You can read through all the text below or choose to read this Piktochart for a summary of the blog post.
Everyone in the startup world especially in the recent 10 years must have heard or at least seen/tasted/read Eric Ries and his huge following of Lean startup principles. At Piktochart, we would not claim that we are 100% lean, but we do try to be as lean as possible.
We were reminiscing just 2 days ago about how many times Piktochart has pivoted because of ONE Facebook comment or ONE email which made us think, SHE-BANG, you are spot on! Why did we not think about it? To use the word pivot would be a large misleading lie, but yes we changed our direction and how we marketed our product differently for a few times.
To re-summarize what Piktochart was about when we had the idea in June 2011…..
Piktochart was a visual editor to create infographics.
Then, we started building and it morphed more and more into a data visualizer. We loved data. We loved presenting data in a beautiful way, but no, none of us thought like a scientist. We thought of data like visual artists. The difference was huge in terms of the work we produced.
And we pivoted again. We knew we were mostly passionate about data and presentations in general. Not powerpoint presentations or those with one white screen and lots of people seated around a large meeting table, but presentations that people shared and read. Such as materials on slideshare or PDFs or blogs or websites in general. These are the greatest presentation tools of 2000 and beyond, not Powerpoint!
Among some comments which made us think twice:
(Translation in English, no disclaimer for the right usage of words when translated)
The only risk is that there are so many infographics published and they all look all the same that they lose any kind of value. Work on something embeddable because infographics are become super-inflated. They are already losing a lot of effectiveness. They were fashionable when there were 2 or 3 in existence but now it perplexes me to stay for 10 minutes and try to understand something written. I would recommend you to work on something simple to present and export data to the users, even the data that changes over time.
More love from Italy
Translation into English: Sorry if I did not understand but I am looking at a visual editor, so it’s not really an app that transforms my data into infographics. I have to construct my own infographic?
This message served as a reminder that users love automated stuff. They do not want a drag and drop. Technically a presentation done in 5 minutes and any more than that, they lose their patience. We changed our UI heavily from Picture A below to Picture B.
Picture A: Old UI
Picture B: New UI
To be continued…….
Pikto.delight