The DigMyData Blog

Once you have your data all in one place and you’ve begun to derive value from taking a step back and looking at your business, you often want to share this learning with others. Most, if not all, small businesses rely on strong teams larger than just one. Having the ability to share immediate successes (and failures) of the business + trends affecting your business (with zero effort!) is very powerful.

Until recently, there was no way to share DigMyData with anyone without sharing a username/password or sending a screenshot. With our most recent update, account owners can share their account with anyone with an email address.

New users will be asked to signup and create their own credentials. This allows users to use the same login to view multiple DigMyData profiles (which we will introduce in the next blog post).

Note that these users cannot view the settings of your account, nor can they create story points or new calculation lines. They can create view the details by clicking on any point in the timeline.

More sharing options are coming. Specifically – sharing by embed (like a Google Map) and also a page (link to a page sharing a specific chart set). Additionally, sometimes you want to share your DigMyData account with someone, but maybe not all of the data within. In a few weeks we will offer the ability to share a chart set with specific users and nothing more. You might want to share all of your chart sets, except for your specific sales figures.

If you judged the activity of DigMyData by the number of posts on our blog since we launched publicly in September, you’d think we’d taken a long winters nap. In fact, we’ve spent hundreds of hours on the product preparing it for the end of the extended trial and beginning of DigMyData as a profitable web service. Over 400 have signed up for DigMyData and given it a test drive with many making it an indispensable tool for their business.

As the end of the extended trial approaches, I thought I’d go over what we’ve accomplished in the past few months. I’ll go into more detail in the coming days with specific posts on the new features.

* New Features
Sharing by user
Multi-profile

* New Extractors:
Authorize.net
MailChimp

* Extractor improvements:
Multiple PayPal accounts
Multiple Facebook accounts

* Important code changes
Finished removing PHP!
Upgraded our front end user interface code

* Other changes
Lots of improvements in Settings/help text/more to do
Removed screenshots; not a bad idea, just bad implementation

* Guides
We are building out a library of guides that will offer specific instruction on ideas for using DigMyData, how to measure traffic, how to track sales, and how to import data from the various data sources.

In the future, the guides will be part of the application itself – making experimentation with new data sets and analysis much more intuitive and simple.

Soon I’ll go into one of our two recent new features: Multi-User

Today we are publicly launching DigMyData after 8 months of beta and early access!

As an incentive during this launch period, Mark and I, along with Peldi (our advisor), have decided to offer an extended trial through Dec 31, 2011 for users signing up starting today (Tuesday, Sept 6). As of Jan 1, 2012, we will move to paid plans (we’re thinking $99/month right now).

What is DigMyData?
DigMyData is the online business CEO’s dashboard. Gone are the days of logging into 10 different sites so you can see how your business is doing or hours of Excel time to build a spreadsheet – then have it be out of date before you even save it.

Who is DigMyData for?
DigMyData is for anyone who has an online business. You sell desktop software, developer tools, pitch for donations, blog for a living, software as a service, iPhone games, online newsletters? Then DigMyData is for you.  You have email data, web traffic data, sales data, support data, data, data, data. What’s the best way to get meaning from all of this? We humbly suggest signing up for a free extended trial (through Dec 31, 2011) of DigMyData: https://www.digmydata.com/signup

How does DigMyData dig my data?
Chart: We take your data and present in a beautiful timeline chart. We bet you’ve never seen some of this data – and certainly not together.

Pivot table: Ever built a pivot table? Enjoyed it? Try ours – no setup and just get learning.

Forecasting: Have you wanted to see which road you’re headed down? We take a sample of your data and build out a forecast. No soothsaying here but you’ll be surprised where you’re headed. Plan ahead!

Story Points: Ever had an epiphany then scratched your head about it later? Record any “Aha!”‘s or offline events right in the chart.

More info here: http://www.digmydata.com/features/

What can I learn from DigMyData?

Actionable learning is just around the corner. We have a series of guides that you can follow as you begin using DigMyData:
What is the next bottleneck that I should attack?
Am I spending too much or too little on AdWords?
Determining Sales Conversion Rate

What data can I import as of launch?
Traffic: Google Analytics – See your web traffic data like never before.
Email: Gmail and Google Apps For Business – Tracking orders, support, or sales inquiries is as sample as setting up a filter and label
Email marketing: MailChimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor – Track your list size over time to see what drives it. See how e-mail broadcasts impact the rest of your business.
Sales: PayPal and Google Checkout – Money!
Marketing: AdWords – How much should you spend on AdWords? How effective is AdWords for your business? Find out!
Social: Facebook, Twitter – See how tweets affects your business. Discover what impacts your fan and follower base.

And for anything else we allow you to import spreadsheets (xls/csv) and RSS feeds. See how your blog impacts your business. Pull in your expense data and easily calculate profit. Track offline sales.

What’s next?
Accepted wisdom in the startup community is that you should be embarrassed by your “version 1″; though we’re not embarrassed this is absolutely a version 1.0. DigMyData in its current incarnation is super usable and we’re got great things planned in coming releases, like email and event alerts as well as goal setting. Follow us on Twitter @digmydata for updates on new features.

How do I sign up for DigMyData?

Sign up right here https://www.digmydata.com/signup and within a few clicks you’ll have your first charts built in DigMyData.

Help!
We are standing by like telethon phone operators in case you need help. =)

You can reach us here: @digmydata (Twitter) or support@digmydata.com

Additional coverage

- Read about how Peldi, of Balsamiq, joined us as our advisor and how he uses DigMyData to manage his multi-million “startup” from Italy: http://blogs.balsamiq.com/peldi/?p=3666

- Read about how Ruben, of Bidsketch, uses DigMyData to make sense of this web traffic: http://www.bidsketch.com/reviews/better-analytics-digmydata/

- Bob Walsh, of 47Hats and author of “The Web Startup Success Guide”, talks about how having data isn’t enough – you need DigMyData: http://47hats.com/2011/09/you-have-data-what-you-need-is-digmydata/