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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I can't recommend these enough. Some thoughts:

1) If it requires > 5 seconds to refresh a page, you should be doing a cron job (or whatever) to generate and then just reading from cached data. If you have any pain in accessing data, you won't make decisions based on data.

2) I like to periodically update my dashboards to a) combat trend blindness and b) include new widgets for projects that have upcoming decisions to be made, like "Should I scale out this new SEO mini-project?" (You'd want data which showed you whether it was working or not.)

3) The point of having eye candy is not to display numbers, it is to make the right decisions. Don't include stuff that isn't actionable. (Exception: need to bamboozle investors? Give them all the data they want and more.)

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Disclosure: I run a startup that makes SaaS status boards.

While I agree that having access to _actionable_ metrics is what's really going to be the biggest tangible benefit of these sorts of systems, I've also found that there exists another class of data that, while not actionable, also provides some utility. These are often tagged with the 'vanity metrics' label and conventional wisdom deems them to be useless at best and distracting at worst but, I've found, they can sometimes be useful.

In other words, I may not be able to act (or know how to act) when they change but getting constant feedback from many aspects of my business helps me to notice subtle changes that may be interesting and that sometimes act as a harbinger for larger/more significant changes further down the line.

What these metrics are will entirely depend on your business what sort of person you are. For me, something like changes in my Twitter follower count (a classic vanity metric), when combined with a host of other signals can give me subtle cues about how the business is being perceived, what's causing that, is it a good change etc... none of it is immediately actionable but it all adds up; it's more data points leading a more rounded understanding of how my business works.

It's entirely possible I spend too much time dog-fooding my own product and most reasonable business owners don't have the time to explore these cues, but I do feel like it helps me to feel more connected to the day-to-day running of my own business.

I would be wary of that, given people's incredible facility with fitting a conclusion on top of collections of inconclusive data and then, worse, fitting new data into that conclusion. I have probably done it myself.

Two thumbs up for metrics and startups and startups for metrics, but I hear "delta Twitter followers" and start seeing subtle distinctions teased out holistic evaluation of the arrangement of chicken entrails.

(The difference between Twitter followers and chicken entrails? Chicken entrails have measurable value - people can at least eat them.)

I certainly would not argue that there is explicit value in knowing delta Twitter followers, and wasn't what I was suggesting. If you're trying to retrofit causation to a clutch of assorted metrics you happen to have lying about I totally agree you're going to come up with some misleading conclusions.

What I would say, however, is taken as one - albeit low weighted - input into a system (my brain) that might x-ref against some other indicators of different significance might lead to the conclusion "there's unusual activity afoot". The # of Twitter followers doesn't tell you much about what's happening but might indicate that something is happening.

I think this is a nice point: >> 2) I like to periodically update my dashboards to a) combat trend blindness

Totally happens all the time

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