Stew Langille hatched the idea for Visual.ly while pondering a better way to display consumer spending data during the waning days of his marketing stint at Mint.com. Remember Mint? They are the personal money management service that was purchased by Intuit for $170 million. So Langille found a few designers who could visually tell a story with the data, as in an infographic, and published the results on the Mint site. The graphic went viral, Mint’s servers couldn’t keep up with the traffic, and a startup was born.
Langille is now the CEO of Visual.ly, which at last count has almost 20,000 numerically enriched graphics on their site. Recently, Visual.ly announced plans to ultimately evolve the site into a marketplace through which commisioners of infographics can be matched with the appropriate designers and developers. This past week I chatted with Langille over the phone to learn about infographics and the marketplace.
By the way, that infographic that blew the Mint servers away was one comparing different currencies.
You’re not claiming to have invented infographics?
“Infographics have of course been around. If you look back you’ll see it in Wired magazine. Our contribution really is to bring it to a new generation, especially using it in social media.There’s nothing new here; we’re helping to interpret it for our time.”
Who’s using these infographics?
“Initially, the fastest growth was in the publishing industry. There’s been a lot of demand there. Even more aggressive than the publishers, though, have been the advertisers and the agencies. They have more money to spend, they’re always looking for innovation, and there’s been the rise of content marketing and social media. They like to spend into this since these graphics are more shareable — more than videos and I’d say even more than photos.
What surprised me is what’s happening internally in companies. We’re seeing across the board, not only analytics departments, folks from Fortune 500 companies are coming to us looking for better alternatives to presenting data. Data that they send around internally in emails or data that they present in a conference. They say they’re tired of PowerPoint, and tired of Excel graphs. Infographics has resonated strongly within the corporate space.”
You mentioned publishing as having a strong interest. It seems like you are making available graphics that up until recently only larger newspapers and magazines could pull off.
“We’re trying to democratize the industry. One of our models was what The New York Times was doing with data visualizations. They have an amazing staff of about 30 people just focused on data visualizations and creating infographics for their site. I really wanted to bring that to the rest of industry. Because people can’t afford it, it’s just too expensive. I mean you have to bring together journalists, designers, with developers and data analysts. It’s a big job and expensive, even for The Times!
The question Visual.ly’ is answering is ‘Can we through a combination of tools and a marketplace or community of the world’s leading experts facilitate these transactions and provide value?’ You won’t need a massive staff and developer for the software. No one knows exactly what the market’s going to need. But we’re trying to get out front and learn as we go.”
How would the Visual.ly marketplace work?
“The marketplace will come in phases. So a ‘commissioner’ will come and fill out a creative brief–the graphic they are looking for, the medium, the purpose, etc.–from there we have a backend that will identify the best subset of the designers to match them with. We’ll either present one designer who we’ve selected for them or let them choose from say three designers. We’re going to test both to see what works best.
So then they choose a designer. And then a designer accepts the project. We’ll have a proprietary messaging system where they can exchange data. We’re going to take a portion of the payment up front. We’ll make sure both sides adhere to the terms of service and deadlines. We’ll enforce milestones along the way, and we’ll provide optional support in terms of data analysts and journalists to help if the story is not coming together.
The key thing, though, is we’re planning on automating the design process as much as possible. We’re really going to work at integrating data. So if you have a public API or a private company API we’ll make it easy to plug into our platform, and specify what aspects of the data you want to visualize. It will be part of the secret sauce of what we’re building.
There’s another interesting part to it. Once we have a wireframe or sketch for more complex projects, we’ve developed a platform that allows the designer to take the sketch, which was designed in Illustrator, and then import as SVG into our platform. We’ll hook it up with the data. The designer doesn’t have to know anything about development, doesn’t have to know anything about HTML, or anything about the data really. Here’s the design–kind of like a template–and here’s where the data goes and then we do the rest. We let the designer do what they’re good at, and we do what we’re good at.”
It sounds like you almost eliminate the need for a programmer?
“The way we envision it is that on the lower end project, where they’re interested in the design, where they have the data in order, we’ll just facilitate the transaction and be an arbiter in case something goes wrong. We have the systems in place to make this smooth.
As it gets more complex, people get hung up is in forwarding the data and designers don’t know how to work with the data. We’ll provide pre-designed templates to speed this up. This is where we’ll add value.
Or we see a lot of commissioners requesting quarterly reports for their board, and they want to create a template one time and then each quarter run this on the same data. So we can create a template and store it on our platform. And then each time they upload the data, they can create a new infographics. This can be a mostly automated process at a fraction of the cost–they don’t have to create new graphics each time.”
Are there templates currently available that the rest of us can work with?
“We will be launching more to the public. But we have a lot more we are working on currently with companies. We have pilot projects going with companies like Deloitte, Verizon, Amstel, and CBS that takes the specific data and APIs they have, or take public data and mash them up for customized templates.
We’re doing a lot of experimenting and the end results of that will be that we’ll have more templates available for the public. But this is not our main priority right now because it’s not the biggest opportunity we see. It is something we definitely want to continue to offer over time. The public template stuff will move slower then what we do in the marketplace and servicing companies and customers.”
Stew, thanks for your time!
“I enjoyed it! Thanks for this opportunity.”