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Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

retool.com

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Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#81

Post by dvdhsu »

rsmets wrote: post #78

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?

Thank you for the comment! Do you mind sharing what exactly you were trying to build and how Retool was too constraining? We'd love to learn which use cases we could be doing better in, so we can improve (even if we're able to convince you to try it again!). Thanks!

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#83

Post by cpeterso »

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…

Off-topic but when reading some of the early HN discussions about Retool, I noticed that the old https://retool.in/ links don't redirect to retool.com. The retool.in HTTPS certificate expired last year. :)

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#84

Post by dvdhsu »

troquerre wrote: post #82

Are there any open source alternatives to retool? We’re uncomfortable using a third party tool for our internal operational workflows without more visibility into the source

Hi! We've considered making Retool open-source (and we may yet). Is there any particular reason you'd want access to the source code? For example, you can host Retool on-prem (https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/setup-instructions), extend it with custom components (https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components), and bring in data from anywhere (https://docs.retool.com/docs/queries). And if you were concerned about bugs, we're comfortable providing very tight SLAs, along with 24/7 support if need be.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#85

Post by sparsely »

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…

100% Agree about any non trivial retool immediately becoming a mountain of tech debt. We use retool extensively and have put a lot of effort into making a workflow that is vaguely manageable, but it's still pretty bad. And once you start using custom components it's even worse. It's also an incredible resource hog.

Still, it lets you churn out working UIs and mini apps really fast so it's very hard to stop using it once you've started!

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#86

Post by arey_abhishek »

troquerre wrote: post #82

Are there any open source alternatives to retool? We’re uncomfortable using a third party tool for our internal operational workflows without more visibility into the source

We felt the same way about Retool and that's why we built Appsmith. https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith

Our project has similar goals like Retool, Powerapps or other low code builders for internal tools, but we are building an open ecosystem instead of a closed one.

How close is this project to Retool? We have all the major features already so you won't miss much but we don't have all the UI widgets and native integrations yet. We'll probably reach feature parity in ~6 months.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#87

Post by dvdhsu »

cpeterso wrote: post #83
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…

Off-topic but when reading some of the early HN discussions about Retool, I noticed that the old https://retool.in/ links don't redirect to retool.com. The retool.in HTTPS certificate expired last year. :)

Fixed. Thank you!

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#88

Post by brainless »

troquerre wrote: post #82

Are there any open source alternatives to retool? We’re uncomfortable using a third party tool for our internal operational workflows without more visibility into the source

I would be happy to talk if I can help. I am building https://github.com/brainless/dwata but from a different angle. It is not a builder as such and has no SQL in the interface at all.

It is where non-technical folks can do everything - dig into data, merge data from CSV even, create reports. SQL is generated automatically from schema reflection. There is no engineering help needed, at least at this stage and it does multi-table JOINs by itself already.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#89

Post by brainless »

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…

Congratulations David, this made me have a nice feeling yesterday since I am building in the same space. Thanks for taking the efforts to shape a great product.

Re: Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia

#90

Post by sails »

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, I've been thinking about using Retool within a data warehouse context, as I see you created a Snowflake connector. I feel like direct CRUD access on data in the data-warehouse that exists elsewhere by business users might be an antipattern, but I also can see many scenarios where this might be useful. Do you have any users/use-cases/demos where this has been used successfully?

Thanks!

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