Voronoi is a free new app from the data storytelling experts at Visual Capitalist that puts the world's most interesting data at your fingertips. With dozens of data creators and transparent sourcing, the app is available on both Android and iOS.
Hi Product Hunt community! 👋
I'm excited to introduce Voronoi, a platform that makes the world's most interesting data easily discoverable through stunning visuals.
Background
Starting 13 years ago, I began bootstrapping the data storytelling website Visual Capitalist from scratch, with the goal of making data more understandable for everyone, especially around global trends relating to investing, business, demographics, and the global economy.
But after doing this for a decade, the world has changed substantially, and our vision has evolved with it:
1. The world is awash in information, which has created an "information overload" dynamic. Available information is growing exponentially, yet people are having trouble discovering the right data and insights.
2. Like many of you, we have seen the world grow more and more polarized. We see a growing need for transparent, verifiably-sourced data at a large scale. One that people can rely on for trusted information about the world.
3. We realized we can't make a big dent in the data ecosystem by ourselves. Luckily, we've simultaneously witnessed the rise of many other incredible data storytellers and sources (Examples: Our World in Data, USAFacts, James Eagle, Chartr, Statista, etc.) as well as awesome indie solo creators. We want to enable them to do more!
4. Finally, although many of these creators post their work on existing social platforms, there is currently no ecosystem that caters to the data creator community exclusively. We believe creating this "home" for data storytellers is crucial.
So over the last two years, we've been building our data storytelling platform Voronoi with all this in mind, and today we launch it here! We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
What's Voronoi?
It's a free platform that aims to make the world's most interesting data more discoverable, by putting data stories from top creators in one easy place.
What are other key things to know about Voronoi?
- It's built for data lovers and data creators. For each visualization on the platform, you can see the data behind it, including the original data source and notes. We (and our community) help verify all data and sourcing, to ensure data is reliable and trustworthy
- We see this as a creator economy platform, where eventually we can provide monetization options to third-party data creators, allowing them to focus more on their craft
- We also see it as enabling data discovery across a wide variety of topics and subjects (news, current events, culture, politics, etc.), however you'll notice if you download the app now we still have largely a business/tech/investing focus. This is a "crossing the chasm" moment that will have to happen later
How's Voronoi funded?
We started working on the platform after a Kickstarter round from Visual Capitalist fans and subscribers in 2022 (link included in links section), and then we've bootstrapped additionally from there. We have not taken any venture capital funding to this point for either Visual Capitalist or Voronoi.
Why did you choose the name Voronoi?
The platform is named to honor Ukrainian mathematician Georgy Voronoy, who popularized the Voronoi diagram. It's a concept used in data visualization, among many other fields.
What's in the product pipeline?
It's still early days, and we have a lot of work to do. Here are key things in the short-to-medium term pipeline:
- Launch of a web app version that fully ties into existing mobile platform
- Motion graphic videos and slideshows
- Ability to deeply customize your own feed and algorithm (currently the algo is very simple, but it will have to evolve as we have more data/visualizations on there)
- Adding monetization options for creators
- A focus on data discoverability (contextual and visual search options, AI-assisted, etc.)
- Dark mode (of course)
Thank you for your time!
I'll be available to answer questions on anything you like (about Voronoi or VC) starting at 8am PDT! I also have two key people from our product team (Nick and Armen) that will be available to answer questions too. We look forward to and appreciate your feedback.
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Congratulations on the launch of Voronoi! @jeff_desjardins
Are there any plans to integrate Voronoi with educational platforms or institutions to help spread data literacy?
Thanks for the question @ashikhameed
Absolutely, and I think there are a couple threads that tie in here.
1. Voronoi will always have a free option so that any student, no matter where they live or what access they have to school, can get access to as much data as we have on the platform.
2. Eventually our aim is to offer educational subscriptions to schools/platforms. Imagine a professor curating a feed that students can subscribe to that contains data to explore for a particular course. And as new datasets pop up, profs can add these to the feed in real-time
3. Educational institutions are also great sources of data through their research, and since our goal is to make data more discoverable, we will want to incorporate those sources as well.
IMO the two keys for data literacy are: 1) free access, and 2) making people want to look and learn from data.
Not everyone is a data nerd, but by having a focus on interesting visualizations, we are much more likely to capture someone's attention and keep their attention so they gain that literacy
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I'm enjoying the Voronoi app so far and am excited to see motion graphics on it! I wonder if including the ability to do infographic and animation voiceovers could be a worthwhile addition in the future too.
@govind_bhutada Hi Govind! Thanks for the support. Do you mean being able to record voiceovers for motion graphics within the app, like as an editing/composing feature?
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@govind_bhutada@nickroutley Would be cool to be able to highlight insights on a visual/dataset in this or some other way!
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Hey @nickroutley and @niccolo_conte!
Yes, I think giving creators an option to record voiceovers and provide some insights (or even a walkthrough) on their data/infographic could be cool! Especially for infographics on complex topics that need some extra handholding. In a way, these would be similar to some of the infographic walkthrough reels on VC's instagram (e.g. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C...)
Users could choose to listen to the voiceovers while viewing the infographics, for a bit of an immersive/interactive audio-visual experience :)
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@govind_bhutada Totally agreed - it's just the way that UGC is evolving (or already evolved) so would be great to see something like this here. Especially when dealing with data, sometimes a bit of verbal elaboration is super useful for added context, and better engagement with audiences.
@niccolo_conte@govind_bhutada Thanks! That's an interesting idea. In the future, we plan to expand out the functionality of our creator dashboard with all kinds of tools that will help creators do their storytelling with data.
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I love that you can see the raw data and source beneath every graphic. Talk about transparency. Great user experience also. Thank you for building such an awesome app, excited to see where it goes.
@selin_oguz1 Thanks, Selin! Data transparency is a key element of the app, and one of the biggest pain points around discovering data-driven content on other platforms.
What was it like for you when you were bootstrapping Visual Capitalist? As a young startup, I'm interested to hear your story!
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I love this! You can find any topic you are interested in and check-out the short summary at the first glance! At the same time it gives you opportunity to dig in it a little deeply to understand how the data was collected and most importantly where it was collected from, so you can go deeper from there if you need! Thanks!
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Awesome app, I love the ability to customize the feed. Very different from other apps with their algorithm black boxes. Also the content itself is high caliber.
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Launching Voronoi is crucial for all those original creators that have their data visuals shared (or stolen) all over social and even news without proper credit, let alone payment.
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