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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.




The addressable market is small? Doesn't every Fortune 500 company use dashboards in their operation and control centers? The market is ripe.


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.




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