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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

To put it into a little context: ToolJet seems to be the leading open-source alternative to Retool, which has recently raised money at $3.2B valuation[1].

Moreover, according to the founder, Retool hasn't even needed any VC money for a couple of years now[2]:

> We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021).

So, ToolJet obviously must look like an attractive investment to any early stage VC in this software category.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32264454

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32264969

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Why raise two rounds, diluting your own shares, if you then don’t spend it to grow and capture a larger market? It seems counterintuitive to me.

Surly the VCs expect you to spend the investment, and not doing so isn’t maximising the value of their investment?

Firstly, if you're going to raise at all, why not raise when you are in the strongest possible negotiating position (ie when you don't actually need the money)? Presumably they think they may need the money at some point in the future. If you are burning through your runway that gives you additional pressure and VCs can run out the clock and delay rounds to try to get a better deal. Having cash committed takes all of that off the table, and even if there is a downturn etc you have your funding secured from a position of strength and don't need to go cap in hand down the Sandhill road during tough times.

Secondly (some) VCs bring more than just money to the table and by becoming part of their network you get access to their help etc. In my experience even for some pretty big-name VCs this is a dubious benefit but some people like it.

Thirdly the founder gets to act like a bigshot raising a pile of cash.

The Retool's founder explained this in the linked comment:

> TBH, fundraising is kind of like charades: it's a way to signal you are doing well, without telling people your private company metrics. I wish we never needed to fundraise, and could just focus on building great products and working with customers instead. :)

If they didn't need the money, they could do just that.

The real advantage is for when they decide to sell in X years. Instead of being bought for 1B by Microsoft they'll get 5B because other VC overvalued them in the past.

Yeah it is signal to potential customer, employees and also it always help if you have some money at bank.

It's a signal to me that they're not confident about their market position and will probably need to return the money when VC gets tired of waiting for the growth they typically demand.

They would have never been able to raise three consecutive rounds with increasing valuations without demonstrating to VCs the growth they typically demand.

Because raising capital sets a price on the company. Now we know retool is $3.2B in value.

Has anyone tried both? I deployed Tooljet at work because I needed a self-hosted Zapier alternative, but I seem to remember running into some issues and ending up dropping it. I can't be more specific than that as I don't remember, though I think it was related to documentation/getting started quickly, so I was wondering whether others had more experience.

ToolJet cannot be used as an alternative for Zapier as it doesn't have workflow automation capabilities. Probably this was the reason for dropping.

Ahh, you're right, I remember now. I deployed n8n instead later, thanks.

How is n8n? I've been wanting something like Zapier but I can't seem to do HTTP calls to endpoints not in the list of actions.

It's OK, we don't use that either. I think I had lots of issues trying to set up the GitHub webook and I abandoned that as well, sadly. It was fairly easy to set up the main UI otherwise, though.

A few weeks ago I tried a lot of low code tool(building kit)s.

Tooljet was one of them, but I failed at getting the docker container (following https://docs.tooljet.com/docs/contributing-guide/setup/docke... ) to run.

I can point you to my Harbormaster[1] repo if you want, then you just specify the variables and it runs.

[1]: https://pypi.org/project/docker-harbormaster/

I must admit I haven't used (coming from windows development) docker a lot before, and I was doing it on my Macbook. But all the other tools worked.

So tools like yours existing mean, that there can be trouble having several "docker composed" applications running at the same time? That may explain my (for me inexplicable) errors when trying Tooljet.

No, running multiple apps is fine. In fact, it's what Harbormaster does, it just helps you manage server deployments a bit more easily.

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