Most of our first users have trusted Porter because they know us personally. So I wanted to start writing about who we’re, what we’re doing, and have the most open and transparent communication with those who visit our site.

We’re happy our Facebook Ads connector for Google Data Studio is doing fine!

• It’s functional (which is a lot for early-stage startups)
• And users that we walk through personally say they love it and find it useful
• We get a lot of feedback; users are willing to spend time on us giving us recommendations
• We noticed some of our traffic is coming from Word of Mouth

We know we’re solving a massive problem because it’s the kind of issue I have had for years as a digital marketer. Most businesses still rely on Google Sheets for their marketing reporting.

Google Sheets is excellent, but the future is automated and beautifully visualized. The next stage of BI and reporting is on tools like Google Data Studio + Big Query.

What is our current stage and what we’re missing

Friendlier metrics

The fields labels of our connector are the same ones from the Facebook API, which is different from the Facebook Ads Manager interface.

For instance, the Link Clicks is shown as Inline Clicks.

We should spend some time re-labeling those fields, so users don’t get confused about building their reports.

More templates

Most people don’t like to spend time building reports. Curiously, I love to do it. Business Intelligence is an abstract concept, so narrowing down their benefits into use cases is beneficial.

A simple way to show use cases is building multiple report templates for different examples, just like:

• Instagram Ads reports
• Messenger
• Audience report
• Performance over time
• Google Ads + Facebook Ads reports

Payment gateway

Our main priority is setting up our payment gateway with Paypal. Some users haven’t paid because they can’t do it! A payment system is more complicated than it seems.

You should not only think of the payment gateway itself, the licenses system, and user management.

We’re building our system to allow users to buy multiple connectors, packages, buy monthly or yearly, and even get discounts, promotions, and coupons.

Once we have this, we can keep focusing on growing our connectors list.

We’re launching Instagram!

After writing this blog post, I will be setting up the Instagram connector, templates, emails, and landing page. In the next few days, Facebook Insights (aka Facebook for business pages and organic efforts) will also be launched.

Tuning up our on-boarding

We’re noticing that most people who start their on-boarding to connect their Facebook Ads data on Data Studio don’t finish the process. We need to figure out why and we have some hypotheses:

• People don’t want to use their 14-days trial right now
• They don’t understand Google Data Studio or haven’t created an account before
• They don’t trust Porter; they might think we’re stealing their data or are not secure.

The first hypothesis is hard to test right now as we would need to experiment with our product offering and pricing; those decisions are not tactical but strategical.

For the second one, we will re-create our video tutorial and add more documentation links. We will also set up more follow-up emails. We will add surveys asking, “why would prevent you from trying Porter today?” to figure out what’s going on.

We need to create more content so people can trust us. Finally, we need to be listed as Google Data Studio partners, so people don’t get warning messages like “this app is not verified.”

We don’t steal or access your data, by the way. At best, we’re taking your email when you sign up with Google or Facebook.

Tutorials and a free course

While Google Data Studio is pretty easy, most users get stuck in tiny details. I will start writing blog posts to teach people Data Studio in a structured way. I’m sure it will take them a few hours to learn.

This is everything so far. Thanks for reading until the end.