It shouldn't take weeks of effort, a data engineer, multiple proprietary solutions, and tens of thousands of dollars to answer key questions like CAC or the efficiency of a given marketing campaign.
We're hoping to lower the barrier to entry in both cost and effort, by providing an open source pre-packaged solution.
Yeah, I get that. The analytics space is very complex and companies, even ones with good engineering teams, don't have the internal knowledge or resources to typically put all this together.
In addition to working in this space, my copmany helps companies set up their analytics stack.
We typically set them up with one cloud-based data integration tool (the one with the most # of integrations they need at the best price), dbt, and one BI tool (usually Looker or Periscope, in that order). All in, that takes us a few weeks to get them set up and going.
I applaud your effort. I just struggle to understand why you accept punting on transformations (and using dbt (amazing library, by the way - great choice)), but then try to tackle something like integrations or BI tools. The complexity of both of those is massive and there are great open source efforts already out there.
I'm eager to see where this goes.
I would love to hear your suggestion for a great open source BI tool. We tried Superset and Metabase but both didn't came close to what we could do with Looker. That is why we're giving Meltano Analyze a shot.
BTW Do you want to do a livestreamed video call to discuss further in the 30 next minutes? You have a lot of knowledge. If so please email me and comment here.
Update: He did email and livestream will happen on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8tEDq3K_pE
Also, I had a coffee at 5PM with someone, which is way too late to be drinking coffee, and it is evident in how quickly I'm talking >.<
@slap_shot and anyone else — I'm curious if you have thoughts on, or even have heard of the Ballerina language? It's a programming language for doing data integration work, built by the ESB/integration consultancy WSO2. It seems to have a lot of eng resources sunk into it but surprisingly little fanfare.
The CEO's interview with the Software Engineering Daily podcast was great: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/07/12/ballerina-la...
The language site tends toward buzzword-salad, but clearly has had a lot of love and thought put into it: https://ballerina.io/philosophy/