Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia • Hacker News Board

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#61

Post by kamyarg » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

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…

Just wondering what is the most interesting use case(s) you have seen for retool.

We were actually looking for a similar tool, considered some famous SaaS and decided we should go for our in-house backoffice because of niche requirements.

I am really interested in understanding the full potential for future projects. :)

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#62

Post by alextapper » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

aidos wrote: post #44

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…

Sorry about these frustrations! Sending you an email to see how we can help :)

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#63

Post by kiwicopple » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

bfstein wrote: post #41

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.

Supabase[1] provides full Postgres databases which take ~2 mins to spin up. You can connect Retool with the DB connection details in the settings

[1] https://supabase.io

Disclaimer: I work at Supabase

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#64

Post by dalton » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 1:34 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #50

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…

I realize that this is likely to be less illuminating than you would hope, but the Retool founders were relentlessly focused on getting their first users, building quickly, and getting to profitability as if their lives depended on it. Witnessing them go from 0-10K MRR was to witness someone walking through walls.

To give a perspective on how much of an outlier this team is, my recollection is they got to ~1M ARR very quickly and with just the 2 cofounders and one employee. That is rare.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#65

Post by aliakhtar » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

dalton wrote: post #64

ignoramous wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I realize that this is likely to be less illuminating than you would hope, but the Retool founders were relentlessly focused on getting their first users, building quickly, and getting to profitability as if their lives depended on it. Witnessing them go from 0-10K MRR was to witness someone walking through walls. To give a perspective on how much of an outlier this team is, my recollection is they got to ~1M ARR ver…

Can you give any examples of those 'walking through walls' moments?

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#66

Post by aliakhtar » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 2:22 AM UTC

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 disagree, you can definitely improve the stuff you built in retool. As a dev it's saved me a lot of time from having to build non user-facing dashboards, etc that would otherwise take up a lot of time. Instead I was able to spend that time on the core features.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#67

Post by jeswin » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

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?

I like Retool, but having used both (VB for nearly a decade in the 90s, till .Net came along), and I don't think the comparison is accurate.

Visual Basic represented the high-water mark for developer productivity[1] when it came to small/medium apps. And that's not just Forms apps. You could build a TCP server on it. You could build embeddable COM components, embed a Web Browser, do Distributed Transactions, make a System tray app, connect to any database that you choose, Web Apps, etc. It had a great interop story with COM/C++ code (which allowed you to do embed stuff like, say Telephony, with just a few lines of code).

There's truly a market for a reincarnation of VB. I don't think Retool would be that, because the capabilities will never align. VB is much "lower level" relatively, and that was its strength.

[1]: As long as you stuck to Windows, which was the case in the 90s.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#68

Post by yandie » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 2:58 AM UTC

alexashka wrote: post #35

I'd be curious to know what the investors see as a path to success here. This tool strikes me as confusing for non-programmers and too limited for programmers. What is this meant to compete with, what's the use case?

Building internal tools - I've built enough internal tools in just a few years at Amazon. Those are never high enough in terms of priorities but improve productivity of the non-tech people. You don't need a heavy dev team to build internal tools - and devs can focus on delivering the business values instead.

Of course if you're a dev that loves building tools, this might not be good news for you if your company decides to adopt it.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#69

Post by gilliali » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 3:29 AM UTC

DataGrid_Retool wrote: post #24

dvdhsu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You mention support for complex UIs, but Retool only ships with a basic table, and no built-in support for Data Grids. Something to consider when it comes to building richer page experiences. I would presume you intend to add more standard components as Retool continues to mature.

Current Retool customer here. We had this concern as well and we're supporting it with a custom component. Retool has been immensely helpful in planning, developing and supporting us in the engagement.

Due to Retool, we've essentially overhauled 60+ 10MB Excel sheets that we had to generate,distribute consolidate for a business planning function into a single app that supports by-user profile settings with 2 guys that are decent Excel/SQL guys but by no means devs.

Strong data grid, and Retool will start eating into "Excel as a front-end" market.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#70

Post by masonhensley » Wed, Oct 21, 2020, 3:49 AM UTC

nlh wrote: post #49

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 bug…

Heard about this countless times. I’ve felt that pain before, but in a regulated environment where retool wasn’t an option at the time.

Internal tools at many orgs languish as not being sexy - I’ve always found them cool and an opportunity for building some good operation secret sauce.