In March 2023, three months before I registered Revisual Labs, I sat down and scribbled a plan into a notebook. I still have the page. In the middle, in big letters, it says WHY DATAVIZ STUDIO IN INDIA. Around it: the kinds of work we might do, a list of the people I would need, and in one corner, two words I had no real right to be confident about, a culture and a community.

A notebook page, hand-drawn as a dense doodle, headed with the question "Why Dataviz Studio in India". It maps out the idea: the kinds of people such a studio would need, and the services it would offer. It captures the dream of an Indian dataviz conference, and the wish to see powerful, effective charts everywhere they are missing in India, from newspapers, journals and PowerPoints to reels, colleges and even textile-school curricula. It notes the markets the work could serve, news, think-tank research, academia, corporations and product design, alongside the untapped potential of the region and the many applications data visualisation might have. Tying it together is the goal of building a culture and community around data visualisation. The plan. March 2023.

On Saturday, 13 June 2026, Revisual Labs completed three years as a registered company. I went back to that page. Here is what it got right, what it did not, and what it never saw coming.

Some of it has not happened. There is still no full-time backend developer, no administrator (still me with my Claude agent), and a few of the fields I had listed are untouched. I had planned for one designer; there are many. I worried on that page about demand; demand was never the problem. Learning to explain what actually makes us different, that is the part that is still hard.

But the two things I least believed would happen, the two I had scribbled almost as a wish, came true. An Indian dataviz conference, which I could only call a dream, is real. VizChitra went from a line in a notebook to 300-plus people on a terrace in Bangalore and a community of more than 1,600 (join us for the second edition on July 3-4!). And the culture I wanted to build is being built.

Most of the last three years, though, was never on that page at all.

The notebook did not know we would win anything. A year ago we won the Information is Beautiful Silver for Outstanding Studio, and it took me months afterwards to be able to walk into a room and say out loud that we are the second-best information design studio in the world, and own it.

It did not know that, this year, people would leave for the first time. One moved to part-time, one moved on entirely. This is the part I find hardest. You build something, you want the people in it to stay, and then they grow in directions that take them elsewhere. I am happy that this place helped them grow. The company absorbed it and kept evolving.

And the notebook certainly did not imagine that one day the company would out-imagine me. This month we launch a global report where my only real input was to say we should think harder, this is not it. And then the team thought, and delivered. More and more of the work here turns out better than I could have made it alone.

This year we also took our first team offsite, where the team came together to rescue a dog and then played poker until 2 a.m. We also got our first international contributor, our dev intern Brenda, joining us from Kenya.

And to mark three years, we did a Tea and Tattle session last Friday: silly awards, a round of Pictionary, and one question I put to everyone.

What is something you have learned from someone else on this team?

Ipshita showing someone how powerful Flourish really is. Someone inspired by the way Rashi sketches concepts. Swathi’s client emails and Asana timelines called a work of art. Schubert now carrying a notebook because a teammate once asked if he sketches when he travels. Someone more confident in life because no question here is ever treated as stupid. Ananya welcomed by a former intern who passed on everything she knew. Mine was that the work ethic of our earliest hires, Aman, Divya, and Swathi, is what made me more accountable and finally married to my deadlines.

That call, and those stories, are the part of these three years I am proudest of.

Thank you to the people who trusted us, and to everyone who has ever shown up for the work alongside me. To Aashish and Geetika, who are quite literally the backbone of every business process here. To my family who backed a journalism degree and a strange little company that visualises data, long before either made any obvious sense. And to all the many friends of RVL who bring us up in conversations even when we are not in the room.

Three years. More grey hair than I started with, a company I did not quite believe would exist, and a plan that, against the odds, mostly held.