Help validating the idea - visualization as a service

Shawn Cao
7 replies
I'm building a single API to help developers to exchange a data spec for an embeddable data visualizer URL in scale. Is this something interesting? details: https://columns.ai/dev

Replies

Sameer Maira
Can you please share an example showing the problem this would solve?
Shawn Cao
@sameer_maira let's assuming you're building a software for your customers, your customer has data in your software (eg. transactions), you want to provide page for him to analyze and visualize their own data, you don't need to develop the whole module by yourself, instead make a call to the API mentioned here to get an embedded visualizer URL, and your customer can use it now. I'm not sure if this example is clear enough now.
Sameer Maira
@shawn_cao Yes it's clearer now. There are existing tools out there which do visualization of data like Mixpanel, Tableau etc but I think you are focusing on giving the developer an API which returns an embedded graph right? I know there are front end charting libraries that do this on the client side. Is it kind of similar to those?
Shawn Cao
@sameer_maira yeah, there are some similarities, it's embedded "Visualizer" not a "Graph", you can open the link I mentioned on the page: https://columns.ai/visual/3FmTik... The embeddable URL has full service of "collaborative storytelling", though visualization is a basic piece. So yes, there are similarities but not the same thing. Let me put a joke, it's like asking if Tesla is similar to Honda Civic, yes it's similar, :)
Will Veazey
Validate the idea with a "Search Visualization as a Service." Value Proposition with proof of concept is simple. Google what you see above between the quotation marks. I did just to make certain there was still seven Google Ads with virtually no competition. You know the old saying. "Where There is Smoke, There's Fire".
Shawn Cao
@abco_specialties I just want to circle back to ask you a follow-up question: when we realize there is a fire, should we become a fire fighter or leave to find another green pasture? what is your thinking process on this?