
Show HN: Retool: Excel-like, with higher order primitives - dvdhsu
https://retool.in
======
dvdhsu
Hey HN! I'm one of the creators of Retool, and we're excited (and nervous) to
be posting this on HN.

Retool is a visual programming language, like Excel. But instead of cells
being the base unit, widgets are. Widgets are prebuilt React views, and you
can edit their properties. They can pull data from SQL queries, and other
widgets. The page we made is an example of what you can do.

If you're curious how it works, here are the docs:
[https://docs.retool.in](https://docs.retool.in).

Any feedback or questions welcome! :)

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ummjackson
Are you from the [https://www.notion.so](https://www.notion.so) team? UI looks
eerily familiar.

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dvdhsu
Ha – I do use Notion a lot, and really love their design. Much of our design
is definitely inspired by them – the widget picker, for example.

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jtmarmon
you may want to uh...branch out a bit. the widget picker in particular is
basically identical

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kchr
Why change something that works, just because it isn't uniquely designed?

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zdrummond
I wish things like this would start of as an open-source and/or stand-alone
app. It looks great, and I want to play with it. But Excel is at it's core
used for very sensitive data. Financials, budgets, customer lists, biz plans,
etc.

How and why should I trust a brand-new startup? Doubly so when they don't even
list security in their docs.

tl;dr; I love the idea, looks like a great implementation, please let me demo
(and then ideally purchase) an on-prem version.

~~~
dvdhsu
Thanks! I agree -- we've literally been writing the docs all throughout the
night, and don't expect this to be used by any customers yet :)

Security is definitely a concern when we have access to your data. In the
coming week, we'll definitely open-source the backend and allow it to be
deployed via Docker. We're also thinking about doing a complete on-prem
solution -- email me if you're interested! (email in HN profile)

Thanks for the feedback!

\+ write privacy / security policies to guarantee we never see nor touch your
data; coming soon

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supercoder
You can't just 'promise' you'll never touch someone's data. You have to make
it impossible in the design of the technology

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majewsky
For companies, it's often enough if you're legally bound to not touch data, or
else cough up a sufficiently high compensation.

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adius
Finally! I was wondering when someone would finally implement something like
this. It makes so much more sense to have a proper database to contain the
data and a notebook like interface instead of shitty cells to display it. For
me spreadsheets are the biggest UI fail in computer history.

~~~
smacktoward
_> For me spreadsheets are the biggest UI fail in computer history._

I can't wrap my head around this perspective. To me, they are one of the
biggest UI _successes_ in computing history.

Spreadsheets provide an extremely _approachable_ interface for managing data.
A 2D grid is easy for people to understand. Entering data is easy: you click a
cell, then type. And that is literally _all you need to know_ in order to get
some use out of spreadsheet software -- you're just using it as a dumb tabular
data store, but it turns out that there are lots and lots of common scenarios
where a dumb tabular data store is all you need.

That's where lots of people stop learning about spreadsheets, of course. But
that's fine, because _the software is still providing utility for those
people._ And for the fraction of those people who are inquisitive enough to
want the software to do more, they can start extending the basic metaphors
they learned coming in the door with additional power -- sorting, filtering,
functions -- without having to learn new interfaces at each step along the
way. Then some subset of _those_ people will discover that there's actually a
scripting language under the hood, which gives them even more power.

If you wanted to design an interface that provided the widest possible funnel
for picking up new users, while simultaneously letting those users power up to
new levels of capability as seamlessly as possible, you would have to work
really, really hard to come up with a better solution than the spreadsheet.

~~~
Pxtl
Imho, the problem is Excel has so many common-law bugs and boneheaded
workflows they're stuck with for historical reasons that the state of the art
can't improve. The whole "add a row on the bottom and find that none of the
styles apply or formulas have extended that far" is moronic. Not to mention
the boneheaded behavior when you paste anything that looks like it could be
data (even if it _is_ a date, but in a slightly diffferent format) and it just
gets perma-mangled.

Excel is _close_ to good, but it can never be actually good because it's got
decades of workflow to protect.

~~~
tjalfi
Have you seen the Joel Spolsky video _You Suck at Excel_ [0]? He demonstrates
how using tables can avoid many of the common pitfalls.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)

~~~
mschaef
Data tables are a huge win where they apply... they can result in significant
performance improvements in addition to all the other benefits. (A former co-
worker of mine once wrote a simulation using Excel, and switching to tables
give the system several orders of magnitude better performance.)

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zokier
Neat. One issue with the demo is that the initial impression makes the tool
seem very sluggish, when in reality the sluggishness apparently comes from
fetching data dynamically over the network. While demoing that capability is
nice, I would default to using local data.

One thing that I noticed while paying attention to the sluggishness was that
customer information view showed the previous data until new data arrived when
selecting another customer. I would consider that fairly bad thing, especially
as there are no indicators that the data is not actually valid.

I think a natural extension to this system would be to add a form builder or
something that adds the ability to modify/submit data. Combined with something
like AWS Lambda (and other AWS services) you could build quite powerful
"applications" with relative ease.

~~~
dvdhsu
Thanks for the feedback!

\- local data -- good point -- will switch that up so the demo goes faster in
future

\- no loading indicators -- thanks! I think I've used the tool so much I've
now gotten used to it, but this is definitely something we'll add in our next
release

\- form building -- interesting. We were thinking about doing API queries to
modify data, but that would require backend code. Were also thinking about
just having a database local to retool -- so you can take notes on your
customers, say.

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smortaz
Nice. This could use a 5 min video to show the flow + value-prop...

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rntksi
Hello! Have you had a look at Klipfolio.com ?

We're using it but it's not flexible enough, and the code editing sucks. I
think there's definitely a market out there for this thing, so I hope you
succeed at what you do, and do the best you can.

Multiple sources is very much needed, and definitely a way to edit all the
code in a code editor (i.e. plaintext only, no drag and drop). We have 40
branches and maintain a separate dashboard for all 40 branches. Having to edit
manually all 40 of them sucks. I want to copy the code for 1 dashboard and do
find+replace - I don't want to use the drag and drop and so on.

Some comments, wish you all the best

~~~
dvdhsu
Thanks for the comments!

I think editing by code is definitely better when you have 40 separate
branches. What if your datasource (e.g. postgres instance) was a variable, and
you could change this for each branch? Perhaps forking would also be useful,
if there were specific charts you needed for each branch?

I think this is something that we're interested in building -- do you mind
sending me an email at hn@davidh.su? Would love to chat more. Thanks!

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kfk
Hi there. We pay hundreds of thousands nowadays to build data collection tools
in salesforce (ie forecast that needs to be inserted by salespeople). Your
solution is better and it would be cheaper and more flexible. I have always
been thinking that embedding a tool like yours is probably the best way to go
in sales force (rather than coding things out).

We will embed Tableau for the analytics, so why not embedding a tool for data
input?

Integration with different data sources will be key though.

~~~
dvdhsu
Hi. Thanks for the message! That’s a prime use case we were thinking about.
What’s your email? I’d love to chat more – mine is in my profile.

I agree that data integrations are key. I think that postgres is a start, but
for a tool like this to be widely useful, we have to be able to consume and
write to various APIs, in a way nontechnical people will be able to
understand.

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thenanyu
What's the performance like for large datasets, is there a timeout on query
time, or a caching scheme behind the scenes?

Also, this looks similar in functionality to ChartIO and Mode, do you have a
summary of how this is differentiated?

Edit: I wanted to add: great work!

~~~
dvdhsu
Fast. We use connect directly to your SQL database (mongo coming soon) so
that's the perf bottleneck. Currently no query timeout -- if you host it
yourself, the server is also async, so timeouts won't be an issue. Caching
behind the scenes is something we'll build over the next month.

I think that Chartio and Mode are very good answering questions, and exploring
data. If your problem is "what is our CAGR since 2015", Chartio is good for
that. Mode, I think, is more similar to us, and certainly better for data
analysis. I think, however, that we are more customizable than Mode -- imagine
writing a search box in Mode, for example, in order to drill in deep on a
certain customer's orders.

I think we're more about building apps that would be rote coding otherwise
(e.g. building a CRUD app to manage orders), or empowering non-engineers to
build and maintain these apps themselves. Instead of hiring more engineers,
what if you made everybody in your company able to quickly build simple
software? I think Excel has been very empowering, and we want to do the same.

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rrggrr
This is almost ground-breaking. Can you imagine the power of this thing
coupled with AI widgets? With Zapier-esque connections to APIs.

Great UI and concept. Can't wait to use this if I can find time.

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TeMPOraL
So this is a web version of Lotus Notes, right? :).

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arc_of_descent
Nice work. I really like the drag & drop stuff which snaps to a grid. Awesome!

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fiatjaf
That's amazing, amazing. I love it and can't discover how to use it.

~~~
fiatjaf
So this is basically just a way to show data from your database in custom
widgets, right? It doesn't allow you to update the database in any way,
correct?

"Build tools in minutes, not days." is not clear. What is a "tool"? To build a
"tool" using a "widget" is a perfect nonspecific thing to do. Also, what is
Launchaco?

Still, I like it a lot, seems to be a much better solution than all those KPI
dashboards and also to people using
[https://www.blockspring.com/](https://www.blockspring.com/) to get database
data into spreadsheets.

~~~
dvdhsu
As of now, no, but we're probably going to release buttons that trigger API
calls in the upcoming week. So you'll be able to reset passwords / clear redis
caches / anything else you want, since you'll be able to hit arbitrary API
endpoints.

EDIT: good feedback on the messaging -- thanks! launchaco is a static landing
page generator I just used (after posting this) to generate a landing page --
working through kinks right now! (I noticed a lot of people were landing in
the app, clicking around, and bouncing, so maybe a landing page would be a
better way of explaining things)

------
aw3c2
Nice, I can almost copy and paste my most recent comment again:

Warning, plays a sound to make you notice a fake chat message in the corner.
That's scammy.

~~~
codezero
Intercom is a pretty well known support/engagement/communication tool. How is
this scammy?

~~~
jcwayne
Not sure I'd call it scammy, but I've been increasingly annoyed with the
number of things I need to swat away or make an active effort to ignore in
order to spend an uninterrupted 15 seconds skimming over a page to see if it's
worth more of my time.

~~~
codezero
Fair point :)

I can't argue much, I use Ghostery and also this host list which means I
usually don't see those things:
[https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts)

~~~
pyre
A bit off-topic, but you might want to check this out if you plan on
continuing to use Ghostery:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism)

~~~
codezero
As mentioned I supplement with a host blocker.

I feel Ghostery has been very transparent about its use of data and has been
clear about what I opt into and out of with any given update.

Good looking out though!

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ovao
It may just me be, but from the title I was expecting Retool to be something
_for_ Excel, not _like_ Excel. Perhaps a better title would be "Show HN:
Retool: spreadsheets with higher-order primitives"?

~~~
dang
OK, we affixed "like" to "Excel" above.

Edit: we also changed the URL from
[https://demo.retool.in/demo](https://demo.retool.in/demo) by submitter's
request.

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xet7
I don't know is there any benefit in using Retool, when compared to
[https://www.nubuilder.net](https://www.nubuilder.net)

~~~
juleska
completely strange this "app", I barely could try the demo, it supposed to
work ?

