Post mortem of our 1st YC startup: a Reverse ETL | Hacker News Reader

Post mortem of our 1st YC startup: a Reverse ETL

github.com

57 pointsAnhTho_FR25 comments

re: posting to github blog. It is simply to get additional stars on the repo.

It's smart if you can pull it off, but it does get a bit weird on news.yc where you expect to be going to a repo when you see github links.

The OP/Author has recycled posts from their corporate blog to their GitHub and then submitted them to YC many times in the last few weeks: For example, this post was submitted by them 2 days ago [1] and is on their blog here [2].

Their submission history shows a this is a pretty regular pattern at this point. [3].

To be honest, they've done a very impressive job of content marketing in this community in the last 6 months. I'm not sure anyone has been able to place more of their own stuff on the front page. From that perspective, they are doing something quite successfully. From the perspective of the community, it might feel like things have been a bit over manipulated at this point. I'm not sure at which point you earn a shadowban for self-promotion, but I have to wonder if it's worth the risk.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016490

2: https://www.getlago.com/blog/post-mortem-of-our-1st-yc-start...

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=AnhTho_FR

I'm not sure how based on the title of this submission you could expect it to be any sort of code repository.

It really shows their Growth background :)

> I'm not sure at which point you earn a shadowban for self-promotion, but I have to wonder if it's worth the risk.

is simply submitting your own company blogposts a basis for shadowbanning?

i understand if the titles are overly promotional but i dont think submitting your own content is - if it is of interest to the community

The guidelines [1] state:

>Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

>Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

>Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.

(They solicit upvotes in their slack/twitter/etc)

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

OP here, first I'd like to apologize as our point has never been to be manipulative, but I understand from your comment that it can be perceived that way.

I'll ask the moderator to replace the link.

For the sake of sharing our thought process, not to justify ourselves:

a/ About Github links, we thought we'd start segmenting content to different audiences: via Github and via our website. Our company has several audiences (founders, engineers, product managers, finance and revenue people) and we've been willing to create interesting content for each of them. It's still in the works (as you can see, there are fewer articles on Github vs on our website, some content is duplicated, which is actually bad for our own SEO, it's far from being a very polished strategy). In no case, did we think people would think "because it's posted via github, the content would be perceived to have more authority", or "because it's a github link, with such a title, people would expect a repo". I understand it's what happened, though, hence the apologies.

b/ We did post several times. We read from [1] that is was ok to do so, and we've also seen that amazing posts which interested the community sometimes were not visible on the first attempt (example [2]). I'm fully aware from the comments that it wasn't something we should have done, I just want to share our thought process.

c/ We did invest a lot of time writing in my company, and I genuinely love writing.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what would be useful and impactful to the tech community in general. Sometimes it voluntarily points out to Lago, sometimes it's indirect, sometimes it has no link to Lago (examples 3 or 4), but I just think it might help or resonate with people. Once again, HN is a community, so I just want to abide by the rules.I thought we did. We have not been shadow banned or contacted by the mods. From the comments I understand it has been perceived as "too much" at times. I just wanted to say I genuinely do love writing and sharing, it's a mean for me to connect with people, and hopefully help a tiny bit if people resonate with it. So I'm grateful because HN has helped us connect with people who resonated with our content, and I apologize for the rest.

Will email the mods about the link just after hitting "reply"!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24170546 2: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33882590 4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33641019

It seems like people like your content. Don't stain your rep in the community just because you want the next hit. You've had to post apologies like this before as well, so they do wear thin.

Best of luck.

> Growth marketers wanted more autonomy to manage their data, but were not necessarily willing to put the extra effort into: (i) understanding the structure of a database (dozens of tables), (ii) practice lightweight data modeling.

This highlights the primary issue for most tools in the data analytics space: poor data modelling, leading to the exposed data being "too difficult to use in Business Tools".

I've gathered some thoughts [1][2], but it boils down to the following: What users experience as the problem, is probably not the cause of the problem. Most builders respond to the user's poor experience at the interface as sufficient signal to start building solutions that improve that interface, while the underlying cause is deeper within the system (and the primary method for improving that underlying, currently, is data modelling).

Here [3] is a snippet towards an example of Facebook building a solution that addresses the complexity issue. Also common for ex-FAANG engineers to their surprise, discover that none of this type of infra exists outside of FAANG.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33804938

[2] https://twitter.com/rdrn_/status/1604528546784870402

[3] https://seattledataguy.substack.com/p/a-zero-etl-future#:~:t....

poor data modeling, or data modeling that is well suited to the needs of the application, but not to the needs of analysts

Great addition, and a very important point. Analysts are expected to use the exhaust and incidental output of applications to try and generate insight instead of their needs being better considered at the design stage.

This is all within the context of analysts also needing to reconcile across multiple source (SaaS and other) systems leads to very brittle pipelines, and consumers downstream completely dissatisfied.

Why is this not on a corporate blog? It makes no sense to me post this sort of stuff on GitHub. Are they that broke they can't afford to host a static site on s3?

Edit: Nevermind, I see why. So people star their GitHub repo. People go there and oh that sounds interesting. Give a GitHub star. Then they use that as social proof which they do in the post. Smart idea.

They expect the blog to survive the company.

I may be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure they're not saying they're shutting down and are not in the process of shutting down. They are pivoting. And are in the process of the pivot.

If they think that blog will survive long than the company then really it doesn't make any sense for them to keep all their marketing efforts up. Which this is clearly a part of. And it really does not make sense for them to publish that they're shutting up shop in the same post as they're talking about signing 5 companies to support deals.

Putting “here’s how we changed on a previous product” doesn’t really need to be on a small corporate site. It being a sort of investigation fits better on GitHub where fewer people will accidentally stumble across it from their current product.

There is a whole lot of bigging up their current product. That blog post is part of their marketing campaign. And the entire point of it is so people will get to their product.

Also:

* it's mixed up with all their other marketing material for this product.

* it's in their current product's repository

It's more likely people will stumble across it when looking at their product.

As I said in my edit. The reason for it being on their GitHub is to increase the likihood of GitHub stars which they use as social proof.

I guess "ETL" in the article stands for "extract, transform, load" [1] which seems to describe a workflow/pipeline concept for importing data into a database.

The described company was into "reverse ETL" so I guess ... report-generation? Taking data from a database and presenting it nicely.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load

Reverse ETL is where you take data from your warehouse and load it back to places you might typically use as sources. Eg you might send data from BigQuery to Google Ads, Intercom, your transactional DBs, Google Workspace, etc.

It's not really reporting in the visualisation or "send a PDF to a human" sense

Taking data from a database and pushing it into another tool, not just a static report

As a long time “back end” ETL guy - it’s just “etl” in different words.

Marketing for powercenter. :p (i love informatica products..)

Some details here [1]

> Reverse ETL enables companies to move transformed data from their cloud warehouse out into operational business tools, doing the reverse of ETL (which enables companies to ingest data into their data warehouse for transformation and modeling). It’s a new approach to making data actionable and solving the “last mile” problem in analytics by empowering business teams to access—and act on—transformed data directly in the SaaS tools they already use every day.

[1]https://www.moderndatastack.xyz/category/reverse-etl-tools

I'd love to see more posts like this on HN. You generally learn far more from what didn't work for others than you do from the many survivorship biased stories that usually get posted.

Curious what questions you think you could have asked in your up-front interviews to uncover the issues prior to building?

Thanks! Not sure about the exact questions but I think we could have dug deeper into what the persona (growth team) was ready to invest or learn to be autonomous with their data needs. And if they had shown a history of « learning curve », so that we could have made sure it wasn’t just « wishful thinking ».

Sounds like an application for ChatGPT. I would try this again getlago.

You mean writing this using ChatGPT instead of « handwriting » it?

The issue seems to be the lack of data modeling interest/knowledge of users. ChatGPT could be trained on the schema and so be able to map user's plain english to api calls. So minimally the front-end could be GPT -> api-encoder -> api-call.

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