A story about finding the goals you want to chase
by RazThe time is due to put in words the story of Chartbrew and what we learned from it. It's been almost 1.5 years since the day we started working on it, but we shared very little from our story, the ups and downs, and how we almost abandoned the project.
The most important lesson was that our initial goals to create a successful business was too far fetched from what we were willing to do to achieve this goal. We are both technical people with design knowledge and we were not as excited to chase people down and try to identify our exact market.
In truth, our market is already validated by all the other tools about data visualisation, so instead, we need to shift our goals towards making a better product. We need to tap into our knowledge of engineering and design (HCI/UX). It's time to shift the way people look at specialised software and propose a user-centric alternative. And this is a better goal because we are willing to do what it takes to achieve it.
Find the goals that you want to chase and make sure that you are willing to do what it takes to achieve that. That's how you know you're on the right track.
I wrote a bigger piece with the entire story of Chartbrew and lessons learned along the way. I appreciate if you give it a read and get back to me with your thoughts. You can find the story on my blog.
✌
-
3
Tenacity and persistence is a big part of success - sometimes I think to myself, how many of the "successful" people I admire, really aren't "the best" so much as they are "the most tenacious" in their pursuit of goals/ideas they think are valuable, and come hell or high water, simply dedicate their life to it. (Elon musk - started companies even though he knew the chance of success was irrationally low, but regardless valued the concept that time is never wasted in the pursuit of something you consider important.)
(And how many are there in history that spent their lives in pursuit of an idea that was actually a dead end that you never hear about- example: alchemy - which lead the way to chemistry).
-
1
Thank you for your shared wisdom ✌ I do actually emphasize with this and I have a gut feeling that this would work eventually. But the main thing is that I actually enjoy working on the project and not thinking all the time about "oh Raz, you forgot to send an email to these 100 contacts" is kind of relieving.
I'm also at a stage in life where I make enough money from my part-time remote job (that I actually enjoy) so that it doesn't take from the joy of hacking around and applying my design knowledge to the product. It's so important how you set your mind to think about things in life!
-
-
2
The chartbrew website is beautiful; awesome design @depomoty. Out of curiosity, why did you write up your story? Marketing chartbrew, or just venting out your thoughts?
If it's the former, one thing I would've liked to read about are the struggles you faced with data visualization in your own life + how things changed after you built chartbrew? That is, all those big companies (tableau, power bi, qlik) talk about how they push graph complexity to the limits, but rarely talk about what to do with those visuals - what analysis would impress my manager? What subset of my site's google analytics data should I turn into a graph and why? What visualization would change my diet / grocery shopping habits after deciding to track calories?
I love the idea of generating beautiful charts just by connecting my db. I think you have an opportunity to hold people's hand one step further (for example, I only started using the no-code app builder "bubble" after discovering https://lab.zeroqode.com/ which held my hand through building a yelp clone and it all clicked for me how bubble could be used in my life).
There are many ways to do sales; if emailing 100 contacts doesn't excite you, then maybe "building real examples of how we use chartbrew to monitor our website / finances / tasks / user engagement / mental wellness" could be a better fitting sales process.
-
2
Hey @vdizzle 👋 Thanks for dropping by and touching upon all these interesting points. First of all, I wanted for a while now to write a blog post about the story of Chartbrew and reflections from this journey (I want to get into blogging again). While writing this piece I paid a lot of attention to my learnings and the main bit was that I was chasing a goal I wasn't interested in following. I think a lot of Indiehackers are in this position and it's easy to fall in this trap if you read or listen too much to other entrepreneurs without filtering the information through your own lens. This was pretty much the reason I wanted to share this story, but the post here on IH is also meant to show what I'm working on.
I can't really say I struggled with data visualisation so far, but I find the process of coming up with a good visualisation a bit backwards. For example, with all the tools I used so far, the process goes like this:
- Meet with your colleagues/classmates to analyse the data and brainstorm visualisation ideas
- Go over data multiple times individually
- Play around with different visualisation ideas using the tools (individually again)
- Meet again to show what you've all done
- Brainstorm again and chose final solutions
I see a tear in the pattern here where the tools are only there to create the visualisation after you've done the rest yourself on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard with your colleagues. My vision with Chartbrew is to make it so that it helps with this process. I want the tool to be collaborative and to encourage expressiveness and to design the interaction. I'm confident that my set of skills can help with this since I combine HCI with data science and data visualisation. I hope this gives you a better idea of where Chartbrew will position itself in the near future.
Regarding the real examples, this is very high on the todo list at the moment, and I already planned test session with people interested in data visualisation to create visualisation solutions for different APIs. This will be exciting!
-
1
Good on you dude! Wholeheartedly agree that the hustle culture "peer pressure" surrounding our communities is starting to get counterproductive. With you being the expert on collaborative data visualization, it's great to hear that your own voice / goal is starting to come out.
Btw that process you described is accurate to-a-t of every meeting I've had with managers preparing to showcase a project; the final deck takes forever to build due to dataset req's and visualizations changing with every discussion as they "tune in" their own thoughts over whiteboard. Would be great to just sit there together over chartbrew and build things live 👍
-
