Once upon a time, in a faraway land...

On October 15, John A. De Goes headed down from Boulder, Colorado to Denver, to participate in the Denver Startup Weekend. In the 54 hours that followed, John and his team managed to create an API that allowed developers to track and visualize simple metrics. On Sunday of the same weekend, on October 17, 2011, John introduced the world to ReportGrid — the first API for analytics and visualization.

The journey to that fateful day began about a year prior, when John came on as VP of Engineering for a rich media ad vendor. In the next-generation platform he architected and oversaw, one of the key features was analytics and reporting, to help advertisers understand and optimize the performance of their advertising campaigns. John never wanted to build an analytics and data visualization engine, preferring to focus on core platform features like dynamic creative optimization, but the lack of any third-party solution gave him no choice. So reluctantly, he dedicated a third of his engineering team and nearly a year to the problem.

After living through that experience, John became convinced that there had to be a better way. Every technology platform and nearly every SaaS application needs to give its users reporting. But historically, the only way to solve that problem has been to devote months or years of custom development, building on top of open source frameworks, deploying across numerous servers, and maintaining the whole stack indefinitely. Someone was going to build a solution, John figured — why not him? And the rest is history.

In May of 2011, ReportGrid was invited to participate in the TechStars 2011 summer class, in Boulder, Colorado. John left his full-time position as Senior Director of Engineering at LivingSocial to pursue the opportunity. Pulling together a full-time team, ReportGrid's technology went from prototype to market-ready during the course of TechStars, and by the time Demo Day rolled around, ReportGrid had a pipeline of 50 companies waiting in line for access to the technology, as well as 15 companies building solutions on the platform.

Since graduation from TechStars, ReportGrid has filled out its engineering team, attracting top talent from as far away as Wisconson and Portugal, raised $750k in seed funding, onboarded numerous customers, and launched its self-service platform to the public.

ReportGrid is currently focused on some next-generation features that will change how developers solve problems in analytics and data visualization.