Isaac Correa · Madrid
The Looker Studio years
The first thing anybody ever paid me for was an analytics dashboard, on the last day of 2022, on a freelance platform. Seven dollars. The two years that followed were Looker Studio, one commission at a time. This page is about the work itself rather than the arc it belongs to: what a job actually consisted of, what turned out to be the same in all of them, and what came out the other side.
What a commission actually was
Somebody gives you access to their GA4 property, their Search Console, sometimes their Google Ads. They send a paragraph describing what they want. The paragraph almost never describes a chart. It describes a worry: they think they are paying too much for something, or they cannot tell which half of the traffic is worth anything, or a number went down last month and nobody in the company can say why.
The job is to turn that worry into something a screen can answer, and then to build the screen. The building is the short part. Most of the time went into reading the paragraph correctly, and when I got that wrong the report was opened once and never again.
Some of those clients were one person with a shop. Some were companies of considerable size with a marketing team and an agency already in place. The worry arrived in much the same form from both.
What repeated
By the end there were three hundred of these, for clients in the United States, across Europe, in South America and in Korea. I was studying at the same time, so the meetings went in the afternoons and the deliveries went out in hours.
Three hundred businesses, and the questions their data got asked came down to a handful: which channels bring the visits, what those visits cost, which of them turn into something, and what moved since last month. The dashboards looked different from each other because the businesses did. Underneath, they were answering the same four things.
Every single one of those three hundred started from an empty canvas. That is what Looker Studio gives you, and for a tool it is the right default. It also meant rebuilding the same skeleton three hundred times before getting to the part that was actually about that client.
The reviews
A hundred and three clients left a verified review, and they are published in full on Kodalogic’s reviews page rather than summarised here. A delivery count only records that I turned up. The reviews are the part I did not write.
Kodalogic, September 2024
Kodalogic exists because of that. I founded it in Madrid in September 2024, so that the skeleton would only have to be built once.
The catalogue is six finished dashboards rather than three hundred, and it took the three hundred to see why. Six covers GA4, Search Console and Google Ads, which is where the questions above actually live. Anything past that is a variation on one of the six, and a client who needs one can make it in an afternoon from a dashboard that already works, which is not true of an empty canvas.
The other half of the decision was the interpretation. Each chart in those dashboards has the reading written next to it, in words, saying what it means when the line does what it is doing. Without that, somebody who knows the tool has to be standing next to the client for the chart to be worth anything, and nobody is paying for that person to be on call.
The fifty-eight posts
Kodalogic sells through search results, so I wrote fifty-eight posts on Looker Studio reporting for its blog, all signed and all still up. Not pieces about the company: the actual answers to the questions people were typing into Google, written out in full.
What was underneath
By the three hundredth dashboard the pattern was hard to miss, and it was not about reports. In almost every business I worked with, the data, the rules and the decisions had never been written down anywhere; they lived in people’s heads and in the habits of whoever had been there longest. Every tool that arrived had to be told the same things from scratch, and every dashboard was a fresh attempt to reconstruct them. That layer is what the company I run now works on.
Read more
How Hellomatik started — what the two years of dashboards turned into.
From a seven-dollar dashboard to Hellomatik — the whole story with its dates.
What selling taught me that building never did — the lesson underneath three hundred commissions.
Hellomatik and Kodalogic — what each company does, and where each fact can be checked.
The questions people ask, answered — short answers, each with a source.