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Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

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Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#41

Post by bfstein »

jameslk wrote: post #19

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 us…

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#42

Post by arey_abhishek »

joshribakoff wrote: post #37
arey_abhishek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

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!

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#44

Post by aidos »

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…

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#45

Post by vincentchu »

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…

Congrats David, we're a big fan (and users) of Retool.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#46

Post by algo_trader »

dalton wrote: post #10

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…

What are your thoughts/reactions after a pitch with an novel idea+execution+traction but no obvious moat?

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#48

Post by pixelmonkey »

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#49

Post by nlh »

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.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#50

Post by ignoramous »

dalton wrote: post #10

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…

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...
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