eChai Showcase - ChartStore.io
We are introducing one more exciting feature - eChai Showcase - which is more of an extension of our flagship program - eChai Demo Day - which is the quarterly showcase of innovative products & ventures in front of the large entrepreneurial community. eChai Demo Day provides an opportunity to entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, professionals, and students to share, connect and collaborate with each other.
Today we are introducing ChartStore.io - which is well-designed, themeable, responsive, real-time and easy to use charting library. ChartStore.io is a product of Pykih - a data design company which specialises in designing custom visualizations and interactive dashboards.
Here is the eChai with Ritvvij Parrikh, Founder, Pykih and ChartStore.io. Before starting pykih, Ritvvij worked for many years at Amdocs Inc from US, Israel and India. At Amdocs, he designed data-driven enterprise systems for AT&T. Later, he founded TracksGiving, a social enterprise to use open-data and analytics to bring transparency to charitable giving. At Pykih, Ritvvij spends most his time interacting with various media houses, software companies and businesses to help them make sense of data.
How did you come up with the idea of starting ChartStore.io ?
As a data visualization company, we kept getting requests from our customers for better designed standard charts that are easy to setup and style. So we built ChartStore.io a platform for well-designed and responsive Javascript charts that are easily to setup and style.
What problem are you solving?
Today, the internet is becoming a ubiquitous medium for communication and consumption of information. But when it comes to representing visualizations (charts/ maps) or building web based dashboards, one needs developer skills. We wanted someone with even basic HTML, CSS and Javascript skills to be able to build the best online charts possible. Also, SaaS companies today have to either train developers for several months to make basic charts with the available open source or premium alternatives. We wanted to solve this so companies can focus on solving larger problems.
How does ChartStore.io work?
ChartStore offers a Javascript Charting library. As soon as you purchase a license for the charts, you get our charting library that you unzip and include in your web project. We ship you example files and data so you can get up and running with your first chart in minutes! Also to help with styling the chart, we built a simple online tool on ChartStore.io
According to you what's the target market for ChartStore.io ?
Our target customers are individuals and organisations that want to graphically represent data (of all forms) online. Now these may be bloggers, large companies/ organisations (for their annual reports), SaaS companies, Wearables and IoT companies, etc
What is your competitive advantage?
What are doing is breaking the traditional packaged model of charting libraries available out there. We have adopted an iTunes based approach for selling our charts. So now you don’t need to buy an entire library worth thousands of dollars just to make a pie or bar chart on your website. With ChartStore, you can just buy the charts you want to use.
For Power users who need lots of charts, when they by a full license from us, we offer them data design consulting hours for free based on their plan. This is really valuable as our design experts try and understand their product and service and offer means to best customise our charts to fit seamlessly into their offerings.
Currently, none of the existing charting libraries offer such modular or data design consulting features with their product.
How much time did it take you from conceptualization of ChartStore.io to actually launching it in the market ?
We began developing the core library behind ChartStore (known as PykCharts) organically with our custom visualization service projects. It has been in active development over the last 6-8 months. During this time, we have actively been using the library in our other custom projects and we believe that now it is at a stage where other developers, users and companies can use it
Tell us more about your team?
Pykih is a single founder company setup over 1.5 years ago. However, we’ve always believed that great products and services are built by great teams. Sows’ve gradually grown harnessing the best talent and currently stand at a 13 person strong team.
What is your technology stack?
Our Charts are built in Javascript for easy inclusion in webpages
How do you plan to market your product? What are your customer acquisition strategies?
Our product is at its core a developer to developer product. We plan to engage our audiences though community engagement at conferences and metopes, at startups, incubators, accelerators, etc. In addition we may also plan to engage customers via social media
What sort of support and feedback are you looking from the community?
We are looking for community managers who are actively engaged with developers as well as SaaS companies who need or use visual dashboards and charting. In terms of feedback, we are currently interested in SaaS companies who wish to use visualizations in their websites or services to evaluate ChartStore and let us know how we can offer more relevant features and charts
What do you want to achieve from this? What is your larger goal or vision?
We really want to see well-designed charts everywhere. Also, we want to build the single largest repository of responsive and beautiful web charts and maps in the world on ChartStore.io
Checkout this awesome videos from ChartStore.io team and do give them the feedback :
Ritvvij Parrikh of Pykih talks about why pykih built a javascript charting library (https://chartstore.io ) when there are well established incumbent players like FusionCharts, amCharts and HighCharts.
Akshay Rao of Pykih talks about why Software as a Service companies should invest in a great charting library like https://chartstore.io
Sanjit Oberai talks about how https://chartstore.io charts are easy to use.
