Comment by dvdhsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvdhsu | Hacker News Reader

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As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood.

If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool (https://tryretool.com) that is essentially Excel for developers. Imagine if every Excel cell — instead of being a cell — were instead a React component. So you drag and drop these components around, and you can connect them to any back-end datasource (postgres, APIs, etc.). So you could drag on a table and have it pull data from `select * from users` from postgres, and then drag on a button and have it `POST` the selected row back to your API, in order to ban a particular user. The goal is to let end users build CRUD apps (like Salesforce) around their existing datasources quickly.

If you guys have any feedback... I'd really appreciate it. We're just starting out, and really curious to get any feedback from developers. Thanks!

When I looked into this a few months ago, your pricing didn’t make sense to me. You’re saving developer time, but charging on user time. So I’ve got 800 people in this org and I could either pay a shit ton to use retool or just build it from scratch. The difference between both of these is my time so it makes sense I’d pay you for that.

That made it not viable for me. Building from scratch was way cheaper with Upwork. Anyway, Product was cool.

Thanks for the feedback — that's really helpful. I agree that our pricing isn't good for a large org that is looking to build a tool or two (instead of say, a few hundred).

Do you mind if I email you? (I can't see your email in your profile, but my email is david@retool.in if you're interested in reaching out.) I'm really curious — just to learn — what kind of pricing plan might work for you. Would a per-app model work for you, for example? Thanks!

I've since left the company but one of my friends working there is the one who suggested we try the product anyway. I'll tell him to contact you.

so you're rebuilding Visual Basic in react.

Do you mean that as a good or a bad thing? VB was fantastic to many people!

absolutely a good thing.

It was a light hearted jab at the description that made it sound like something completely original and never tried before :)

I hope he does well, those tools are super useful.

I would have to delve deeper to give actually useful feedback, but I wanted to say from a presentational point of view, it looks great, well done for putting something like this together

Unrelated to the tool, your homepage is absolutely gorgeous. I imagine the rest of your execution is along those lines, which is to say - excellent. Well done!

Uh this is super super cool, well done.

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