Columns
Data storytelling platform
Regardless how good the functions and flows are, people loves "the feel", the most important ingredient of a product that tries to connect with a user.
Unless the product is designed for fast food - least time to get job to be done, otherwise UI impact users' productivity on your product.
Better UI has been the top request from Columns' users, and we decided the first priority is to improve on that, here are a few principles applied
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Reduce options as much as possible, less choices is better, though you have to judge whether an option is essential or not, after all, deleting stuff is not favored by most developers.
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Use single color rather than multi-colors
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Start with Dark mode over Light mode, I do not know why, but seems like dark mode in general is easier to get right, Light mode is way harder to reach a balance.
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Consistency - make sure all places using the same styled component.
Here is our newly updated UI: https://youtu.be/cyjXkmJC1Hs
(with some nice background music, :)
After some thoughts around how to advance Columns as a smart visualization platform, I eventually open-sourced its core data model and graph model here https://github.com/varchar-io/vaas
Along with it, we have made it ready to play with, a few lines of code will produce a flexible story with full capability for customization. I wish this is something many developers will find interesting and useful.
We also created a landing page for this Open Source repo at https://columns.ai/dev, check it out and share your feedback, please!
We start brand Columns as "Miro for data".
As a thin layer presentation in the modern data stack, it must be lightweight, easy to access, and fast to get work done. The best attribute of modern app is "collaboration", enabling people to collaborate and communicate in real-time, fixing issues and iterating is a minimal requirement for collaborative platform.
Check out the new landing page to learn more about this theme.
Once we figured out the basics and enabled the basic scenarios for our users, we listed it on AppSumo the Saas marketplace.
This month, we sold 75 LTD codes through this platform, it's great to see people buy your product, the price is low, the total revenue is low, but the encouragement is big, there is nothing more important than that.
Let's keep it up, the product should be loved by people who are willing to subscribe monthly.
To build a good product, we need to understand what users expect.
It is hard to understand what users expect, some product never gets there if you don't have a chance to hear any voice at all. Building in public is a great way to do so, no need to hide how bad the product could be, believe it or not, it can be completely off, but give it some time, bring it to people, capturing what people care most, and you shall have the right direction to navigate to.
We tried a bunch of things: brand Columns a real-time analytics product, and a focus on anomaly detection, blog post publishing, no-code apps build, and metrics prediction. Every single of them is a good idea, but none of them is a good starting point.
A good starting point is something pretty basic and simple that initial customers can come to you.
At this moment, we figured out an area where "storytelling" is the main theme. A simple and easy-to-use visualization tool that many technical or non-technical people will all love to use to transform their data into a beautiful story, ready for communication. No matter what stage we are at, building a great experience is always the highest priority, make the basics right, and make users happy.
After 16+ years working in big corps, I thought to do something on my own.
I looked at the area that I'm most familiar with, big data, data warehouse, real-time analytics, database, distributed system, and large scale, many years I have been hands on those things, and many of them turned into well-known products, such as Hive, Presto, ORC file format. Especially, I built up a real-time engine from scratch that is used in Pinterest, and it's open source (FYI. github.com/varchar-io/nebula).
Lucky enough, today the whole industry is in the middle of a "Data Revolution" - driving every single business by data becomes a common agreement. For me, I don't need to switch domains to build something meaningful riding the trend.
The only thing for me is a clear vision of what data product Columns will become. I'm obsessed with product experience, believing in a good product definition covers everything to be built to serve unlimited user growth. So here is my vision for Columns:
The de facto data presentation platform for anybody to collaborate and communicate with data, think about Miro but data story-oriented.
Cheers!
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