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

92 points| wulczer | 15 years ago |blog.ducksboard.com | reply

34 comments

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[+] kmfrk|15 years ago|reply
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. :)

[+] wulczer|15 years ago|reply
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 ;)

[+] aitorciki|15 years ago|reply
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!

[+] andypants|15 years ago|reply
Your product looks like Geckoboard: http://www.geckoboard.com/
[+] wulczer|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] biaxident|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] aitorciki|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] gavinballard|15 years ago|reply
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?

[+] aitorciki|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] k7d|15 years ago|reply
If I may ask, what were you considerations for having near 100% unit-test coverage even before private beta?
[+] wulczer|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] dgurney|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] wulczer|15 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] Spines11|15 years ago|reply
Looks good, how many people do you have working on it?
[+] wulczer|15 years ago|reply
We're two technical people and one biz.
[+] timjahn|15 years ago|reply
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. :)

[+] MatthewB|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] troels|15 years ago|reply
Within the last couple of hours, I have received a newsletter from chart.io, Ducksboard and Geckoboard. Coincidence?
[+] dmarinoc|15 years ago|reply
Don't know... we made it public a few days ago that today we will be giving invitations.

Ask them ;)

[+] markbao|15 years ago|reply
Invite codes? :P
[+] wulczer|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] paulnelligan|15 years ago|reply
This looks and feels great. Great idea and concept. I've already requested an invite. Best of luck!
[+] noodle|15 years ago|reply
your front page animation is broken in chrome (but not ff).
[+] wulczer|15 years ago|reply
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!