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Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

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Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#71

Post by Dyac »

dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi 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…

Hi, congrats on the funding!

I've been really interested in trying retool since my head of ops pointed me to it a few months back. I think it should meet my use-case but I'm not entirely sure.

I run an experimentation program and I think retool might give me a way to build views on experiment performance for me and my stakeholders, but what I think it may be missing is some way of running statistics on the data, perhaps using python or R.

Data "about" my experiments (descriptions, tags, dates & times, stakeholder details etc) lives in airtable. I think I can get that into retool using sequin, right?

Performance data lives in bigquery. Sessions, clicks, conversions - all that stuff.

Right now I build ad-hoc reports in R/excel/data studio but as our velocity increases I need to streamline this.

I think what I'd like is for a stakeholder to be able to select the experiments and timeframes that they're interested in from a list, then behind the scenes the ID details to then be used to run a query in bigquery and that to pull back performance data. I'd like to show that in charts and tables on screen with how much impact the experiments have had (I think so far this should be reasonably straightforward with retool), but crucially I want to calculate confidence bounds for each metric.

Is there any way of bringing Python or R into the data flow somehow to do the heavy statistical lifting?

Am I looking at this the wrong way? Should I be trying to pre-calculate this nightly as some sort of scheduled job and just use retool as a presentation layer?

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#72

Post by normanvalentine »

its_bbq wrote: post #60

I'm not so knowledgeable about this space, but is Retool aiming in a similar direction as Airtable?

Fairly different - for one, Retool isn't the system of record; they're not storing any of your data, more of a back-end agnostic UI layer.

The user is pretty different too, Airtable generally targets business users who may otherwise reach for a spreadsheet, whereas Retool is focused on developers who might otherwise reach for React Admin (or something).

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#73

Post by bottled_poe »

intelVISA wrote: post #29
monkeydust wrote: post #23

As 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)?

Are we living on the same planet? "a day"? "$500/hour"?

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#75

Post by Mandatum »

dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi 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 love the demo. I love the tooling.

Demo tips: Name your queries. Following along "query1, query2, query3" is confusing. You should following best practice (where it makes sense) during demos, and you're definitely not doing it.

The selling point of this tool shouldn't be for the developer, it should be for the manager. So add some "here are some other examples of tools we've created in a similar amount of time through a similar process" - then have UX's for different companies, industries, regions.

Non-technical management need ideas. This demo doesn't give it beyond "hey look you can create a button to update a table". So what? Every ERP and CRM SaaS has that!

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#76

Post by Mandatum »

tofuahdude wrote: post #45
dvdhsu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is our target market too. We don't think people will be building airbnb.com (say) in Retool, but not all software is like that. (In fact, we think most software is probably just CRUD apps, haha.) We don't manage the database for customers; we instead connect to your data (whether it's behind an API or database). That was one of the first decisions we made — as a developer, if my data is already in postgres,…

> if you have (say) 1M orders a day, you aren't able to put that data in Salesforce anymore Could you clarify in what way you can't put 1M orders a day into Salesforce?

Salesforce has a limitation of 50,000 records for any operation. 1,000,000 records for read-only operations.

If you go beyond that, you talk to Salesforce about it, because they can make adjustments for you - and you can likely afford it.

Salesforce will bend over backwards and make internal engineering changes for large customers, including adjusting governor limits, dedicating hardware and running backend queries directly for the customer.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#77

Post by Mandatum »

throw12321 wrote: post #39
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

Hi 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…

Just to say that we're actively switching away from retool because you insist on charging £10 a month users who are a simply view form thats already built. I can understand charging for building and launching a form, I can understand charging something for a view only, but the same as builder? na I think not. Good luck with your pricing

It's certainly not a cheap SaaS, but if you get enough value out of it - it makes sense. For your use-case, it sounds like it doesn't scale and you can't justify the pricing structure they've setup.

The best thing you can do is what you've already done. Post about it publicly, let your AE know.

Hope Appsmith, Budibase, Tooljet, Bubble, et al work out!

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#78

Post by frakkingcylons »

dvdhsu wrote: post #9
artemonster wrote: post #8

I 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…

Rare to see such a frank response from a founder about something like this. I love it.

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#79

Post by sarora27 »

mousetree wrote: post #24

Congrats. We're big fans of Retool! We're a neobank and use Retool for all of our internal customer service, operations and compliance apps. Our subscription is now up for renewal and it looks like we're in for a big price increase as we transition from a handful of shared users to 50+ named users + granular permissions. We're still a very small startup ( Looking forward to continuing to build on Retool!

Would love to learn more about your neobank! Would you be open to sharing the name? For context, I work as a PM for a company that has launched a bank product on a baas. Always looking for ways to help improve our internal tooling :)

Re: Retool raises $45M at a $3.2B valuation

#80

Post by intelVISA »

bottled_poe wrote: post #73
intelVISA wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Are we living on the same planet? "a day"? "$500/hour"?

Was a little tongue in cheek, but we're talking CRUD not complex systems; modern tooling has dramatically expedited the speed at which we can churn out such things, I see no reason to drag it out unnecessarily.

Not bashing retool ofc, I think it's a great product for tech sectors that don't have access to top SWEs.

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