Push it!

Headquartered in New York, NY, Boxcar has sent over 700 million notifications to iPhones and Macs  around the world. Want to know the moment someone mentions you on Twitter or a friend checks in on Foursquare? Boxcar handles it all. With integrations to tons of services it allows you to read notifications where and when you want them.

Mission Critical Metrics
Needless to say, when you're growing fast tracking and communicating operational metrics is vitally important - this is where Geckoboard comes in.

"Being able to insightfully see where we're at for the day compared to the previous day or week is ultra important", says Jonathan George, CEO and founder.

"Geckoboard enables us to keep an eye on mission-critical metrics, as well as providing an early warning system for both positive and negative events."

Specifically they use Geckoboard to give a real-time breakdown of the overall state and health of Boxcar on a real-time basis including core operational metrics such as:

• New user signups
• New services
• Number of pushes

They're currently accessing Geckoboard from their laptops, iPhones and iPad and will soon have a big screen in the office dedicated to running Geckoboard to give everyone in the office access to their real-time operational stats.

In this series of blog posts we'll be profiling the businesses of Geckoboard customers - what their business is, how they use Geckoboard, and how it helps them. Interested in being profiled? Email us at help@geckoboard.com

Today we'll be profiling Jason VandeBoom from ActiveCampaign

Here's a little about ActiveCampaign in Jason's words:

"ActiveCampaign is a web based software company focused on improving email marketing.  We help over 50,000 users succeed within their respective industries.  We seek to improve all aspects of email marketing including email design, list management, email delivery, and learning more about your subscribers with in-depth reporting."

Here's what Jason had to say about how ActiveCampaign use Geckoboard:

"Metrics are very popular within our company.  Once we started to use Geckoboard we began transitioning some of our existing reports into our Geckoboard account.  Geckoboard has allowed us to create good looking wallboards in a manner that is much more efficient than our internal based systems we used to use.

With Geckoboard we provide real time status updates of our critical services, show recent activity & trends, gauge our overall customer satisfaction, display our support queue visually, show recent development updates, etc..  All widgets are setup to provide greater transparency within our company along with encouraging a team based goal of improving our service and product."

Jason says that Geckoboard has helped the team work together and share more information:

"Several panels of our wallboard are dedicated to providing information about our support queue and support ratings.  By displaying this information in a central location everyone can work to improve their own work and our overall goals.  Upon implementing Geckoboard it assisted us with working collectively to ensure top support ratings and has helped improve our overall support ratings.

In addition to directly trying to improve our service we also use Geckoboard to share interesting information.  Such as recent orders, email volumes, etc.. This helps share information that we normally wouldn't be posting every day and keeps everyone more engaged in what our company does."

Find out more about Active Campaign at http://www.activecampaign.com/.

In our new series, we'll be profiling the businesses of Geckoboard customers - what their business is, how they use Geckoboard, and how it helps them. Interested in being profiled? Email us at help@geckoboard.com

Today we'll be profiling Elliott Draper of KickCode LTD. 

Here's a little about KickCode LTD in Elliott's words: 

“KickCode Ltd is a company that I founded in August 2010, providing web and mobile development services to clients. I've been programming professionally now for almost 8 years, and I've been working for myself for over 2 years (initially as a sole trader). Last year I decided to formalise things and start a company so that I could grow what I was doing over the coming years.”  

Here's what Elliott had to say about how he uses Geckoboard and other apps to keep his business organised and productive: 

“I bill for my time by the hour, and so it's critical for me to keep on top of my hours, on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These stats, along with some vanity stats for Twitter/Facebook, and some basic up/down ping checks on my most important websites, are what feature front and centre on my Geckoboard. Geckoboard provides me with an at-a-glance view of the most important data for my day-to-day running of my business, and that's what makes it indispensable.

A little about which apps I use to run my business: One of the most important apps I use is FreeAgent, which helps me with many facets of running my business, but the most important features are invoicing, and finances/tax calculations. I've got my own web app, Watchy which I build with a design partner of mine, Capra, that interfaces with FreeAgent and adds a layer of more detailed analytics and statistics that as I mentioned above, are the lifeblood of my business. Watchy includes Geckoboard widgets for the most important stats, which is how I'm able to keep on top of all these things right from the comfort of my dashboard!

Besides that, in terms of coding, I use MacVim as my text editor, and the majority of my work right now is web development work using Ruby on Rails. With a terminal, MacVim, and a web browser (currently I mainly use Google Chrome), I'm all set!

Being a Ruby developer, I've written a gem to expose data from my Ruby on Rails apps to my Geckoboard dashboard, called Chameleon (https://github.com/ejdraper/chameleon). This lets me easily drop in widgets to keep track of stats for each new web app I launch (for example the number of signups per day).”

Find out more about Elliott and KickCode LTD at kickcode.com. 

 

 

In our new series, we'll be profiling the businesses of Geckoboard customers. What their business is, how they use Geckboard, and how it helps them. Interested in being profiled? Email us help@geckoboard.com.

Today, we'll be profiling Kevin Waterman of Crisis Plan. 

Crisis Plan is an emergency management consultant agency run by Kevin Waterman, offering services such as Emergency Management Planning, Emergency Response, and Business Continuity Management. 

Here's what Kevin had to say:

“While I work in a number of fields, primarily I’m an emergency management consultant who helps small and large businesses prepare, respond, mitigate and recover from disasters and emergencies. 

I normally do this through my Australian based company Crisis Plan, although over the last few months I’ve worked mostly as a freelance consultant due to the large number of disasters in this part of the world and the need for me to work fluidly between the different regions they have occurred in.

I was lucky to get an invite to Geckoboard pretty early on in their beta period and it has completely revolutionised the way I work and how I track what's going on within my company. It’s the glue that holds my complicated online world together and I can't imagine not using it.

My work takes me to some pretty remote places, often in conditions that would have made it challenging to get on the internet even before a disaster had occurred, Geckoboard gives me a central command post to my business and work life that ensures I know whats happening to all the services that are important to me without the need to log into dozens of sites.

I have a lot of services running through my Geckoboard including Basecamp, Highrise, Zendesk, Uservoice, Pingdom, Chartbeat, Twitter and Google Analytics. When I see a new service that I think may help me run my business then its ability to work with Geckoboard is a huge factor in my decision to use it.

A big part of the reason I love Geckoboard though is that its a set and forget service, I set it up and then it just works without the need for me to do anything but an occasional refresh. The developer and the customer service have been outstanding, they truly want to make it a better service and I regularly see them engaging with customers trying to find out how they can make it better.

I have become really passionate about Geckoboard and how its made my life easier to control, the modern business world is complicated and competitive and Geckoboard gives me a competitive edge in keeping my business running smoothly.”

Find out more about Kevin and CrisisPlan at http://www.crisisplan.com.au and http://www.kswaterman.com.