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

We’re Andrew, Gary, and Rohan, and we’re the founders of Explo (https://explo.co). Explo is a platform that allows you to create external-facing dashboards and embed them directly into your application, admin portal, or website. Create usage reports for your dev tool, dashboards for your educators on an online learning platform, or sales and profitability dashboards for sellers on your e-commerce platform.

Our product currently isn’t self-serve, but https://www.loom.com/share/fd63361f850d44f68cd395a552f5548d is a quick video walking through how to build dashboards. Feel free to take a look at a few examples of our embedded dashboards here as well: https://www.explo.co/gallery.

We applied to YC with an idea in the restaurant space (we knew nothing about restaurants), but quickly pivoted to build a tool that allowed you to analyze data directly in your database or data warehouse without knowing SQL. As former data analysts and engineers, we spent hours diving into databases to understand data and conduct analyses, so we wanted to speed up this process. Our early customers used Explo to analyze data by creating charts and graphs. They then wanted to share their visualizations, so we built dashboards, and then they wanted to share these dashboards with their customers. In fact, we first discounted the request as we wanted to focus on internal analytics. But as we continued to work with our customers, we learned that B2B companies were getting more and more requests to share data with their clients. For example, a construction tech platform we were working with wanted an easy way to surface customer data on purchase orders and contracting costs directly from their database securely and directly within their product. A virtual events platform needed to share stats on registrations, attendance, engagement times, for event admins after each event they hosted.

These companies want a snazzy dashboard in their application, but that usually requires a dedicated engineer weeks or months to build along with ongoing maintenance costs. They also don’t use BI tools such as Looker, Tableau, or Metabase because they are either not great for embedded applications, or too heavy for this use case. Instead, they settle for sending CSVs over email, taking screenshots of internal analytics tools, and uploading pictures to shared drives.

After learning about the various pains in sharing data with customers, we decided to pivot and build Explo. We saw that sharing data with customers was becoming increasingly important, and the external analytics space was much more greenfield than the internal space. Our goal is to be the easiest and cheapest way for companies to create dashboards that can be embedded directly into their application.

Our current platform connects directly to SQL databases and warehouses. We don't copy, cache, or manage any data. This makes security much easier to negotiate and allows us to offer a plug-and-play solution that's easy to stand up. We provide a SQL editor and dynamic parameters that you can inject into your SQL queries so that our users can transform and manipulate data before it renders into charts and tables. We've seen our customers use these temporary transforms as a template for future data pipelines so that the heavy lifting is done ahead of time. We work with companies with a variety of data infra setups from startups who create a read replica of their production database that we connect to directly, to companies that have a dedicated Snowflake warehouse with multiple data pipelines and clean data model built out.

As part of building out our product, we’ve had to tackle some pretty interesting and essential technical challenges. We created a SQL builder that can generate SQL across every major database and data warehouse. We implemented a git-like version control system for our no-code tool so that the embedded solutions could be versioned just like code. We’ve had to put our networking hats on to programmatically connect to very secure databases through firewalls and SSH servers.

We have a lot of ideas as to where Explo will go beyond a dashboard platform to enable our clients to share data better and we’re excited to hear your thoughts on the topic. How do you currently share data with customers, have you built out dashboards for customers before, or used embedded analytics solutions such as GoodData, Looker, or Tableau? We’d love your feedback and to learn more about your own experiences sharing data!

Looks like you are using Highcharts and chart.js ... and Leaflet for the maps? Since you are using React, Airbnb's Visx [0] might be a very good charting solution so you have a unified chart library with flexibility to meet customer demands in the future. Also, you will find customers demanding mobile access to their data and dashboards soon enough and having a system that is built on low level d3.js api's it will be easy to implement the charts using the same strategy visx does in React Native.

That's my two cents.

[0] https://airbnb.io/visx/

Nitpick: 'Simply copy a few lines of code and utilize to our API' - I am guessing that's a stray 'to' in there?

Hi! We offer different pricing packages since we work with a varied set of companies that use the product in different ways. Some example use cases: metrics and data viz on a landing page, admin panel dashboards, billing dashboards, custom dashboard share links, etc. Depending on your use case we'd be happy to chat more and figure out a pricing model that makes sense for you.

In general we don't charge for # of dashboards or even traffic to the dashboards. We charge based on the # of end customer groups you are presenting dashboards to. This has been the most aligned with our customers since you can use the full power of the tool and only pay more as your own business scales up.

Looking at where highcharts are today, I might have jumped the gun on that comment as they have come a long way. Three years ago we were using them. After I built our React Native version of the data dashboard I was giving the hard requirement to implement charts on mobile of which there weren't any out of the box solutions for at the time. Nonetheless, if you find yourself needing to implement custom charts especially if you have larger customers previously using Tableau or if you want custom branded charts, I do recommend considering visx.