Hey, it’s been a while!
Our last newsletter was three months ago… and even though we worked and published some updates, it took us a while to get back into a routine that lets us write these emails.
If you have been following us for a while, you know summer usually rhymes with France and house renovation… and we did improve things quite a bit! And that was immediately followed by a long family visit.
But being honest, I think we also needed the time to pause. Things move so fast that it feels like you need to relearn everything every month or fall behind. We barely scratched the surface of Tableau Next… and now have Tableau Studio coming very soon.
With AI, adding features, or even building a full extension, has become easier for us, and for everyone else. It’s an easy trap to just add and add endlessly. Especially when many of you can now build what you need by yourself.
And this is not just a feeling. We are data people, and data shows it.
Revenue from our product, the one thing we try to grow, has decreased 45% YTD. And we don’t think adding one more extension will solve it.
Of course, we’ll continue to add new extensions, new features (we did just yesterday!), and make our stuff better, but it’s not going to be enough. Now that development speed has considerably increased, communication (marketing) and innovation (boldness) will be key.
On communication.
Marketing is hard and time-consuming. Much harder than development (or at least, for us it is!). But also essential. That’s why we spent the last few weeks building systems and ways to showcase our work more efficiently through video.
This is just one example, but hopefully we’ll be able to communicate more frequently using these better formats.
On innovation.
At this year's Tableau Conference, we won the hackathon! And if you have seen one of our presentations, you know we like to innovate and push the limits of what’s possible. But honestly, it's been a while since we last launched a bold new product.
BANg revolutionized how easily you could make a KPI Card in Tableau; we invented a way to convert Figma designs to Tableau dashboards; we created a free tool that changed the way people could build advanced charts in Tableau Public…
Then, our Viz Extensions combined everything we learned from our previous experience and became our most successful product.
Since then, we've showcased a lot of cool new stuff and ideas, but we haven't released anything truly new.
So yeah, we probably needed this time to pause, and think, and get ready for what’s coming next.
So with that, speak to you next week (probably!).
