Congrats on raising $10.5M, @mbostock & al.!
Seems like that should buy you an extra maybe 2 years of runway? Are there any big changes implied by taking more VC money? A bunch of new hiring? An aim for new business models / markets? Big new marketing push? Or is the platform doing okay at organically growing a self-sustaining customer base? Hopefully there isn’t too much pressure to start “monetizing” existing users.
In any event, thanks for making Observable. It continues to be great!
Edit: just spitballing, here are a few ideas for possible business directions:
(1) Add paid features to tailor the platform for classroom use, and try to get adoption from teachers of statistics, math, computing, GIS, etc. classes.
(1b) Figure out how to publish (free and/or paid) online textbooks for a variety of subjects that students can deeply interact with.
(2) Help companies streamline visualization of internal non-public data; start by creating a bunch of examples matching people’s existing data shapes so that they can hook a simple prototype up in a few minutes.
(3) Make deals with governments (or other kinds of organizations) to help them publish their data online in an easily consumable way. All of the Microsoft BI / Tableau widgets popping up around the web are ugly, horribly laggy, and a pain to interact with in this reader’s opinion.
(4) Partner with newspapers and other informational websites to host data visualizations and models, perhaps aiming particularly for those who don’t have the independent budget to do fancy work like e.g. the NYT can do.
(5) Look for grants from governments or funding agencies to do UI / visualization research.
(6) Build some tools specific for publication of interactive computing API documentation.