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00:00:01
Flourish CEO Duncan Clark talks about the Flourish Data Visualization Tool
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Duncan Clark is a co-founder of the data and storytelling tool Flourish, which is now part of the Canva family. By background a data-driven author, journalist and publisher. In this week’s episode of the podcast, I talk to Duncan about the Flourish team and how they keep up with current trends, what the Canva acquisition means, and what the future looks like.
Episode Notes
Duncan Clark | Website | Twitter
The Guardian, Data Visualizations
Marimekko Charts – Video from the One Chart at a Time series
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Setup
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyBiz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode of the show, I chat with Duncan Clark, one of the founders of Flourish, the online data visualization tool. I really like Flourish. I think it's a really nice tool. I've seen more of my clients using it because there's lots of good stuff in there that they can use to create decks and handouts and all sorts of other things.
00:00:36
Speaker
Now, most importantly for this week's show is the fact that the design tool Canva recently acquired Flourish. And so I was really interested to see how that merger is going to happen, how Flourish's data visualizations are going to be integrated into the Canva design tool. So I reached out to Duncan. He was kind enough to take some time out of his schedule to chat with me.
00:01:00
Speaker
So today, you're going to hear that interview about not just about this acquisition and what it was like and what it means, but also about Flourish and how they work and how they think about new features and new visualizations and the culture at both Canva and Flourish. So I hope you'll enjoy this week's episode of the show. Here's my conversation with Duncan Clark from Flourish.
Flourish and Canva: The Acquisition Story
00:01:24
Speaker
Hey, Duncan. Good to see you. Good, well, morning, my time, maybe evening your time. How are you? How are things?
00:01:30
Speaker
Hi, John. I'm very well. Thank you. Yeah, it's 3 in the afternoon over here. It's a nice sunny afternoon in London and all is well.
00:01:37
Speaker
Well, it's a rainy, a rainy morning here in Virginia. So you are getting closer to cocktail hour than I am. So maybe get to sit outside a little bit. Thanks for coming on the show. There's some exciting stuff going over there with Flourish. All the existing data visualization, exciting stuff that you guys have going on, but maybe even more exciting is the acquisition of Flourish by the Canva design tool. So I thought we would start talking about that and then dive into some of the details about Flourish itself. So.
00:02:05
Speaker
Maybe you can talk a little bit about the acquisition, how that came about, and then how do you see that integration working? I'm really curious. I use both tools, so I'm curious to see how Flourish will integrate into Canva.
00:02:21
Speaker
Sure. So we were acquired by Canva fairly recently. We announced it just a couple of months ago. And yeah, we met Canva last year and I got talking to the head of product, Rob, over there. And it was one of those cases where you having a kind of informal chat and it's really clear right at the beginning that actually there's such a sort of shared set of interests and values and kind of an enthusiasm.
00:02:49
Speaker
And I mean, the broad story is kind of what Canva have been trying to do is really sort of create a product. I mean, the mission is to empower the world to design. But broadly speaking, it's about empowering everyone to do good quality visual communication, whether that's kind of presentations or posters or whatever else.
00:03:07
Speaker
And one area of visual communication that's quite specialist, which they had never really attempted to crack is data visualization and especially the the rich kind of animated storytelling based visualization that we've we've always had as our kind of core activity.
Integration of Flourish into Canva
00:03:23
Speaker
It's just a weirdly good fit because one of the things we'd wondered about Flourish, obviously, I guess for listeners who don't know anything about Flourish, it's a tool that makes it easy to make richer interactive visualizations, including animated stories.
00:03:40
Speaker
We had wondered about evolving it more in the direction of a presentation tool because we built the V1 very much for kind of online publishing. And, you know, the core use case is that you publish something and you embed it on your website. It's very widely used in journalism, for example.
00:03:55
Speaker
So we'd wondered about, for every one person who publishes stuff online, there's a million people who make a presentation. And we'd wondered about moving the product more in that direction for scale. And when we thought in detail about how difficult that would be and just what a huge project it would be,
00:04:12
Speaker
We kind of put it on pause. And then when we got speaking to Canva, we realized that they had this amazing drag and drop presentation tool, which is really scaling very fast. But they didn't have kind of data visualization stuff.
00:04:27
Speaker
So it just became really obvious that these two, everything we'd built fitted with what they hadn't built, everything they'd built fitted with what we hadn't built. But then in addition to that, there was a huge amount of just collective enthusiasm about the two
00:04:42
Speaker
about each other's companies. So Canva is very values driven, very sort of mission driven. The founders, Mel and Cliff recently gave almost the entire equity stake that they held to charity. You know, they're very much driven by creating magical products and trying to get as many people to get value from them as possible and do loads of good along the way. So it felt very different from other conversations we've had over the years where companies were kind of sniffing around flourish in a kind of
00:05:12
Speaker
you know, maybe we're interested in you, but we just didn't particularly feel very excited about them. So yeah, it was all about together. And so it happened really fast. We have now got to know everyone personally, and it feels like a really great fit. And so to come to the second part of your question, like what we're trying to do is, is kind of two things at once. So we're doing a sort of light touch integration.
00:05:36
Speaker
which is already there. It's already available. We haven't really promoted it very much yet, but you can go and install the Flourish app now on Canva and all your Flourish projects, once you connect your accounts, will just be there on the left. So if you're making a presentation, you can drop in your stories and your visualizations and they're interactive and it all works really nicely.
00:05:53
Speaker
But then in addition, we are now making new features inside Canva to support native Canva visualization stuff. And so that's pretty exciting as well. The technical architecture is quite different, it's quite a big new project, but it opens up a whole new world of possibility.
00:06:12
Speaker
So that would be, you know, when you go into Canada and you insert an icon, for example, there'll be a new tab or whatever, a new menu where you can insert a bar chart or some sort of data data chart.
00:06:24
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And in fact, when we joined Canva, there was already a charts team making this really nice basic charts already there in Canva. But what we're now adding is the next generation stuff. So complete with customization and animation and interaction, all that stuff. So yeah, that will become richer and richer over time. And in the meantime, you can make everything in Flourish and just drop it into Canva.
00:06:50
Speaker
Gotcha. And so what happens? There's a question on behalf of folks who have subscriptions to either or products. So what happens to their accounts? So are they are your flourish accounts now being migrated to Canva? Like when I go into Canva, do I see my flourish account? Like how's that?
00:07:06
Speaker
Oh no, it's a bit more arm's length than that. So your flourish account is unchanged. Your camera account is unchanged, but you can, when you hit the flourish app inside Canva, you just, you just link the accounts and then, um, and then all your flourish stuff appears. So there's no, there's no change to the logins or anything like that.
00:07:22
Speaker
Okay, that's cool. I wanted to ask, you had mentioned, you know, Canva's kind of philosophy is democratizing design. And in some ways, flourish has a similar philosophy, right? It's it's relatively easy for anyone to sort of go in and make things. And I wonder,
00:07:41
Speaker
I don't really know how to phrase this question. Well, I'll phrase the question this way. I know some designer friends who get mad when they see people using Canva because they're like, design is not just about click and drag. There's a skill to it. And the same thing with data visualization. You have to understand something about data. And there is a possibility of danger of people just being able to make things without knowing best practices or this and that. And so I just wonder what your thoughts are on this democratization of both of these areas, the design piece and the database piece.
Flourish's Data Visualization Features
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, and the parallel that you point to is definitely there. I mean, one of the many things that we realized was kind of in common between Flourish and Canva when we started chatting about it was that it's kind of template driven. So Flourish, the model has always been, you start with a working visualization and then you can go in and change the data in the settings and kind of make it your own. And that's kind of how Canva works. You start with a template and you customize.
00:08:36
Speaker
So, that kind of approach has always been there in Flourish, and that has been central to how we've seen that democratization aim. Because when we were kind of chatting to people in the early days of Flourish product development, one of the things I always said about Data VisTools is you kind of put your data in and then
00:08:56
Speaker
you kind of struggle to get from there to anything that works. And often, especially if you're going to try and make something more advanced, like a network diagram or Sankey or whatever, you almost need to kind of get your head around the input data structure. And a useful way to do that is to start with a working thing. So we took the decision really early on that you should always be able to click on something and see something that works and then make it your own. But then I guess the route we've taken is to try and add really rich customization options.
00:09:24
Speaker
so that even though you're starting with that, you can go a long way towards deep customization. These days, a lot of the rich charts you'll see on things like the Financial Times are actually made with Flourish, but you wouldn't necessarily know by looking at them.
00:09:42
Speaker
I mean, I think there is certainly a kind of school of thought that says the problem with any template-oriented approach is that you're kind of constraining the user's freedom. And therefore, Mike Bostock, who is a very brilliant person, the founder of Observe on the creator of D3, talks about code being the ultimate sort of expressive medium. That if you learn to do visualization with code, then you can express yourself
00:10:10
Speaker
in a very powerful way. And I think that's absolutely right. But, you know, there's just a flip side, which is it's really hard. And no, there's a big, there's a big but to that, right? I mean, I always think about like, and it's just because the space I'm in, I always think about the nonprofit organization that has like six people. And there's like one data person who's kind of like, they're now the data person.
00:10:36
Speaker
And they don't have background in coding. They're not going to have the time to learn how to code. They have all these demands on their time. And so while I think it's a worthy goal and a worthy idea, and there's a lot to learn from coding, I'm not sure it's practically feasible in the real world.
00:10:53
Speaker
I think that's exactly right. And I think the other thing that is easy to forget is if your visualizations are kind of for storytelling and publishing rather than for insight, then that's another thing that cuts across flourish and cameras. We're very much kind of visual communication tools.
00:11:11
Speaker
And then the stuff that matters is not just the nuts and bolts of how the internal code of the chart itself is working. It's all the more complicated stuff, like how does the responsive embed code work? How does the font size resize so it's still legible as you get down to a mobile screen?
00:11:31
Speaker
how does it work if you want to connect that visualization into a scrolly telling story. So even if you can code, it becomes kind of spectacularly difficult to produce really production level visualizations if you're doing everything from scratch. And so actually, I mean, this is a part of Flourish that we haven't really promoted as much as we meant to at the beginning, but
00:11:55
Speaker
we saw Flourish in the early days, especially as being a thing in between the developer code writer on the one hand and the visualization creator on the other. So what a lot of people don't realize about Flourish is that all the templates we put into the system, they're made with a
00:12:12
Speaker
code at SDK that anyone can download. So you can code your own template and whack it into Flourish. And so we see it as a tool that hopefully amplifies the software engineer so that rather than writing a one-off visualization with all that fine tuning I just talked about, they can make a software tool that anyone can use that does all that stuff.
00:12:33
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, really, that's really interesting. I want to peel back a little bit because you talked about sort of in the early days and there are a few things about Flourish that I always found interesting. But the biggest one being that it seemed like you and your team were able to keep up with trends in the data this field really quickly. Like I always think about like bar chart races, like we had the little splash of bar chart races and you all were able to like drop that in pretty quickly. And same thing with,
00:13:02
Speaker
The New York Times did at the Olympics. They did it last time. They did it most recently with like the little swim diagrams where you can sort of grab the little icon. And I'm just wondering, like, was that, like, what was the philosophy there? Were you all just like, we need to keep up with what the most current thing is? Like, what was the, what was the thing?
00:13:21
Speaker
So the background, I mean the big picture background is that we started out, Robin and I, Robin being the other co-founder and the kind of technical lead on Flourish, we started out as a sort of specialist micro-agency making bespoke projects for people like The Guardian where I used to work.
00:13:37
Speaker
And so we started out from the basis of when we make this tool, we want it to be able to do all this fancy bespoke stuff. You should be able to make anything as a flourish template was the sort of founding idea.
00:13:52
Speaker
One of the first templates we ever made was to take a really complicated 3D globe visualization we'd made and turn that into a template. And as a result of that thinking, we ended up with a highly sort of modular, highly flexible technical architecture, which meant that using that SDK I just mentioned, you can, you know, just as easily as making a one-off visualization, you can make a flourish template.
00:14:17
Speaker
So, whereas in most tools, it took years and years and years for Tableau to support network diagrams or whatever, because if you've got a big monolithic architecture, then making any change is kind of difficult and risky. But the way that Flourish works is that when the bar chart race thing started flying, John Burt Murdock made that nice example on Observable.
00:14:38
Speaker
We were like, oh, cool, let's make one of those. And so we were able to spin that out in a couple of weeks and publish it. And then if that does well and people use it a lot, we can worry about adding extra features easily over time. So it's very modular. And that's the key. Same with the Olympics thing. We just thought it would be cool to make something like that for the Olympics. So we pushed that out. We did one the other day on the Draw the Line templates, which the New York Times kind of pioneered. They called them You Draw It.
00:15:07
Speaker
And that's a really nice example, actually, of what I was trying to say before. If you're a competent coder, it's really easy to make a not very good one in a couple of days. And then the more you use it, the more you realize that actually if the person's finger moves too fast, you miss out some data points, or if the data is too dense, it doesn't work. And so actually doing that as a template, even if it only takes a couple of weeks, is so much more effective than trying to do one from scratch, which is just a bit too hard to make it worthwhile.
00:15:37
Speaker
Right. I hadn't seen the Draw the Line one, so I'm excited about that because I've had ideas to do something like that. There is the added challenge of
00:15:47
Speaker
collecting people's data. The Times does it, or they have done it, where you draw, and then they collect everybody's data, and then you sort of scroll down, and it's like, here's all the results. And that adds a whole other layer of data collection, and storage, and real time pushing it back and forth. Yeah, that's true. We decided not to try and bite that off for now. So similarly, we have a quiz template, but we don't aggregate the results and show you what other people. Right. It's something we might do in the future. It'd be fun to do, I think.
00:16:16
Speaker
Yeah, the other feature of Flourish I wanted to talk about was the cards feature, which in
00:16:22
Speaker
And I want to talk about both the feature and how it will integrate with Canva because I could see how it could be really interesting. So in Flourish, for those who don't know, it sort of works like either a scrolly telling or a little stepper. I have a bunch of clients who really like it because it's kind of replacing their PowerPoint summary or pitch decks because they could just send a link as opposed to like trying to get you this big PDF that maybe you have to put up in Dropbox or something.
00:16:49
Speaker
I wanted to get your take on the cards feature in general, but also with respect to Canva, I can see a lot of opportunity there to integrate that particular piece into Canva.
00:17:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting. So for those who haven't used it, what the cards template does is it takes an input datasheet, which would typically be, you know, maybe it's got like a name and an image and a description or something. And then it renders a kind of grid of what we call cards with the info laid out, or you can have them more like a carousel.
00:17:22
Speaker
And this very much comes back to this thing of flourish in its early days growing out of interactive journalism. And one thing you see in interactive news articles sometimes is things like, you sometimes call them face walls. So like, here are all the candidates in this particular primary or whatever. And it would just be 20 cards with a couple of data points on each, like, you know, net worth and kind of number of percentage of the vote or whatever, and a picture.
00:17:52
Speaker
So it's not really a data visualization, but it's like a visual expression of this simple data set, maybe with some imagery. And so because we kind of came out of that background, it felt very natural for us with Flourish's very sort of flexible architecture to say, well, let's not limit ourselves to
00:18:10
Speaker
data visualizations. Let's do all the stuff that interactive news desks do. So let's have a cards template, for example, but other examples would include things like we said, well, let's make a photo slider. So you can do a kind of before and after pair of images or things like that, or the quiz I just mentioned before. So
00:18:30
Speaker
That's where it came from, that desire to say sometimes your data set isn't really highly quantitative. It's more just like a collection of entities that you want to lay out nicely on a grid. And what we found is that if you're doing online publishing with data, actually, that's often a really nice thing to mix in. It might be that you start with a chart, and then halfway down you've got a nice grid showing all the different countries, and then further down you've got a map or whatever. But also what we wanted to do is
Enhancing Storytelling with Canva and Flourish
00:18:57
Speaker
over time support putting visualizations inside other visualizations. So again, this is something that we don't really heavily promote, but you can make a cards visualization, which might just be a list of, might be a card per country with a little map and a couple of sentences, but you could then make it where you click on one of those and that opens a panel. And then you can embed another flourish visualization in that panel. So you could have a kind of a dig deeper about this particular country. So
00:19:23
Speaker
That at the moment requires a certain amount of manual setup, but it can work really nicely, and over time we want to make that kind of thing easier and easier.
00:19:30
Speaker
And I guess in the Canva context, yeah, it's interesting because Canva, you know, that feels like it overlaps with Canva a bit more than other things we do. So I guess like over, you know, we're very much focusing on the kind of data visualization storytelling for now. And I guess we'll see where the rest of that kind of interactive content goes. Yeah, it'll be really interesting because you can imagine creating that sort of carousel with
00:19:55
Speaker
a graphic and an icon or a photograph or any of the design features in Canva and all those design tools that you can sort of arrange and align that
00:20:08
Speaker
It's not that Flourish is not good at it, but, you know, Canva is more of like that design tool. So you can sort of build that out. And so I can see a lot of advantage there of merging the two together because you really can create something. And again, online, which is just so much easier to share than, you know, a 300 megabyte PDF file. That's just sort of hard to do.
00:20:29
Speaker
Totally. And I think that thing of kind of sharing big PowerPoints or PDFs of PowerPoints is definitely a kind of thing that the world is moving on from. And I mean, what you were saying before about people like being able to create a flourish story and then share that as a presentation. It was exactly that kind of feedback from users, which made us so excited about the Canva
00:20:52
Speaker
integration because what people would say to us, we love this, but what we want to do as well is we want to be able to drag a couple of bits of text there and do this and that. You would expect to be able to do a drag and drop presentation editor. And now you can do that. You can make your flyer a story with all the rich graphics. You can just embed it in Canva and then you can drag and drop all the stuff you want over the top. You can have a title slide that kind of works as active as you want. And then the other thing you have in Canva, of course, is this massive image library. So if you're making a
00:21:21
Speaker
data-driven story about almost anything, then there'll always be a bunch of photos that you can just use. Whereas in Flourish, you have to upload them and use the URLs and stuff. Right, right. Yeah, so now you can build that little scrolly-telling piece in Canva with the little grid of photographs of the candidates, and then have an interactive map or whatever below that. And you can really do that kind of seamlessly with all the pieces. Yeah, it's really interesting.
00:21:47
Speaker
So what is the process that you all go through when you're thinking about new features, additional graphs, additional charts? Like, um, no, you sort of said that, you know, you get feedback from users. I'm sure you have this huge queue of, of things that you want to put in. So how do you, is that a team effort to sort of, you know, prioritize or like, how do you think about, you know, making those improvements and making those changes?
00:22:12
Speaker
So we try and be very user-led, and we also try to be quite data-led. So whenever a kind of paying customer, because we always try and give extra weight to our paying customers' requirements. Probably good business strategy. Exactly.
00:22:28
Speaker
whenever they ask for a feature, but also whenever a free user does as well, it gets logged. And it gets logged in our sort of GitHub and stuff. And then what we have is a flourish live updating table, because you can make those in flourish, with a little mini charts in them and stuff that show which users are asking for which features. So we have a live table that we can refer to any time that says,
00:22:56
Speaker
The thing our users want the most is, and then we kind of try and fit that with time available. Because obviously when you run a software company, there's a whole bunch of stuff you have to do in the background that's a bit less exciting than new features like database migrations and all the other stuff.
00:23:14
Speaker
But yeah, so we try and be quite user-led. There's a little bit the other way around as well, though, because we always, in Flourish, we've always had a kind of culture of having what we call Free Friday, where we encourage anyone on the engineering side to sort of experiment and do fun stuff on a Friday.
00:23:32
Speaker
And, um, and that fits really well with the modular architecture I was talking about before, because generally what people do on a Friday, they sort of fire up the SDK and they say, okay, I'm going to make a Mary Mecco template or whatever. And, um, and, uh, you know, I use that example cause I saw a really cool demo of a Mary Mecco template yesterday, um, which started off as a Friday project, I think, but will now kind of, it will end up flowing into the, into the, um, into the tool. And, um, so it's kind of like generally it's user led, but sometimes it's kind of, uh, team enthusiasm led as well.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah. So I was always under the impression that flourish, like a lot of the browser-based tools, you're sort of limited by what's in the options. But now I'm learning that you can do more with it through the SDK. So can you talk a little bit more about how a user, who obviously would need to know subcoding, how a user can go in and customize and hack away at that a little bit more?
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah, so the best way to understand the SDK is to see it as a way to put any kind of code into a Flourish template. So it's not like what you might expect, which is, I think, what you were just getting at, where the template doesn't quite give you what you want, so you download it and make a few code changes. And we don't actually share the code for our own templates out, partly because it's really complicated and we don't have time to support other people tinkering with it.
00:24:57
Speaker
But instead, you can make your own template. And that is really hyper flexible. So you know, the simplest end, you can make a template where there's one setting, which is kind of, you know, here is my name, and then in the middle, it's a single HTML line that renders my name is, and you've written john, so it renders john, and then you can publish that. So it can be that simple, it could just be like a way to connect
00:25:21
Speaker
you know, a setting that you sort of declare in a configuration file through to something that gets rendered in the graphic.
00:25:28
Speaker
But then it gets much, much, much more complicated from there, because what you can do is you can use pretty well whatever coding style you like to create the JavaScript that then ultimately renders the template. So if you want to do something in WebGL using Regal, you could do that. If you want to use D3 with React or Svelte, you can do that. If you want to write the JavaScript raw, just straight in, you can do that.
00:25:53
Speaker
And the idea is basically anything that you can render, you can turn into a Flourish template. And then what Flourish gives you that makes it so useful is a really easy way to declare the settings. So like what's configurable by the user, what type of saying is it, what the min and max values you allow, that kind of thing.
00:26:12
Speaker
It also gives you a way to make the data input really configurable. So you can say not only the user can replace this data, but you can say there should be two data tables. They've got these data bindings. They have to have an X and Y and they can optionally have a size by whatever.
00:26:28
Speaker
And then the other killer feature of it is versioning. So when you try and make software, one of the hardest things is that when you change the code, then that changes what the user has done with the code. If the user's done a dynamic visualization, you just change the code, then their visualization changes. And there's a reasonable expectation from users that if they make something, it shouldn't change.
00:26:51
Speaker
So what we do with Flourish is we have semantic versioning on the template so that if you're the visualization creator, and let's take that silly, easy example I said before, you've just got a template that says, my name is John. And you want to change it so the sentence is actually, my name is John and I live at.
00:27:09
Speaker
And now you've got two settings, but the templates change in that way. So you could change. You could just use the versioning system, say, okay, this is a new version. So it replaces the old one, but the old visualization is still attached to the old one. So it doesn't change. And, um, and what's really powerful is, is all of those things together. So you can make a very easily make a piece of software that allows anyone that you give access, um, to it to create some fancy visualization, but with this version control stuff built in. Yeah.
00:27:39
Speaker
Without giving hard numbers, because I'm sure you can't, but how many or what share of people do you find are actually doing that in Flourish? It's a tiny proportion, but it's generally, which we always expected. We built this at the beginning such that we wanted the architecture to support, we wanted it genuinely to be a platform rather than just a tool. We made the architecture
00:28:09
Speaker
we built it this way, and then we use the SDK ourselves. So all the templates are made with the same tools that we give away. And what that means is that for those users who do want to do that, like we have various newsroom users who their newsroom developers can suddenly code all their own custom stuff. And that's super powerful for them.
00:28:27
Speaker
But we always expected that this would be a tiny minority of people, for the simple reason that for every one coder, there's 1,000 people who want to make a visualization. And it's that amplifying effect that the whole platform is designed to support.
Flourish's Appeal and Future Prospects
00:28:40
Speaker
Right, right. I mean, it seems like the tool was built for the common user who wants to move to the interactive world but isn't going to be able to code it or not want to or whatever to code in JavaScript or whatever coding language. But I can see where if you are, like the Financial Times, embracing Flourish, they already have a team that can code in JavaScript. So you can sort of embrace this and really pull it together.
00:29:09
Speaker
Do you foresee, I'm sure you hope, but do you foresee some of the bigger clients, the bigger organizations that are using Flourish also using Canva? Or do they already, because they're so big, they already have a design team that maybe the Canva piece isn't going to be as useful to them as it will be for the smaller organizations, individuals, those sorts of folks?
00:29:33
Speaker
So we already kind of know the answer to this because obviously when we were acquired, we talked to all our bigger customers to let them know, reassure them that Flourish was kind of only going to get better rather than disappear or anything like that. And so many of them, when we said, and the new owning company is Canva, said, oh, cool, we use Canva as well.
00:29:57
Speaker
And because they didn't really speak to each other previously, then that was not something, a connection we'd really make, but actually there's loads of overlap. For all the reasons we were talking about before, it's kind of like a way to make something really good easily and quickly without having to spend a year doing training kind of stuff.
00:30:13
Speaker
And so that's really encouraging. And I think what we're now starting to unlock is the combination. So many of our users, they're using Flourish to make really rich visualizations. And the next challenge is, what's the best way to share that? Yeah, we could put it on a website, sure. But actually, generally, in a business context, if you make a rich data story, it's probably about internal data. You don't want to publish it. I mean, Flourish already lets you publish it to the web and share a URL with a password if you're an enterprise customer.
00:30:43
Speaker
But actually, what you really want generally is to be able to drop into a presentation and share that presentation. And then you want all the access controls on that presentation that you'd expect from a really advanced tool, like being able to share it with two specific people and someone on your team, but not someone else, whatever. And so now you can do that. And so we're really excited about how much opportunity that opens up.
00:31:03
Speaker
to spread flourish more widely across organizations and also to just take Canva from being a really great presentation tool to just being like the best way to sort of tell stories internally with data. And we're already starting to see that kind of work. So that combination is really exciting.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah, that is very cool. As soon as we hang up, I got to go to Canva and put that app in and start importing stuff. That looks great. Duncan, thanks so much for coming on the show. This is really exciting
Episode Conclusion and Farewell
00:31:34
Speaker
stuff. Congratulations on all of it. And yeah, I'm looking forward to see how things evolve over time and how the two sort of come together. Thanks a lot, John. Really fun being on the show. And yeah, see you soon.
00:31:46
Speaker
Thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that. Want to remind you once again, if you'd like to learn more about data visualization and you'd like to learn more about data visualization and have lessons delivered right to your phone, check out my WinO app. I am sending two or three text messages each and every week.
00:32:05
Speaker
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00:32:32
Speaker
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00:32:59
Speaker
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