[HN Gopher] Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia
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Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia
Author : RyLuke
Score : 157 points
Date : 2020-10-20 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retool.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retool.com)
| imafish wrote:
| Wow - congrats. I love the tool. Active user through a year.
| dragonfax wrote:
| I've been using retool for a year, and very heavily for some
| large internal tools for the last month. I find some of its
| design rather inspired. Its been massively helpful and
| surprisingly easy to use. Even for some relatively complicated
| tasks.
|
| We are hitting the limits of its capability. Which is when
| applications get complicated or end up with lots of code. The
| javascript you write in your tool is running inside many layers
| of retool javascription and encapsulation.
|
| But at this point if we decide to move such an app out of Retool,
| then the business logic is already written.
| denster wrote:
| 100% Agreed! Defining logic in JS is quite clunky for these sorts
| of tools.
|
| I'm biased[1], but for this reason we took the approach of
| creating a spreadsheet from scratch for the sole purpose of
| creating logic for apps (both internal tools & customer facing
| UX).
|
| Would be curious to get the everyone's input on our spreadsheet-
| driven approach -- thoughts?
|
| [1] I'm biased, because I'm the founder of: https://mintdata.com
|
| [2] But this example shows what I mean by the "a spreadsheet is
| better to define logic than JS" approach:
|
| https://mintdata.com/showcase/photo-finder/
| dang wrote:
| You've been excessively promoting this on HN
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=denster). Most HN
| readers consider that spamming. Note the site guideline:
| _Please don 't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post
| your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site
| should be for curiosity._
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| It's also in somewhat bad taste to appear to be making a
| positive contribution to the discussion of someone else's work
| while actually promoting your own, and you've done that twice
| in this thread.
|
| (I hesitated to say something about this because Retool is a YC
| co and we moderate less in such cases (https://hn.algolia.com/?
| query=moderate%20less%20not%20more%2...) but this principle is
| the same everywhere and I've made similar comments in many non-
| YC-related threads.)
| dalton wrote:
| Congrats to Retool!
|
| I worked with Retool when they were in the YC W17 batch. They
| were previously working on a p2p finance app for the UK, and I
| remember sitting in the conference room when they told me they
| were pivoting to Retool.
|
| The Retool idea made immediate sense to me because at my prior
| startup we used django-admin to crank out internal pages and it
| was amazing. So it seemed clear to me that having something along
| those lines that was available in _every_ programming environment
| would be useful, but it was harder for me to wrap my head around
| competing with free. This sort of reminds me of Algolia competing
| with Apache Solr - as it turns out can be a great business if you
| build a great product and really understand your customers. Also
| I did not appreciate the power of having a drag-and-drop
| interface, all of the integrations etc.
|
| David and the whole Retool team have done a truly brilliant job
| executing since then, excellent work.
| algo_trader wrote:
| What are your thoughts/reactions after a pitch with an novel
| idea+execution+traction but no obvious moat?
| ignoramous wrote:
| Thanks. (if I may) Since you emphasize that Retool built a 10x
| _product_ and _really_ understood their customers, what are
| some ways they did both of those? Did they hire the right
| product / UX people early-on? Had initimate understanding of
| the problem at-hand? Knew which features to leave out and which
| ones to build in face a barrage of feature requests? Kept in
| constant touch with their early adopters? Ran really good user
| interviews? Or...
| polote wrote:
| Honestly I have seen Retool being used, and see developers love
| it. But the one thing I hate about Retool is that anything that a
| developer does on Retool is tech debt.
|
| You want to do a quick form to manage an app ? Let's build it on
| Retool, you will lose control of everything, you can't improve
| the form, you don't run the form, you can't apply the usual code
| review, ...
|
| Visual coding is great for people who don't know how to code, but
| for developer that should be the thing to avoid at all cost. I
| have seen a company that instead of improving their coding
| environment they started progressively doing everything on
| Retool, what is going to happen the day Retool is down ? or
| increase their price ? or they bring a breaking change ? or ?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I think the product is amazing, but it
| requires huge discipline, and this is never a good idea to depend
| on the discipline of people
| dvdhsu wrote:
| Hi! Thanks for the comment. I'm an engineer as well, so the
| concerns you raise are things I've thought a lot about. I think
| Retool does a few things differently, which help:
|
| 1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All
| Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has
| pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application,
| those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository,
| and you can use code reviews, PRs, etc. in order to manage
| everything. This means we also support code transforms (if you
| want to bulk-change Retool applications), support staging and
| dev environments, and more. https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-
| syncing
|
| 2. On the flexibility side -- you can import your own React
| components. This lets you use the data-handling layers of
| Retool, but still customize the front-end as much as you want:
| https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components.
|
| 3. Most serious Retool users host Retool on-prem:
| https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions. By hosting
| Retool on-prem, you can be responsible for Retool's up-time.
| And because all updates are shipped via Docker, you can always
| downgrade / refuse to upgrade.
| dragonfax wrote:
| The git thing is only for on-prem.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| They still can put git or something basic diffing logic in
| their SaaS backend and surface some simple GUI, I have done
| this before just by selecting the last entry, diffing it,
| and inserting a newer entry that subsumed the old database
| entry
| haxton wrote:
| Hi! I'm an engineer here at Retool. I actually did build
| just this (a basic diffing logic tool) not long ago. It's
| currently behind a beta flag, but I opened a PR up this
| morning to get this to ship to production.
|
| If you're a Retool user you can find it under the Beta
| section in your org settings. And yes, this is available
| on our cloud offering
| aidos wrote:
| I've found the same in our use of it. It's really hard to audit
| the code to understand what's going on and I find myself
| clicking around trying to get some sense of how things fit
| together. The interface itself is pretty slow, which I find
| frustrating.
|
| We've also had it explode on us a couple of times in production
| (on prem) and even reprovisioning it from scratch was a real
| struggle.
|
| Things may have improved now (I try not to touch it these days)
| and I wish the team all the best with it. No doubt there are
| people out there for whom it will work well. But for me
| personally, I'll be moving the things we've built using it into
| something else when time permits.
| drako999 wrote:
| That's exactly why we built appsmith. A company's core tech
| stack should be built on open source technology so you're never
| held hostage by proprietary software.
| https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ahhh so _that 's_ what Retool is. Your page does a much
| better job of explaining what these things are. And it looks
| like an interesting project - good luck!
| ayewo wrote:
| Interesting project.
|
| 1. How soon will you announce pricing?
|
| 2. In terms of feature parity, how close are you to matching
| Retool?
| arey_abhishek wrote:
| thanks! 1. We'll announce pricing in 6-9 months, our
| project opened for beta 2 months ago 2. We are about 6
| months away from feature parity, maybe even quicker if we
| can attract more contributors :)
| joshribakoff wrote:
| I took a look as a potential contributor and noticed from
| spot checking it seems like bug fixes are getting merged
| without tests, which deters me from contributing to a
| project personally. Looks really cool, though!
| arey_abhishek wrote:
| Josh, thats a fair point. We merged a few fixes recently
| to quickly get rid of some bugs. We need to get stricter
| with our automated testing processes.
| anonu wrote:
| Wow - really cool & congrats...
|
| Sort of reminds me of a handful of RegBI tools - like Periscope
| Data. But the marketing/positioning is "this is for internal
| teams". I suppose another important difference here is that you
| can write to the database from the interface. The API out-of-the-
| box is pretty neat too.
|
| I gave it a quick spin after watching the demo. Large tables take
| a while to refresh. I dont know if thats just extra load on the
| servers after the announcement. I would imagine getting latency
| down, especially for queries with many columns or rows, would be
| important to UX.
| dvdhsu wrote:
| Thank you -- seriously -- for trying Retool! You're correct on
| the difference -- Retool supports writing back to databases and
| APIs, which is fairly different from most BI tools.
|
| On the latency part -- yes! We are currently working on scaling
| our systems and latency is a bit higher than usual right now.
| If this is something anybody is interested in working on,
| please ping me! :)
| jameslk wrote:
| I've been using Retool very seriously over the past few months.
| It's definitely helpful to iterate on some UI ideas and
| prototype. Once you want to do anything complicated that involves
| any sort of logic, it becomes very clunky since you're trying to
| write JS in a tiny web-based code editor box. Refractors (e.g.
| changing a variable name or deleting a query) is kind of a
| nightmare since I can't just search for it's usage. I also wish
| it had support for a lightweight DB out of box instead of
| requiring one to always be present. Finally, it seems components
| have kind of inconsistent capabilities, like being able to
| trigger a query on certain events that you would expect, which
| limits their usefulness.
|
| Overall I'd say it's helpful but has a ways to go before being a
| useful replacement for most internal app use cases. It's
| certainly promising though and hopefully this round of investment
| helps round off some of these rough spots in the product.
| dvdhsu wrote:
| Thank you for trying Retool! I agree that we have a lot of room
| to improve on the writing of more complicated JS, as well as
| large-scale refactors. We are working on bringing git syncing
| to the cloud (currently it's only available on-prem), which'll
| let you edit Retool apps as code. I think that should help a
| good amount.
|
| Anyhow -- thank you for the feedback! I will send you an email
| in a few hours too. If you'd be willing to hop on the phone to
| dive into some of this in more detail, it'd be really
| appreciated. (I'll probably run a few potential solutions by
| you and see which ones you like.)
| jameslk wrote:
| Hey there, sure! Feel free to reach out. I think you guys are
| on to something great. Hope I can help
| bfstein wrote:
| I totally agree with the request for a lightweight DB out of
| box..
|
| There is https://easydb.io which is nice and works OK with
| Retool but is NoSQL.. an equivalent for a relational DB would
| be great.
| rbinv wrote:
| Congrats! Well deserved - Retool is an excellent product in my
| opinion. So much CRUD code saved.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| I think Retool continues in the trend of startups creating a
| formidable SaaS from something that is "obviously useful" to
| developers working with open source, and has become a "tool of
| the trade" for those developers, which reveals a wider market
| outside of that language/platform-specific open source niche.
| Examples here are:
|
| - Real-Time Sys/App Dashboards (e.g. Graphite) => Datadog
|
| - Collaborative Source Control (e.g. trac, hgweb) => GitHub
|
| - Team Chat & Bots (e.g. IRC, ZNC, Hubot) => Slack
|
| - App Error Tracking (e.g. Raven/Sentry project) => Sentry
|
| In this case, the category is:
|
| - Internal Admin Interface (e.g. Django Admin) => Retool
|
| Like all of the above categories, this category is obvious in
| retrospect.
|
| Every SaaS product/company I have ever worked on or advised has
| leveraged a Django admin interface. Or, the team wished it had
| one once they went into production with real users, if the
| technology choice _wasn't_ Python/Django.
|
| If you have never personally experienced a the Django admin
| interface, you can read about it and see screenshots in this
| tutorial: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Server-
| side/D...
|
| Essentially, it gives you a web-based interface, hooking into
| your existing user/group authentication model, for inspecting
| (and even altering!) live production data by introspecting your
| "Django Models". That is, your Python classes which represent
| your production SQL tables lead to (controlled!) admin interfaces
| that can edit those tables.
|
| You can extend that admin interface using simple declarative
| configuration, such that you can build functional, SQL-aware
| tables and forms without writing a lick of UI code.
|
| Based on the demo video, Retool is even more featureful than the
| Django Admin (although perhaps a little less extensible, since it
| isn't based on an open source framework). But, for anyone
| thinking to themselves, "Why didn't I think of this?" -- perhaps
| give some thought to the root problems beneath some of the open
| source tools you're using today, that could perhaps be turned
| into a widely-applicable SaaS tomorrow.
| alexashka wrote:
| I'd be curious to know what the investors see as a path to
| success here.
|
| This tool strikes me as confusing for non-programmers and too
| limited for programmers.
|
| What is this meant to compete with, what's the use case?
| denster wrote:
| I think this is a fantastic way to describe it!
|
| I spent 5 years in the 90s creating a WYSIWYG tool with Visual
| Basic 6 , and VB6 was a life saver.
|
| I think retool is a fantastic, modern-day re-incarnation of that.
|
| However, I think when the UX is important -- that is, a rich,
| pixel-perfect design combined with robust facilities to define
| custom app logic, a principles-first approach has to be taken.
|
| We've taken one stab at this, to say that logic should be defined
| in a spreadsheet specifically tailored for the app-building
| purpose, and I think only time will tell if this approach is
| right. [1]
|
| [1] Take with a grain of salt, I'm the founder of
|
| https://mintdata.com
| [deleted]
| exdsq wrote:
| I remember someone suggesting that when you write a web app you
| should prototype the design with the client until they like it
| and then build the backend. Could something like this let you
| create a front end responsive design but leave the logic to the
| backend where you can then make whatever design decisions you
| want to?
|
| Edit: Also, a huge congratulations!
| dvdhsu wrote:
| Hi all! David, founder of Retool here. We've come a long way
| since we our very first Show HN
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494) and subsequent
| launch (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966)!
|
| Briefly -- Retool is a visual programming language, built
| specifically for building internal front-ends. The idea is that
| we can let you use a visual programming interface to get you 70%
| of the way there very quickly, and then let you customize the
| rest with code. This lets you build apps much faster, but also
| retains the customizability and flexibility of code.
|
| We support writing JS anywhere between {{ }} [1], importing
| custom React components [2] , hosting on-prem [3] (can be setup
| in 5 minutes: https://docs.retool.com/docs/running-retool-
| locally), etc. And then once your applications are built in
| Retool, we manage the authentication (via SSO if you want),
| authorization (syncing with your groups in Okta via SCIM), and
| audit logs (can be stored in your own database, so you can build
| apps on top of it.)
|
| One interesting differentiator is that we don't store any data,
| and are happy to connect to any back-ends you already use
| (including both databases and rest / graphql / grpc endpoints).
|
| Here's a 4 minute demo video:
| https://d3399nw8s4ngfo.cloudfront.net/videos/intro-to-retool...
|
| HN is what got us this far, so if anybody has any comments /
| suggestions, please feel free to let me know! We aim to be
| surprisingly responsive to HN feedback, since we've found it
| highly predictive of what developers in general want. Feel free
| to email me at david AT retool.com
|
| edit: fixed video. Thanks!
|
| 1. https://docs.retool.com/docs/javascript-overview 2.
| https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components 3.
| https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions
| vannevar wrote:
| Would it be fair to say Retool is a spiritual successor to
| Visual Basic, upon which a whole generation of enterprise apps
| was built?
| dvdhsu wrote:
| Yes, certainly! "VB in the cloud" is a pretty good
| description of Retool. (I think we're a quite a bit more
| developer friendly, but it's certainly 80% correct.)
| swyx wrote:
| surprised at the final comment. was VB not developer
| friendly? this wasnt my perception.
| vincentchu wrote:
| Congrats David, we're a big fan (and users) of Retool.
| rvz wrote:
| > With the customer traction we've seen so far, we're delighted
| to announce that Retool has raised a $50M Series B, led by
| Sequoia. Other participants in the round include the founders
| of Github, Gusto, PagerDuty, Plaid, Segment, Stripe, and Y
| Combinator.
|
| This is great news. You've really come a long way from a Show
| HN and now raising a Series B lead by Sequoia Capital.
| Congratulations to you and Retool. I look forward to see Retool
| growing with more customers and features in the near future.
|
| Well done!
| tzvsi wrote:
| Demo video link is not accessible
| dvdhsu wrote:
| Fixed. Thank you!
| gk1 wrote:
| Hey David, congrats to you. This felt like a winner even two
| years ago.
|
| The absence of "low-code" (the phrase) throughout the site--
| except for a couple of blog posts--makes me think it was a
| conscious decision. Sort of how Slack remarkably avoids the
| word "chat" anywhere on their site. Is that the case, and why?
| antaviana wrote:
| Your link to the 4-minute demo videos issues an "access denied"
| error.
| dvdhsu wrote:
| Fixed. Thank you!
| AntonioL wrote:
| Hi David,
|
| Congrats on the funding!
|
| I am wondering whether retool can fit this use case? I have
| some bunch of data which I would like to sell, and would like
| to give a dataviz tool to a 3rd party customer to play with my
| data.
|
| Are you aware of any customer of you with such an use case?
| julee04 wrote:
| Congrats to the Retool team! I got a chance to meet David and
| Anthony when they were working out of their apartment and I was
| incredibly impressed with how fast they were able to
| innovate/build. Kevin White from Segment who was an amazing head
| of growth marketing joined their team as well, so I'm confident
| it's only a matter of time until we see them become the next big
| thing!
| nlh wrote:
| Congrats! Quick endorsement (no connection to company):
|
| I discovered Retool fairly recently during a bout of frustration-
| with-our-designers-and-engineers-spending-too-much-time-on-
| internal tools.
|
| We were fighting very very elementary bugs mostly because the
| people implementing our internal tools were just not thrilled
| about that work (vs. the customer-facing stuff) and there's just
| a natural progression of common bugs when you're building things
| from the ground up.
|
| We are just about to launch our first full conversion from an
| internal tool to a Retool-powered one, and I'm super excited. We
| were able to get the project to 0 backend engineers, 1 frontend
| engineer (who gets some help w/ SQL queries), and 1 designer who
| works directly in Retool (which, to be fair, isn't as powerful as
| Figma, but that's actually a good thing!).
|
| And for the product guy (me), I can go in and tweak things
| without filing a ticket and waiting for a test-review-deploy
| cycle. So the whole thing is just quicker and better for this use
| case. Now our team can focus 100% effort (or, at least 99%) on
| the customer-facing stuff, which is where we're adding the most
| value anyway.
|
| Suffice to say I'm very pleased so far.
| mentioum wrote:
| Nice :)
| chenster wrote:
| Congrats! How does it compare against AirTable and Metabase?
| dvdhsu wrote:
| Great question! Against Airtable, primarily in two ways:
|
| 1. We are _not_ a system of record, and do not store any data.
| We'll connect to your data, no matter where it is (e.g.
| postgres, your own API, Stripe, etc.)
|
| 2. We are primarily for building complex UIs, not for simple
| spreadsheets. If you're looking for a spreadsheet for your
| database, there are lots of other options (e.g. postico). But
| if you're looking to build a UI (perhaps you only want some
| columns to be editable, or don't want to expose the whole
| database as a spreadsheet), you should use Retool.
|
| To give a concrete example of a good Airtable use case: let's
| say you join a new company and have a list of friends that you
| admire and want to try and recruit. You'd probably use an
| Airtable for that. Retool is probably overkill here because
| you'd have to setup a database to store your friends, which
| probably doesn't make sense.
|
| To give a concrete example of a Retool use case: let's say
| you're Doordash, and you want to manage all the orders in your
| database (e.g. you want cancel an order because the restaurant
| is closed). The only safe way for your support team to do that
| is you build an internal front-end for it. To do that, you're
| either writing React (or Angular, or Vue), or using Retool.
| Airtable probably wouldn't work here because Doordash is not
| storing their orders in an Airtable.
|
| Against Metabase: we're primarily used for applications that
| both read and write data. If you're looking for some charts or
| tables that only read, I'd recommend Metabase (or Chartio,
| Looker, Redash, etc.). But if you want to write data back via
| Metabase (i.e. the CUD in CRUD), it's impossible without
| building a custom React app.
| DataGrid_Retool wrote:
| You mention support for complex UIs, but Retool only ships
| with a basic table, and no built-in support for Data Grids.
| Something to consider when it comes to building richer page
| experiences. I would presume you intend to add more standard
| components as Retool continues to mature.
| chenster wrote:
| Thanks. Since it doesnt store data, which is excellent, does
| it still cache them for performance? If it does, would that
| still fall under the radar of GDPR?
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(page generated 2020-10-20 23:01 UTC)