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Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

retool.com

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Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#71

Post by deepGem »

I am trying to build a simple user registration/sign in and view your contents website and yes it takes hours or days to do in React/Vue/Angluar + Backend. So by process of elimination:

I tried replacing the backend with just Google Firestore. Surprisingly to do this on react, it's a hell lot of code. I don't mind writing the code but it's just ridiculously complicated and hard to reason the complexity.

I thought of just bootstrap with jQuery with Firestore but then you have to do all the session management which will again devolve into a shit ton of code.

Finally decided to ditch all this and just go with Wix. Wix has definitely come a long way in terms of building websites. I can build a user registration form in minutes and have the whole site up in like less than 2 hours.

Retool offers much much more than Wix so I see a bright future. One of the shortcomings of Wix is lack of component embedding. Essentially you are limited to passing control between pages. If Retool offers component embedding, that's a huge win IMO.

Good luck folks and congratulations on the fund raise.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#72

Post by zubairq »

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?

Retool definitely has similarities to Visual Basic. Actually we are also trying to build a spiritual successor to Visual Basic at Appshare.co, but we still have a long way to go. I think that Retool is far more like a polished RAD tool right now than Appshare as a SQL Builder tool however, so really happy to see this investment and wish them best of luck!

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#74

Post by joshAg »

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…

We really like your product! It's made it super easy to create internal dashboards and admins actions that we can safely trust nonengineers to use without making an entire website for them.

Got a question for the best way to (ab?)use the fact that retool already talks to the db. Say I've got a database that's off in some cloud and i've hooked it up to retool.

What's the best way to use retool as a psql connection, because i'm too lazy to configure and setup and start psql to do that (say, because I'd have to start up a google cloud sql proxy and make sure that's pointing at the right db, and make sure to use a nonstandard port if i've got a dev container up at the time and and and and...)?

Right now I've just got a personal dash that i edit that has an empty table and a query that i can preview, but i feel like there's gotta be a better way that doesn't involve biting the bullet and spending the time to make the bash commands for psql (or pgadmin) just work.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#75

Post by throw03172019 »

Congrats! We built our admin tools in Retool. I was surprised with how simple it was to get started and launch our tools in a few hours. Great docs as well. 2 years later our tools continue to work perfectly without changes. Cheers to the future :)

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#76

Post by dvdhsu »

morcutt wrote: post #73

We’ve been using Retool for the past few months and I just want to say thanks. It’s saved us a slew of time and y’all are always responsive to any issues I’ve run into.

Thank you for using Retool! I'm really glad that we've delivered value to you all. Please let me know if there's anything we can ever help with!

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#77

Post by pbreit »

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…

How do you compare to https://internal.io?

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#78

Post by rsmets »

I tried this product thinking it would be super useful... not the case. Ended up spending a few days total rolling our own internal tools and way happier we did. I love leveraging saas products but this one just fell flat for me. It felt too constraining.

Curious to hear from a real customer of theirs how they are using this service?

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#79

Post by dvdhsu »

joshAg wrote: post #74
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…

We really like your product! It's made it super easy to create internal dashboards and admins actions that we can safely trust nonengineers to use without making an entire website for them. Got a question for the best way to (ab?)use the fact that retool already talks to the db. Say I've got a database that's off in some cloud and i've hooked it up to retool. What's the best way to use retool as a psql connection, be…

Hi there! Thanks for the comments, and thank you for using Retool!

We have a product in beta that (I think) does what you're looking for: the Query Library (https://docs.retool.com/docs/query-library). This lets you run queries, save them, and share them across your company. LMK if that's what you're looking for?

(In the future, we will be adding more permissions, etc. to it. We are actively developing this right now and would love to get some feedback from you on it if you'd be open to it? I will have our engineer email you!)

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#80

Post by dvdhsu »

pbreit wrote: post #77
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…

How do you compare to https://internal.io ?

internal.io is pretty similar to https://www.forestadmin.com/, or even djangoadmin. If you're looking for a quick, non-customizable CRUD interface on top of your database, both of them are pretty good solutions.

Retool is really aimed at engineers who are building custom internal applications. For example, if you're Coinbase and looking to build a complex approval workflow for withdrawals above $100MM (with a custom UI depending on which Okta groups you're in, with custom approvals required depending on the KYC status of the customer, etc.), it's very very hard to do with either internal or forest (since the customizability and flexibility are much lower with both of them).

So: forest and internal are good if you want something quickly but have no intention of customizing it later. Retool takes longer to get started, but allows you to customize substantially more.

In the mid-term (i.e. 1 - 6 months' time) we want to make starting in Retool much easier. We will probably allow users to quickly generate admin panels (similar to internal or forest) with a few clicks on top of common datasources.

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