How we got 50,000 users in 10 months (and how you can too).

Intro

At Graphy, we're building a delightful data visualization product to help teams tell better stories with their data.

We're a small team of 8, shipping very fast.

We first introduced the ability to create an account on Graphy ten months ago. Before that, it was ungated. Since then, we've hit 50,000 users.

Now we’re entering a new chapter of the maturity of our product, so I took some time to reflect on the past ten months. Below is a list of highlights and lessons from where we started, how the product matured, and what's next.

Early validation

We started with the MVP, launching Graphy Lite, and people loved it.

We were able to get early validation because the product wasn’t gated. Instead, people landed on the homepage and could experience the value immediately, without needing to sign up.

We were relentlessly focused on reducing the time to value by removing friction from the product, even when we added the requirement to sign up.

Some other early validation came from customers who wanted to pay us without us supporting payments in the product.

All these early signs gave us confidence that we have something promising here that users want.

Experimenting with AI

When OpenAI launched their APIs we were keen to experiment and we launched Graphy AI. It managed to attract users, but the retention of those users wasn’t what we expected.

We were getting a lot of ‘AI tourists’ who were looking to play with the newest AI innovations but didn’t have the problem we were trying to solve for them.

We got rid of it for now but we believe there’s a place for AI in the near future.

This experience helped us strengthen the culture of always focusing on customer problems first.

Balancing speed & quality

We want to build a product that truly delights our users.

There’s always a tension between building something fast but incomplete to learn versus shipping the perfect feature.

In the early days, we had the desire to build something perfect, and it meant that we were, at times, focusing on the wrong things and missing out on valuable insights from our users.

Over the last 10 months, we have been fine-tuning the balance between speed and quality. What we are finding is that by shipping fast, we are building a higher quality product. Some things we release aren’t perfect, but the learnings we get allow us to better shape the solution we want.

The role of the community

We’ve had incredible supporters from the beginning who have not only helped with feedback and spreading the word but have also encouraged us as a team.

Building a more formal community is a common strategy these days, and for good reason. We considered this strategy in the past and even had a dedicated Slack workspace at some point. For the time being, we’re taking a more organic approach, connecting with our community wherever they already are—on social media, in WhatsApp groups, via email, etc.

What has worked well for us includes:

• Building genuine relationships based on understanding their problems and trying to help solve them.

• When someone has an issue, we resolve it fast and then take the opportunity to ask for other improvements.

• Showing gratitude. It’s simple, but we send nice travel mugs, take them out for coffee, or promote their content on our socials, whatever might mean something to them.

New website and an improved brand

We were rapidly shipping new features and realized we needed a new website to help our users become even more successful with Graphy. As part of this process, we took some time to explore our new brand.

Why we chose to launch a new site, what the new site allowed us to do more of, and when you should consider working with an agency versus building in-house.

This deserves its own post. I’ll follow up with that, but in short: a website was a major unlock for us.

Graphy Boards and Extension

Our activation was great, but our retention wasn’t where we wanted it to be. A lot of our users were using Graphy irregularly. This was mainly because our data input was quite limiting and manual.

We started exploring different ways of getting data into Graphy.

From our previous experience, we didn’t want to ship live data integrations. They're very hard and time consuming.

We found an innovative way of getting the data into Graphy via a Chrome extension. Our users didn’t have to set up cumbersome integrations; they could just perform data exploration in the tools they use and import that data with one click to Graphy to be able to explain and present it to their team.

Next, when we had a way to get the data into Graphy, we started looking at bringing more charts into the same dashboard or report — we call them boards.

Our retention increased by 1.6x.

Where we are today. Graphy for professionals.

Ten months ago, Graphy was a tool for creating beautiful charts and easily sharing them. Today, we help teams bring data from the tools they're using into a unified view, make sense of that data, and turn it into a story that can be shared with their team.

With every single iteration, we were becoming a better tool suited for professionals and teams.

For the past two months, we have relentlessly focused on improving the product experience and recently made our biggest architectural change from a charts-first experience to a boards-first one.

I'm super proud to share the product with the world and see the great adoption of our boards.

Our pricing is now better aligned with our users. We introduced a new paid tier — $20/user/month. You can still use Graphy for free with 3 boards.

We just want to take a moment to acknowledge how far we’ve come in just 10 months.

What’s next?

We’re not stopping here, we have very ambitious plans for the next few months, a few things we’re looking at:

• Workspace and teammates — we want to improve our workspace functionality and not just empower you but your entire team to create and share boards.

• Storytelling — the more we hear from users, the more we hear this gap in products today that allow users to communicate through their data. We want to become world class at this.

• More Sources — being able to get data into Graphy quickly is crucial. We want to open the extension up to other users.

• Templates — there is already so much you can do with Graphy, templates allow us to show you this.