It’s been quite a journey with DayWatch. Since 2012 we’ve been working for it as our wonder child and now it is time to let it fly even higher. Here is the story:
Birth
It all started with the niche idea to help Daily Deals companies (very trendy in 2012) analyze their main metrics at any time, any moment. Industry reports, insights, market share & product performance were the most powerful aspects of our beloved tool.
Personality
We are Django/Python lovers, hence, Daywatch was built entirely with them. Scrapy’s framework & MonkeyLearn inclusion were key to bring scraping & Natural Language Processing features to the product, specially used for market competition analysis.
Growing Up
Later on, with an expansion intention, we added new features to DayWatch which transformed it into a very powerful platform for any E-Commerce manager. Which features are we talking about? Start counting:
– Extract information from unstructured data sources.
– Curate, analyze and synthesize key performance indicators.
– Present information in cool ways (pie charts, images, dynamic tables, etc).
In order to develop these features, we worked closely with several South American clients from a lean startup perspective: create, test & rebuild.
Once this process – quite – ended we started the growth phase and the results were surprising…. DayWatch was a hit in Asia & Oceania! Several daily deal & E-commerce platforms licensed and started gathering interesting insights which supported their important decisions.
Fly
Growing was cool, we were quite happy with the results obtained… however it was time to let DayWatch fly. By fly I mean open-source it.
You might probably be self-asking these questions:
– Why are you giving DayWatch open-source when you devoted so much time and investment?
– Why are you giving DayWatch open-source when you were still charging for it?
Good questions, here are the reasons:
As the tech market determines, some products are hits and some aren’t. In my opinion it is being very harsh to claim that DayWatch was a not successful, still, time & resources are limited and we needed to focus. In addition (main reason coming) we are open-source enthusiasts and really believe in DayWatch as a great resource that will help E-commerce entrepreneurs to discover cool insights from mind blowing data.
DayWatch was Tryolabs’ second product (a social media platform was the starter one) and we believe it is time to let it fly. You can find all the source code to integrate it in the Github Repo and please feel free to send us feedback, opinions, bugs, etc.
As entrepreneurs we need to know where to focus, at the moment all of our attention is concentrated at Tryolabs’ cool/demanding projects and in MonkeyLearn growth phase. Daywatch we’ll surely keep in touch.
Daywatch link: http://usedaywatch.com/
Daywatch Repo: https://github.com/tryolabs/daywatch