Business model and future plans?

Sorry - I’ve been burned by falling in love with things and having google yank them too often, I gotta ask; what is your business model? I just can’t get invested in another hosted service, no matter how cool (and - this is very cool) - and risk it disappearing once we’ve become dependent on it. I can host my own Jupyter stuff - but it doesn’t appear self-hosting is an option here, at least currently.

Related to that question, because again this is very cool - what can we do to support your efforts here? I mean, over and above using the site and sharing and word of mouth.

I fully realize you may not be able to answer this - you may not even know yet. Any info you can share is appreciated.

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Yep, I can’t predict the future and though we definitely have plans, I shouldn’t share too many of them because they’ll inevitably change as we do more research & iteration.

What I can share is: we’re going to open source the runtime so you can run notebooks outside of the web environment. And, re: capitalism, we’ll introduce paid options as soon as we’re done implementing some super cool additional features/specs, and when that happens, please do lend some support! So, yep - export/running-on-your-own is definitely on the roadmap, as is business. For now, sharing and experimenting is the best way to support Observable - it’s already amazing to see what people have come up with!

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Sounds good, thank you for the reply. I’d love to see some team/collaboration tools (the data I work with isn’t public, so a public share is out for me for the most part). I’d love to be able to make my employer throw money at this. :slight_smile:

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Observable is great. What’s your business model?

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that’s a bold question :slight_smile:

@mbostock & @tom I hope you are not building this to sell it to Google like kaggle

altho I’d totally encourage you to run sponsored competitions when this site is ripe for dataSci in JS liberation front :slight_smile:

@tom that biz model q. move got me a bit dizzy.

:heartpulse: your short term plan!

let’s keep digging at it …

These pages give some insight as to the business model:

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