Chart It

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/chart-it

I was doing the rounds in terms of getting my app out there so I submitted my app to product hunt. I emailed support and tried to get verified as a maker. I wasn't exactly sure how the process works to be honest, but after a little back and forth from a very helpful support person from PH, I was approved as a maker.

By the time I got around to logging in and checking out what I can do as a maker, I saw my app was #2 on the site. I had to check in incognito mode to confirm that my app was actually #2, but it was.

It was very exciting. I look back now and I added a lot of features that I wish I could spotlight easily. I added chart embedding into HTML which may be a really nice feature. Check out more in the API section: https://www.chartit.io/api

I also didn't even have geo graphs setup yet, which I think is also pretty sweet.

Anyway, it was a huge bump in traffic but I still have to work on my value prop to become sticky. I also need some SEO. The best thing about PH is that google indexed the PH page so at least I have that. I've registered with google and submitted a sitemap, so that's at least a start.

I finished my mvp and bought the domain chartit.io.

The product is more than an mvp as it included a lot of features that I was planning on releasing in version 2, but I'm glad I put in the extra work to make it useful right out of the gate.

As it stands now, you can create and share charts including setting most available chart options.

I didn't yet build out the monetization aspect but put in a link to get notified once it becomes made available. I'm not tied to any business model and the site can exist without it. I'm just looking to get some sort of feedback and adoption before I decide on the way forward.

Although I had the idea, there were a lot of unanswered questions. The main one is whether an online platform to create charts would even work. Maybe there were no platforms because it was just not worth it.

I delved into the project and settled on using google charts as a graphing library, react with typescript as a front end, AWS Amplify for hosting and ant-design for the component library.

After toiling away for about two weeks, I came up with a proof of concept that allowed me to past some data into a text box and create a canned chart.

I pared back my ambitions and decided to avoid the complications posed by manipulating data. I didn't want to re-create Excel. When I removed that constraint, the rest became a lot more manageable.

I still had to build out the functionality to have multiple data sets and charts and chart options. I also had to build out everything else, but I was satisfied with my conclusion that there is a way forward.

I was working on a different project and I came across some data to visualize. I didn't think it was worth starting up Excel or google sheets. I just wanted to see a histogram of a bunch of numbers.

I figured there was a number of online tools to visualize data, much like there's web-based tools to edit images, create gifs, host images, etc. But to my surprise I couldn't find any. I tried wolfram-alpha and tried "plot [data]" but that didn't work as well.

I also remember having discussions online in which I wanted to share some data to resolve a dispute. What I would normally do is do a google image search to try to find some chart (e.g. "taxes as a percentage of gdp"). This was hit or miss and often resulted in outdated data, inscrutable sources and suspicious websites.

That's when I had the idea that I should build a platform to create a host charts. This was the birth of Chart It.