, from SMBs to agencies to bigger brands. Joyce said thy don’t have a specific target customer, it’s really just anyone who wants to monitor their operational metrics in real-time. Customers pay anywhere from $19 per month for 20 third-party data connections, to $199 for 200 connections.
Prior to today’s Widget Editor launch, Geckoboard’s customers could also connect to third-party integrations through GeckoFuel, which offers custom widgets for the Geckoboard platform. Rather than spell the demise of GeckoFuel, Joyce said that since there are countless services that could be added to a Geckoboard dashboard, the more people building integrations the better. “We see potential integration points in hundreds of thousands of applications,” Joyce said. “Our goal is to reach as many integration points as possible, and certainly we’re on good terms with the GeckoFuel guys, and I still see a place for them in the ecosystem.”
Geckoboard has raised over $1.5 million in funding since its launch in 2010 from investors including Index Ventures, 500 Startups, and Path CEO Dave Morin, and has grown from a team of two to 11 people over the last six months. Right now almost 50 percent of the company’s customer base is in the U.S., with others in Europe and other areas. Along with their launch partners, Joyce said there are several other companies developing widgets, and though he can’t specify who they are, those widgets will be released in the coming weeks. With companies continually trying to dive into their metrics on a granular, real-time level, opening up Geckoboard’s platforms to new integrations means more data sources, and in turn a more robust company snapshot.