Alphacast Yearly Update - 2021
Dear Users! Our first year is coming to an end and we would like to share with you some of the achievements that we have managed to do in 2021 and what our plans are for next. We are sincerely grateful for the engagement that you have made with our platform. We are looking forward to making your life easier in the future!!
2021 in a nutshell
We began 2020 with just an MVP, a WordPress website, a visualization engine, a simple excel add-in, and about 200 datasets. In June we launched a revamped fully operational version of the platform, and we rebuilt the UX/UI from scratch. With the new platform, you can now find data, buy and sell content, create custom charts and datasets, transform the data within the platform, integrate it with other tools, and explore other users' ideas.
In more detail:
Data: Our datasets grew from zero to about 1.300 datasets! During the year we've also given the users the ability to create their own datasets and provided integration with CSV, Excel, Google Drive, and API to the users. Also, we've created a Python Library. With that feature, users have created more than 300 user-created datasets. We have also worked in simplifying the Search and Explore experience.
More recently we've opened-sourced most of the code that generates de data and began working on the data community
Charts: We have opened our charts engine so that users can create and format their own charts, and simplify the creation process. We added many new chart features - too many to detail here - such as new chart types, on-the-fly transformations, dual-axis, state-level maps, annotations, and more.
Insights: We've created the basic "insights" features so that users can create reports, dashboards, or charts with comments. Around the insights, we are creating a basic social experience, where users can follow and be followed, explore to get inspiration and share their work.
Pipelines We've created the basic pipeline engine, to give the user the possibility to deal with the most common data transformations such as currency conversion, resampling of frequencies, seasonal adjustment, etc. Stay tuned as we are working on a full revamp of this feature!
Marketplace: We've launched the Marketplace, where selected users can offer pay-to-access subscriptions to their clients.
users: Since the relaunch in June, we saw a steady increase in users activity. The following table summarizes some of the key metrics. We've reached 1.300 signups, and 250 Monthly Active Users. Also, Users are downloading a growing number of unique datasets (in line with the growth of data content). in June, 104 different datasets were downloaded at least once and this number grew to 463 in December. Finally, there are now 8 publishers in the platform: AACREA, CREEBA, Econviews, GMA, GRA, PICNA, Roura Consulting, & SEIDO.
Early 2022 Product Road Map
Pipelines: So far users can choose within a limited range of hardcoded transformations (around 50) and the ability to merge data and combine transformations is restricted. We are working on a new, more powerful, and flexible pipelines engine that will change the way data can be transformed within the platform. We expect this to be a major upgrade in the value proposition of Alphacast.
Data. We plan to have a massive boost on the amount of data (1.250 to 10.000), 100% focused on markets outside Argentina.
Insights We will improve the overall insights UX/UI, including more social interactions and features such as automatic tables.
Search. We understand that finding data is at the heart of our value proposition. We plan to improve this experience in many ways, mostly around related content & recommendations, using the users' behavior to guide other users' journey.
Learn. We need to improve the overall "Learn how to use Alphacast" experience within the product and we plan to do so with many incremental changes to the platform (better UX, automatic emails, videos, etc).
Latin America / US: We really love our country, Argentina, however, we will be focusing our product, content, and webinars efforts on growing to the region and the USA. Are you in Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, or the US? Alphacast is coming to town!
