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Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

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Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#31

Post by threeseed »

mmckelvy wrote: post #26

Interesting. I think you're on to something here. I fully agree that a combination of spreadsheets and SQL are the ideal tools for data analysis -- not a SaaS GUI. > Niching down, if you work in operations at a With the rise of AI, companies like Tembo that help you set up all in one databases, and tools like this, I'm increasingly of the mind that many companies should start bringing things like analytics and observ…

Minus the AI part tools like this have existed for decades.

And companies are not dumping their SaaS tools and switching to them en masse.

Because (a) data silos have dramatically increased pushing dreams of a unified data schema out of reach, (b) technology stacks have become far more complex necessitating tools like Datadog and (c) competition is stronger than ever meaning that skimping on paying for tools like MixPanel is often short sighted and counter productive.

Companies like this will do fine and there will be always be a demand for them especially in the SMB space. But there simply isn't the business value in bringing a lot of analytics and observability in-house in almost all cases.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#32

Post by threeseed »

mceoin wrote: post #28
mmckelvy wrote: post #26

Interesting. I think you're on to something here. I fully agree that a combination of spreadsheets and SQL are the ideal tools for data analysis -- not a SaaS GUI. > Niching down, if you work in operations at a With the rise of AI, companies like Tembo that help you set up all in one databases, and tools like this, I'm increasingly of the mind that many companies should start bringing things like analytics and observ…

Agree. A general thesis I have is that the API-ification of the web fragmented business information, and with every new SaaS tool we fragment our company's data further. The trend at all company sizes is to be increasingly analytical, but for SMBs it's too hard to get access to your data (mainly due to technical limitations). So it makes sense to centralize data somewhere, and we think that somewhere is inside the da…

> So it makes sense to centralize data somewhere

Modelling and integrating datasets that you don't own is extremely hard.

Shopify for example updates their API every 3 months.

How much time and money do you think an SMB can afford to spend on this before the ROI becomes so poor that they abandon it entirely.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#33

Post by Jayakumark »

dioptre wrote: post #7
yawnxyz wrote: post #3

> Niching down, if you work in operations at a I'm already using Retool for these kinds of tasks- what does sourcetable do that I can't already do with Retool? edit: also, did you build your own spreadsheet engine, or use an off-the-shelf one? (also will it be open source ;P)

Hi I'm Andy, Cofounder & CTO @ Sourcetable. We use a heavily modified licensed engine that prevents us from open sourcing everything (for now). We have plans to open source our agentic/plugin framework, and other parts of the system. We also have a strong ethos of contributing back to open source where we can (contributed back to Arrow, DuckDB etc.). I'd also add that while everyone knows how to use and work with spr…

Will you be able to share name of the engine ?

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#35

Post by mceoin »

threeseed wrote: post #32
mceoin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. A general thesis I have is that the API-ification of the web fragmented business information, and with every new SaaS tool we fragment our company's data further. The trend at all company sizes is to be increasingly analytical, but for SMBs it's too hard to get access to your data (mainly due to technical limitations). So it makes sense to centralize data somewhere, and we think that somewhere is inside the da…

> So it makes sense to centralize data somewhere Modelling and integrating datasets that you don't own is extremely hard. Shopify for example updates their API every 3 months. How much time and money do you think an SMB can afford to spend on this before the ROI becomes so poor that they abandon it entirely.

Yes some integrations are excellent (hey Stripe : ), some are terrible (no comment on who). We're finding that LLMs increasingly able to fill the gap around organizing data schema for that initial data prep piece where someone has to build the data tables that others consume. To your specific question/problem set, when a schema updates you end up with a "fuzzy schema matching problem"; we are solving that separately anyways for a separate product feature requirement.

Strong note here that the current state of technology is much better for SMB scale data and not enterprise scale data with messy schemas.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#36

Post by mceoin »

threeseed wrote: post #32
mceoin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. A general thesis I have is that the API-ification of the web fragmented business information, and with every new SaaS tool we fragment our company's data further. The trend at all company sizes is to be increasingly analytical, but for SMBs it's too hard to get access to your data (mainly due to technical limitations). So it makes sense to centralize data somewhere, and we think that somewhere is inside the da…

> So it makes sense to centralize data somewhere Modelling and integrating datasets that you don't own is extremely hard. Shopify for example updates their API every 3 months. How much time and money do you think an SMB can afford to spend on this before the ROI becomes so poor that they abandon it entirely.

There is a separate answer here which is many (most?) SMBs can't afford technical folk, so the ability integrate data at all, talk to it and model it (using SQL or AI), is already a big step forward for them.

My personal use case tends to involve a lot of Postgres data and transaction events for my reporting. We see "simple" businesses like parts manufacturers, print shops, vineyards, etc. all doing something similar.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetable – AI Spreadsheet and Data Platform

#38

Post by mceoin »

smcleod wrote: post #37

Are you open sourcing the product for non-commercial use?

Would love to but unfortunately there are pieces we can't open-source for various reasons. We'll open source bits and pieces over time, and generally are excited to start blogging about AI & technical learnings now that the product is out of stealth mode.

Small plug for the analytics tracker we are using which Andrew (CTO) built and is open source: https://github.com/sfproductlabs/tracker

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