Roambi Flow was a companion product to our core Roambi Analytics application that let customer create their own interactive, magazine-style reports for the iPad. As part of the Roambi Suite, it brought data to life, letting users embed live visualizations, video, images, and media into beautifully designed, narrative experiences. Flow, allowed teams and organizations to share insights and tell the story behind the numbers.
My Role
As Co-Founder and Head of Product, I conceived, designed, and led the creation of Roambi Flow. I owned the product vision, user experience, and roadmap, working closely with design and engineering to build a new kind of business storytelling tool for the emerging iPad era.
The goal was to extend Roambi beyond dashboards, making data not just visible, but communicable.
The Set Up
When the iPad launched our customers adopted it quickly, especially at the executive level. They were already using Roambi Analytics to track KPIs and dashboards on the go, and we saw an opportunity to extend the value of their data by providing a way to share insights and context with the same ease and polish as consumer media.
At the same time, Flipboard was exploding in popularity, showing how natural and tactile digital magazines could feel on tablets. That sparked the idea to create an app that allowed customers to publish their own interactive, magazine-style reports that combined narrative, visuals, and live data.
The Product
We designed and built Roambi Flow as an end-to-end publishing platform that combined elegant storytelling with live analytics.
Flow let anyone create interactive magazines with embedded, live Roambi Analytics, video, and images. It was available on iPad and Android tablets.
Flow was full publishing and content management platform that included:
Roambi Flow Publisher, a web-based authoring tool with a touch-oriented UI and drag-and-drop templates.
Roambi Flow App, a native iOS reader optimized for offline use, multi-touch navigation, and seamless content management.
Unified backend shared user administration, content management, permissions, and security with Roambi Analytics.
Template-based design let users easily combine text, images, video, and live Roambi views into interactive reports, no coding required.
Collaborative authoring allowed teams to build together by assigning stories to contributors, easily review, and approve submissions.
Content Management enabled content recall, remote wipe, and issue management that allowed users to subscribe and automatically receive new editions of periodical content.
Searchable story database made every story discoverable across editions.
Reader Collaboration each story in a report had it’s own comment thread, and markup/annotation features allowing readers to interact with each other.
One of Flow’s most distinctive features was live peer-to-peer collaboration, allowing presenters to sync nearby iPads via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
When a session started, attendees received a local, locked copy of the report. As the presenter navigated pages or interacted with live analytics, every device mirrored the movements in real time, not as a screen share, but by driving the same publication natively on each iPad.
The presenter could unlock the session for exploration, re-lock it to regain control, annotate slides, and decide whether to leave behind or wipe the publication afterward.
It was a secure, tactile collaboration model years before AirDrop, SharePlay, or real-time co-editing became mainstream.
Platform Expansion & White Label Strategy
As adoption grew, we expanded Flow into a white-labeled publishing platform based on demand from customers like Nielsen. The new offering allowed customers that produced data-driven content as part of their business, to publish branded versions of the Flow App in the App Store—tied to their private Roambi accounts, and populated exclusively with their content.
This turned Flow into a scalable data oriented publishing platform, enabling any organization to package their proprietary data as interactive magazines as a premium offering for their customers.
The Results
Flow achieved 80% penetration into our customer base as an add-on product.
Expanded quickly across departments for weekly, monthly, and quarterly performance reviews, eventually representing 30% of our ARR, and was growing at +100% at time of acquisition.
Opened up a new market for data publishing companies creating a new revenue stream with multiple +$1M “white label” customers.
Strengthened Roambi’s position as the leading mobile-first data suite, uniting analytics and narrative in a single platform.
Anticipated the convergence of data visualization, publishing, and collaboration that would later define the next decade of productivity software.
The Flow app had a Cover Flow style library for browsing publications that had been shared with you. New editions of periodical publications were automatically downloaded if you were subscribed.
Flow magazines had a tactile experience with different animations you could choose from (curl, FlipBoard), search, and a scrubber for
easy navigation.
Tapping on any story zoomed in to show the full narrative, alongside live, embedded Roambi Views, videos, or images. Each story had it’s own comments thready for active discussions between viewers.
The Flow Publisher was a web based application that allowed fast, easy, collaborative authoring of publications. It had touch sized controls enabling both desktop, and tablet based authoring.
