Show HN: Explo Report Builder – Embedded report builder for your application

We’re Andrew, Austin, and Carly and we’re the creators of Explo's new report builder(https://explo.co/report-builder).

Embed the report builder in your application, and your users can select the data they're interested in, filter, sort, and export the data as a CSV or PDF.

Over the past year, we've worked on an embedded dashboard solution to allow companies to share metrics, data, and insights with their users. However, our customers were still receiving requests for data dumps. Their customer service reps often triaged these data requests, had their data teams pull the data by writing SQL, and emailed large CSV files. For example, an ed-tech platform we recently worked with wanted to allow teachers and admins to pull student rosters, but each user was interested in a different set of fields such as age, grades, contact info, etc. Because of this, they often created customer reports in Jaspersoft or wrote custom SQL queries that took time to do for each request.

That's why we built out the Explo report builder. It leverages the existing Explo platform that connects directly to any SQL database or warehouse and filters the data by customer. To set up the report builder, you write SQL to create the table you want expose, format the data, and embed the report builder in your existing web app.

Check out a demo (https://demo.explo.co/report) for the report builder here or a quick video walkthrough here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHJnII-DteA&ab_channel=Explo). We're building out much more functionality here including the ability to perform aggregations, pivot the data, save reports, and more.

One question on our minds as we continue down this path is how self-serve do you want your data and analytics to be? Does it make sense for your customers to build their own dashboards and reporting in-app? We learned that it's actually quite rare for users to want to build out their own dashboards in the products they use. If they do want to perform more ad hoc analysis, it often makes sense to just export the raw data, and run the analysis elsewhere. Or pull the data directly into a data warehouse to analyze there.

We'd love to chat with anyone who has built a reporting tool in-house for their own product. What additional functionality did you build out that was helpful for your users? If not, how do you currently deal with data requests and share data?