Automatic Product Pulse With Google Spreadsheets

Github, the largest source code hosting and collaboration platform, has a great built-in tool call Github Pulse. Github Pulse highlights key aspects of a project like number of authors, commits, pull requests, open issues, closed issues, and more in a designated time frame (e.g. 1 month). The same way Github Pulse provides an automatic dashboard of a project, startups would do well to build an automated pulse of their product usage using the Google Spreadsheets API.

Here’s how an automatic product pulse with Google Spreadsheets would work:

• Blank Google Spreadsheet with columns for each piece of relevant data and a new row for each day of data
• Nightly cron job to insert a new row of data based on the previous day’s data in one or more sheets
• Example columns: New accounts, deleted accounts, new account revenue, deleted account revenue, new users, deleted users, active users, user logins, # module A created, # module A updated, # module A used, # module B created, # module B updated, # module B used, etc (where each number represents the amount for that one 24 hour period)
• Charts and graphs would automatically update based on data

Overall, the idea is to spend a few engineering cycles to build a system that automatically sends data on a regular basis to a cloud-based spreadsheet so that everyone in the company can see the most important information at a moment’s notice. Taking it one step further, the product pulse could then be displayed on a large LED TV, much like a LED Scoreboard, so that the most important product metrics are always top of mind.

What else? What are your thoughts on an automatic product pulse with Google Spreadsheets?