Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: [00:00:00] Welcome to UpYourStack Podcast. I am your host, Noah Berk. Every week we feature interviews with some of our favorite developers who've either built their apps on HubSpot or have integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

And today I have Tom from Geckoboard, who's gonna be sharing a little more information about what they do and why it's so cool. And, I don't want to steal all the thunder here so Tom, how about you go ahead and introduce yourself your background, your title, and what does Geckoboard do?

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: Cool. Sure. So, I'm Tom, I'm Geckoboard's CEO and we make dashboard software. So we integrate with about 90 different services and we make it super simple to connect those services and then pull together data from different data sources onto the same dashboard. We try and make it real time wherever possible.

And we also do a lot of work to make this dashboard shareable. So it's all about, for us, it's all about creating feedback loops for your team. So you might have the reporting tools within things that HubSpot, but often people don't look at [00:01:00] them. And for what we do is we put that data into a really nice, successful dashboard that's totally bespoke for your team and make it shareable. So we automatically snapshot it through into things like Slack. We make it really look good, really good on TVs. So if you want it up in front of your sales team or up in front of your support team we're like the best at that. And. Yeah, and I guess the other thing is making it really easy as well.

So I think a lot of people struggle when it comes to things like dashboard, really dialing into exactly what you want isn't necessarily that straightforward. And so we do a lot of work both in the product to make it super simple to get set up so you can get up and running and build a dashboard genuinely in 10, 20 minutes.

Even if you're not technical, no need for a data scientist. And the other thing, It's just, yeah, maintaining it as well, making it really easy to edit and then how did this come about? Dashboards have been around for a long time. Like, why say, okay, all of a sudden I'm going to create [00:02:00] a company who does this. Like, did this idea come from?

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: Sure. Well, we've been around a long time. We were founded in 2010. But Paul, our founder I'll tell you his journey. So he was working on big data warehouse projects for banks and things like that. And, these projects would go on for years and cost millions of pounds to develop. And then he was really frustrated that at the end of the day, they do this work.

And the teams would not really have any better access to data or be any more connected, have any better feedback, it would be very gatekeeper, there'd be your data scientist, there'd be your data scientist or your your data team have a better access, but actually, like the people on the floor were still in the dark, didn't really know what was going on.

And so this was playing away his mind. He didn't really like. the culture of that, the fact that, yeah, in this day and age, like people ought to know what's going on. They ought to have that feedback loop of how their teams were growing. And that really bothered him. And then the other thing I guess was, back [00:03:00] 2010 was the rise really of SAS and all of a sudden APIs were there.

And for the first time, people's data was in different systems and there was no real way of getting them out. And so it was those two things combined and then Paul tried a few different ideas, but one got traction. He was, he's trying very, the lean startup thing, trying to build an MVP, get it out there.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Of course.

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: And then 

one just took off and that was Geckoboard. He put it on Hacker News and it just exploded. He got lots of love, lots of early usage. That's the journey. Really?

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That's a really cool journey. And I think, especially from the standpoint of back in those days in my background, I used to sell we'll call it reporting dashboarding to to OEMs, the software companies and just how important it was to So I get where the whole space comes and that piece.

So what would you say are some of the key tractions you've seen growth over the years? And especially compared to a lot of these other players in the marketplace why you guys?

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: I think one of the big things is real time. So we do a lot of work to try and get your [00:04:00] data updates as fast as possible. And with stuff like HubSpot now, most of our metrics can update instantly. And you need that. If you're wanting, particularly an operational team to get excited about those new deals, or so you have to spot if you've got a big backlog of support tickets that all of a sudden come in or people waiting on the line.

You need that real fast element. So that's one big thing that we do. The other is that because we don't want to have, a data expert in this way, we want to spend no code type solution. We do a hell of a lot of work to take the data that comes out of these APIs and actually present it to you as the metric that you don't expect, because that isn't what comes out.

What comes out is raw data and actually like. If you want to know your conversion rate and stuff like that, you have to quite a lot of work. And for things like HubSpot's not so bad, but things like Shopify or some of the support tools, like Intercom and Zendesk, like there was a lot of work doing, and so we.

Go above and beyond to sure that it's calculated. And then the other thing is, the other big slot on [00:05:00] Geckoboard is the sharing of it. So again, as I said, we're not designing for one person who's invested in that data to be able to better access it. We're designing to empower that person to make other people interested in it.

So it's all about the sharing, making the data visualizations really easy to understand, making the dashboards engaging by having a combination of metrics, goals. And feed so they can see your new deals come in or your new tickets come in. So it's all about making engaging and changing who's paying attention to that data.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That's really cool. And I think it's interesting. You mentioned that it's like the sharing of the data and the dashboards and reports because I remember when I was in that career, it was always for the end user, but it wasn't necessarily designed to like share per se, is meant to have the end user to be able to see whatever data they were trying to visualize inside the software application.

But really, what you've done is you developed a solution because we hear from clients all the time, like the sales leader needs to see it or a CX leader needs to see it, or maybe a marketing product manager needs to be able to see the [00:06:00] data, what the feedback is coming in and you've designed and developed your products that really focuses on that.

It sounds like, so you had mentioned something earlier and it really comes down to the ease of use. Why is that such a critical thing versus some of the perhaps other competitors in the space? Yeah.

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: I think that dashboards are inherently hard when you report inherently hard because you can in words say quite easily what you care about but then actually you have to try and work out how to build that, is this a HubSpot? Is this a property on a contact or a company or a deal?

If you want to filter it down, all that kind of thing, it just gets hard. And so that with the fact that in dashboards, they're not like, there is ROI immediately in terms of the time saving and that you don't have to manually go in and copy and paste this data out into a spreadsheet that you're then sharing with your exec team once a week.

There's that time saving, but The actual kind of big benefit, the team performance benefit is one that [00:07:00] takes longer, right? And the ROI, while it's huge, it's harder to prove. And so you end up finding that people can put it on the long burner and delay it. So the ability to do it very quickly and do it yourself is really important.

The other is the dashboards. If you're doing it right. So to keep it current, your current priorities, your current OKRs for using that kind of thing, you need to be updating all the time. And too often when people build dashboards, they or they do sometimes for instance, people code their own or they hook something together with spreadsheets.

Great. But you can do that first, but then your goal is going to change the API's might change and the ability to easily edit it is really key. And I think the other thing we find is that once people get traction with one or two, you realize, Oh, actually. There's a hell of things I want to be tracking or want to be tracking here.

Like I want a dashboard for each teammate maybe, or product line, that kind of thing. And all of a sudden, like the kind of, again, ROI of it being easy to do rather [00:08:00] than again, needing to get a developer involved with, or like a, reporting expert involved is

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Who generally is your customer then who's purchasing Geckoboard? Is it a sales leader? Is it a marketing leader? Is this as a customer service leader? Who is customer saying, "I need this."

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: Two primary ICPs are leaders of support teams and leaders of sales teams. We also find in smaller businesses we're serving to execs sometimes and founders and CEOs as well. But it tends to be quite senior because I think again that stakeholder like this is a management thing as much as it is a

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Yeah.

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: And so you need that leadership buy in to make it work because this is going part and parcel with being clear on your goals and having the kind of team processes in place To really make it sing. We traditionally like we've oriented the business more around support and sales the last year or so, actually.

So traditionally we were used a bit more by marketing teams or by founders of tech companies. But we found [00:09:00] that the customers that need us most tend to be those operational teams are very well, operational teams are very kind of real time in terms of what they care about. Like they care about

how many tickets they've sold today or how many deals are going through the pipeline right now. How many? 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So a lot of it's heavy on the support teams sounds, it makes sense. Like you want to be able to see how many tickets you're handling, the frequency, the urgency what you want to get back to you first, second, third, and you're right in tool. Cause I can give you some of that visualization, but if you just have a dedicated dashboard for it, it provides a deeper layer of visibility, I 

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: I think the other thing that I've is really key that I've not talked much about yet as well is that most people are using multiple tools, right? And HubSpot is great, got obviously all the different hubs. But still, it's quite common that you're using a tool like Aircall alongside it, or maybe you're for your e-commerce You're also using Shopify, or if you you might be using, more powerful support tool like Intercob or Zendesk, or you [00:10:00] might still invariably a lot of people use spreadsheets a lot or have their own proprietary databases. So we also integrate with all that and we also allow you to add that to the same dashboard easily.

And if you've got, we have some customers, who've got slightly complicated HubSpot setups. Maybe they've merged the company as well. and With Geckoboard, you can have both companies, both different HubSpot accounts on the same dashboard as well.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And be able to have a side by side comparison that, that's awesome. And so, so on that train of thought here, like how do you fill in the gaps within the HubSpot ecosystem in your opinion? Like someone's Hey, listen I see those reports and dashboards and HubSpot. And I knew you'd mentioned earlier that you can bring data from multiple sources, but what is that talk track you generally talk through with customers about why you're still going to use Geckoboard?

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: Yeah, well, I think the sharing mechanism is key. So the fact that they look great on TV, they update in real time that's paramount. The multi data tools is the other one. And [00:11:00] the sort of the multiple integrations and different sources of data is another key one. And then we also did a little bit more around things like goals as well.

So I think. Perhaps we'll have certain restrictions on what you can set goals on and certain plans and that kind of thing. And we don't have that as well. So you can work over that.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That's awesome. And what does the future roadmap look like for Geckoboard? Like how is, coming out next? I and how does AI playing a part in all of it?

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: Good questions. So, well, the thing that I'm most excited about right now is that we've actually just, I think, very coincidental timing as we've just shipped our brand new HubSpot integration. Actually, I don't think we've marketed it yet, so hopefully I'm not breaking some kind of marketing law here.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: coming out in a couple is going to be delayed by a 

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: We'll be alright then, we'll be alright.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: episode

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: But we've we've completely written that up. So it's way, it supports basically all metrics now, way more powerful filtering. It's just a massive upgrade and a super fast update, like it's instant in most cases. [00:12:00] So we're continuing to do that, and we're actually extending support for the support hub as well now, which wasn't so very traditionally supported. So that's one thing. But we're really doubling down on that as well.

So we want to we got a lot of feedback from teams that they'd like more around the gamification side of things. So to really celebrate when a new deal comes in who's just those good things that happen in the team and like really drag attention to it. So we're looking at doing things around that, looking at things like making it easier to spin up dashboards for each team or each team member as well.

At the moment, that's very possible and we'll help you do it, but it's a little bit more manual. And then also, so our roots were in TV dashboards we started out. But there's a lot of things that we've done recently to make the dashboards more interactive. So you can if you see a trend, you can drill into it and try and understand why that's going on.

We can see the tickets or the deals or the contacts behind that. So, that's something we'll lean into more as well. And then there's just always more around customization that people want as well, slightly [00:13:00] richer visualizations or a bit more control to really. So those are all on the radar. The other thing that we're looking at doing as well is allowing more kind of calculations on the metrics as well.

So we support all the common stock things you want to do and we also support all the custom properties that that Hustler's so great at allowing you to do. But we want to do more around really complicated combining that and we're going to offer that as combination of service and product as well going forward.

So if you come to us and say that we've got this really weird thing that we need to do, but it's really important to us as a business, we will help you do that either via the product or as professional services. In terms of AI, so there's lots. that I'd like to do eventually, but I think right now the focus is actually making sure that where it affects customers metrics.

So for instance, in support, AI is a big deal. We want to make sure that we can support tracking the AI related metrics there. So, cause you want to separate like how your human team is [00:14:00] operating compared to your to AI. And

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: splitting. So it's more about delineating between, was it a human fulfilled ticket? Or was it AI fulfilled ticket? And then be able delineate between the two based upon it's almost like an agent. 

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: That kind of thing, yeah. And then there's a lot of work going on in places like Xenophon to come in terms of classifying the tickets too so, and CSAT's a very common support metric and being able to I do that in AI as well. I think that would also happen with fails as well.

So like scoring, you've got things like gong, scoring how well your calls have gone and whether you can be doing more of that. I think those are metrics that are going to become more and more important on team dashboards. And so we want to be supporting that where we can. 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So one of the cool things I think you mentioned earlier, if we go back to the question earlier, we're answering more about your ICP. Really, Geckoboard is for anyone who has multiple technologies. Oftentimes you need to share what that board [00:15:00] is to a greater audience, you want to put it on a TV or you need a regular weekly Friday report, you're bringing multiple different data sources together. You're mashing them together to to give a better view of what's actually going on inside the organization. So Tom, being the CEO of Geckoboard and running this organization, what are some of the fun learning lessons or experiences that you could part with people who are listening to this episode today? Like what would you share with them?

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: Oh, wow. I don't know where to start. I think I was late to the importance of setting out a longer term vision. So we're very much a product of engineering company and we're very big fans of the kind of lean movement and being agile and a minimal viable product. So getting to the value as early as possible and being agile.

So if you get feedback, being able to switch course and change prototypes, Seriously important still, but it needs to [00:16:00] come hand in hand with a vision for the year or longer, because if you're always flipping between things, then the teams can't invest as much headspace or get ahead of or really commit to what they're doing.

So I think building out that vision and being really clear about that is incredibly important. We another thing actually was getting a coach. So I was, I think us Brits, it's a bit of a new phenomenon, really. I think maybe we're behind the times there, but. I kept meeting people saying that, tell me to get a coach it will make a real big difference.

And I was really skeptical for a long time, but this time last year I did that and made a huge difference to me as a leader. I think having someone who's solely there to push you and it's there in the service. It's just a different kind of relationship to a manager or investors or the board.

They're there to get the most out of you, but they're also there for you, but they push you in a different way. And I think I found that really interesting. And then just having someone who's interacting with different CEOs and their problems as well. I'm able to bring that in is really useful.

So I've got a lot of [00:17:00] that. I've obviously got a lot to say around OKRs, KPIs, that kind of thing. I think that a lot of people go wrong and we've got wrong, even though I think about this every single day and have done for over 10 years it's easy to get a little bit. too puritanical about it and wish that you could track everything and do everything in terms of combining the kind of, well, let's say with okay, I was right.

Normally pick a KR for your quarter. And it might be we want to increase the conversion rates demos or something by 50 percent or something. And you might have a load of stuff going on in that quarter. But whether you're going to, you give that to the team. But if you give that to the team without kind of a view over how they're going to do it, and you just give it to them as the pure kind of KR, then often you lose a lot of time to what is possible or how we're going to approach it.

Rather than going in with a plan actually, look, [00:18:00] this is what we're trying to achieve. But these are the things that we think are how we're going to get there. But then also who's responsible for whether you hit that or not? Is often a little bit different as well. Like, 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Holding people accountable.

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: Yeah, it's often actually, maybe I've chosen a poor example, but with engineering products in particular, let's say that we've got an engineering OKR to improve.

Yeah, the conversion rate again of a feature or something like the decision to work on that is probably a leadership decision over whether we're working on that or not. The team aren't accountable for whether for that vision piece, they're accountable for delivering the piece of work. But I think with OKRs, people often lump them together a little bit too much and you end up

kind of not separating out execution from the strategic piece. And ultimately, if you're in a business that's doing experimental stuff, not everything's going to work and you need to treat that differently from, and evaluating probably a different cadence [00:19:00] to whether you're evaluating whether you executed on the vision, like whether that was the right thing to you might not find out for another six months and that's okay.

And you need to be, you need to divorce the two, but if you combine them, you end up with really weird things where teams end up really demotivated. So well, we can't tell we've affected this business

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And I think it goes all the way back to what you said earlier, set out a vision, have a longer view of your vision. So how does this relate all the way back to the OKR set it If you have a five or 10 year vision, how is this all playing together? And honestly, I also think it comes back to you having a coach.

You said a have a vision. Think long term. And there's a really great book I've been reading. It literally just talks about that five steps ahead or five moves I'm thinking, what is that going to look like? So you're working towards And the second thing is I've been a visage member for such a long time now which is the business CEO groups that you're part of.

And I can't stress how important that is to [00:20:00] have a coach or be part of a group. And then sending these OKRs. I think it all comes together Tom. That's excellent advice, by the way. I think it's people, one, a sense of vulnerability. I tell people all the time, I think there's nothing wrong with having a coach and I seek them out.

I have actual coach, plus I'm part of the visage group. So it all plays together, Tom. Thank you so much. This has been fantastic. Love the product. Love what you guys are doing. If you want to visualize data and share it with that CEO leader, who's been like, show me what we got. Got to reach out to Geckoboard so they can actually help you put it all together and they make it super simple to do so, Tom, if people are interested to learn more about you, how can they find out more about you?

And how can they find out more about the company?

Tom Randle, Geckoboard: Well, I'm on, I'm active on LinkedIn, so help me out, Tom Randle, Geckoboard, and then also go to Geckoboard. com and we've got a free trial so you can get up and running straight away. We're also on HubSpot Marketplace. So if you search Geckoboard with that, you'll find us. Excellent.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: appreciate all to all the [00:21:00] listeners. You've joined us again today that really wraps up our conversation, which again, this really features app developers or software developers. You've either built their apps on HubSpot or with HubSpot. Our goal is to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack. Again, thanks for joining. It's been a pleasure. 

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