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Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

retool.com

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Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#11

Post by polote »

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

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#12

Post by dvdhsu »

chenster wrote: post #9

Congrats! How does it compare against AirTable and Metabase?

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#13

Post by gk1 »

dvdhsu wrote: post #2

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 v…

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?

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#14

Post by chenster »

dvdhsu wrote: post #12
chenster wrote: post #9

Congrats! How does it compare against AirTable and Metabase?

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 bui…

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?

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#15

Post by drako999 »

polote wrote: post #11

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 kn…

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

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#16

Post by vannevar »

dvdhsu wrote: post #2

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 v…

Would it be fair to say Retool is a spiritual successor to Visual Basic, upon which a whole generation of enterprise apps was built?

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#17

Post by dvdhsu »

polote wrote: post #11

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 kn…

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#18

Post by anonu »

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#19

Post by jameslk »

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#20

Post by dvdhsu »

vannevar wrote: post #16
dvdhsu wrote: post #2

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 v…

Would it be fair to say Retool is a spiritual successor to Visual Basic, upon which a whole generation of enterprise apps was built?

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.)
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