Show HN: Ducksboard, from nothing to private beta in four months | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Ducksboard, from nothing to private beta in four months

blog.ducksboard.com

92 pointswulczer34 comments

You 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. :)

Ah, our quest for a logo was truly epic. One day we'll write a blog post about 99designs...

Anyway, I hope that this exact conversation will make you remember it's duckSboard.com ;)

I can't unsee the duck s now.

For 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!

Your product looks like Geckoboard: http://www.geckoboard.com/

Yes, 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.

I 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?

It'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.

Looks 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.

Hi, 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.

IMO 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/

beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I prefer db to gecko, it looks great. +1 on very polished

Very 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?

We 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.

If I may ask, what were you considerations for having near 100% unit-test coverage even before private beta?

A 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.

Thanks. 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.

Thanks, 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.

This 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.

Thanks, 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 :)

Looks good, how many people do you have working on it?

We're two technical people and one biz.

I like this. A simple place to get a snapshot of what's happening with your stats across all channels.

Hope I get an invite. :)

Well...this is definitely pretty. I am going to play around with the demo but I'd like an invite code as well if possible.

Within the last couple of hours, I have received a newsletter from chart.io, Ducksboard and Geckoboard. Coincidence?

Don't know... we made it public a few days ago that today we will be giving invitations.

Ask them ;)

My attention was drawn to Streamerapp who also announced today!

Welcome to the space :)

http://betali.st/startups/streamer http://www.streamerapp.com/

Oh, missed that one. It's a great day for dashboards and the more the merrier!

Hey 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.

Invite codes? :P

Short 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.

This looks and feels great. Great idea and concept. I've already requested an invite. Best of luck!

your front page animation is broken in chrome (but not ff).

Yeah, 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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com