Hey yo! Enrico and Moritz here. We are the hosts of Data Stories a podcast on Data and Visualization. Moritz is an award-winning independent data visualization freelancer and Enrico is a data visualization professor at New York University.

We have been recording Data Stories since 2012. We started for fun, mostly to see if it "could work" and over the years we realized it could actually work really really really well!

Our show is mostly centered around guests we invite to talk about a particular topic we are interested in. When we ideate our show we think: "what cool ideas or projects do people need to be aware of?". Many of our listeners say they love our show because it makes them think and laugh at the same time. They also seem to like our "exotic euro voices" :)

Why do we need your support?

Short version: We are currently funded by our sponsors and we would like to turn the show into a crowdfunded podcasts, with no advertising.

Longer version: Running a professional high-quality podcast requires lots of expenses. Besides server space, promotion and audio equipment, the show requires the work of our wonderful producer Destry and our audio wizard Florian, who need to be compensated for their invaluable work.

Without them the show would be basically impossible to run. So far, we have been funded by our sponsors but this means the show contains advertisements that interrupt the flow. It also means we have to devote some of our precious time to producing the ads other than the show. Being supported by YOU would allow us to remove ads and focus entirely on content.

... and there is another reason: we'd love to feel the warm and cozy feeling of being funded by our listeners!

What is our main milestone?

If 200 of you decide to give at least the minimal amount of $3/episode (roughly $6 monthly) we will have reached our goal!

The show is currently funded by advertisements. We are covered for a few more months which we are using as a "buffer" before switching to Patreon entirely.

Our goal is to be able to transition to being fully crowdfunded by our listeners by June 2017. And to achieve this goal we need $600 for each episode, which makes $1200 per month, given our bi-weekly schedule.

The money will be used for the following purposes:

Server (for blog posts and audio)
Audio Equipment (good mics and recorders are crucial!)
Content Producer (Destry, our lovely producer)
Audio Producer (Florian, our audio wizard)
Promotion (mostly to boost episodes on Facebook)