Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports

explo.co

61–66 of 66 posts

Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports

#61
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really cool use case! Especially with for environmental and ethical conscious brands. We sort of do the same thing with QR codes in a factory at the moment where we trace production batches, stock management and R&D test data to link the label factory items back to the MRP data and dashboards. This was implemented using Lowdefy [0] - interestingly we also started Lowdefy out of the need for customer facing…

Wow the QR code resurgence is real! I'm curious why you chose to support data sources such as Mongo and google sheets first as oppose to others I saw that were coming soon (Postgres, MySQL, etc) and challenges you experienced building out the connections. Looks like we support a completely different set of databases. And is your data pulled directly from your MRP system or loaded into another database first? And we'l…

Although we currently support MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, and Amazon Redshift, SendGrid, Http requests, Google sheets and S3. We started by building apps with MongoDB and the aggregation framework really allowed us to do more and more complex things ito data analytics which I doubt one could pull off in SQL. (I'm no SQL expert, so forgive me if I'm wrong). Our Lowdefy operators and application schema also took a lot of inspiration from Mongo's query language.

We usually deal with less than 100k records, scaling has mostly not been an issue for us, and in such cases we can run the analytic aggregations directly on the MRP read replica [0]

We built Lowdefy so that we can build better, more flexible, quality apps faster for customers. Then decided to OS it.

Lowdefy is designed to work any number of connections, so we'll be adding as we grow. Also, we prefer to not add a "thin" connection, but rather build out a well scoped and tested connection - this can be tricky, not sure of this is the best approach ito marketing as we have an extensive list of connection requests we would like to get to [1]. We'll start to prioritise these more in the near future. We'll also finalise module federation for connections, which will enable custom connections.

[0] - https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/read-preference/#std-la...

[1] - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy/discussions/309

Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports

#62
post #50

Hi Explo team. Congrats on the launch! My previous company and my new company both provide insights as a service, so customer facing dashboards are the core product, and therefore this is very interesting to me. A few questions for the team: 1. I see that startups pay $500/month. How do you compare that to Metabase which is $85/month (or $385 if you remove the Metabase attribution)? 2. Do you, or do you plan to, offe…

Would love to understand this more. pklee.hackernews@gmail.com

Sorry I had meant this for @curiousperson23. Thanks

Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports

#63
post #22
post #19

How does it compare to Amazon QuickSight which also has a pretty strong embedding story. Thank you.

Not trying to be rude but I’m curious what makes you believe quicksight has a strong embedding story? I’m generally a quicksight fan (although it has so many things it could do better with a little TLC). What setup are you using that makes quicksight work well when embedded? Quicksight’s embedding story is worse than tableau’s. And tableau isn’t that great with embedding either.

You can programmatically and securely get an embed URL and even pass parameters.

There are SDKs and major framework support.

For me that’s already great. :)

Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports

#64
Btw, I've requested a demo on the site and the following happened:

Got an automatic email to (1) fill out typeform, (2) book via Calendly.

I did (1) and (2).

Did not get any Calendly notifications / invitations. Nothing in junk either.

Six hours later got another (same) email as email 1.

Did book via Calendly again. Still no notifications of the booking.

Gave up.

Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports

#65

Very cool! We've spent a lot of time + money doing this ourselves. I'd be interested to understand the pricing model and self serve options. I'd also be interested in adding alarms so we could use this to monitor our system status. We do that now but without visuals and it would be nice to have a slick internal status page with graphs and alerts for unexpected values.

Startups and smaller companies we work with are paying $500/month. Our pricing then goes up from there depending on number of end customer groups. We are definitely hoping to launch self serve in the near future but have decided not to while we iterate on the core features and ensure things work with a qualified and controlled set of customers. However, it is helpful to understand how important self serve is to devel…

Cool, I'll submit an inquiry on your website.
Post reply on HN