The build process took a bit of time and I had to hire an expert on Upwork. Not everyone might persevere. A gallery with examples of varying complexity would make the sell easier.
Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
31–40 of 153 posts
Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
#32I dont understand how an apparently billion dollar company still requires to raise 45 million. Can someone ELI5 the economics of this?
We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is…
Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
#33As someone on the product side I am getting more bullish each day on low-code tooling as it gets increasingly hard to source and retain engineering talent. Whist it might comes with downsides and limitations I think the positives in terms of time-to-market and cost outweigh these on balance for many types of needs (not all for sure). Congrats.
From the other side I can't imagine using no-code and inhering that tech debt when the equivalent software can be written by 1 skilled SWE in a day(ish), is it really cheaper than about 10 quality manhours (~$5k)?
10% of the code we write produces 90% of the value: retool etc. allow us to spend much less time on the 90% of code that isn’t valuable to the businesses we work for.
Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is…
> TBH, fundraising is kind of like charades: it's a way to signal you are doing well, without telling people your private company metrics. I hate that this is the answer. Edit, for clarification. I don't hate that this is Retool's answer , I hate that this is how the world actually works.
Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
#35I dont understand how an apparently billion dollar company still requires to raise 45 million. Can someone ELI5 the economics of this?
We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is…
Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is…
With names like the Stripe founders and the GitHub founder on the list, perhaps fundraising is also a way to get those well-connected people's skin in the game? They might be good routes to new customers or other connections good for growing the business.
They already were investors from previous rounds.
Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
#37Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
#38Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…
I do see you pivoted away from some developer tooling things, like mock APIs generated from your database schema (that was a thing previous, no?). While I see you have the mock api generator service, I seem to recall you guys had a more robust paid offering that would read your database schema and spin up a mock API. Any reason you pivoted away from that product? I quite literally am in search of a company that will…
a) Is this for rapid prototypes? (web? mobile?) b) Do you have a microservice architecture and you want to mock out one of the services? (dev? ci?) c) something else?
Lets say the generator looks at your schema and generates an api, how much would you want to tweak/customize that api?
Is the mock api returning data based on what's in the database? If so, can the mock api mutate data in the database?
Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
#39Hi all, founder @ Retool here. We've made a lot of progress over the past few years, but we first started on HN, and certainly wouldn't be here without all of you! For example, here's when we launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 . Hilariously, we described Retool as "Excel with higher order primitives", and people understood it! (Only on HN!) After that, we spent around a year polishing the product…
Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation
#40I dont understand how an apparently billion dollar company still requires to raise 45 million. Can someone ELI5 the economics of this?
We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021). But raising money is helpful because a) it gets prospective customers interested in the product (oh, X company raised, let me check out what their product does), b) it gets prospective employees interested, c) it allows people externally to see that the company is…