[dvdhsu]

Hi all! David, founder of Retool here. We’ve come a long way since we our very first Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494) and subsequent launch (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966)!

Briefly — Retool is a visual programming language, built specifically for building internal front-ends. The idea is that we can let you use a visual programming interface to get you 70% of the way there very quickly, and then let you customize the rest with code. This lets you build apps much faster, but also retains the customizability and flexibility of code.

We support writing JS anywhere between {{ }} [1], importing custom React components [2] , hosting on-prem [3] (can be setup in 5 minutes: https://docs.retool.com/docs/running-retool-locally), etc. And then once your applications are built in Retool, we manage the authentication (via SSO if you want), authorization (syncing with your groups in Okta via SCIM), and audit logs (can be stored in your own database, so you can build apps on top of it.)

One interesting differentiator is that we don't store any data, and are happy to connect to any back-ends you already use (including both databases and rest / graphql / grpc endpoints).

Here’s a 4 minute demo video: https://d3399nw8s4ngfo.cloudfront.net/videos/intro-to-retool...

HN is what got us this far, so if anybody has any comments / suggestions, please feel free to let me know! We aim to be surprisingly responsive to HN feedback, since we’ve found it highly predictive of what developers in general want. Feel free to email me at david AT retool.com

edit: fixed video. Thanks!

1. https://docs.retool.com/docs/javascript-overview 2. https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components 3. https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions

[gk1]

Hey David, congrats to you. This felt like a winner even two years ago.

The absence of "low-code" (the phrase) throughout the site--except for a couple of blog posts--makes me think it was a conscious decision. Sort of how Slack remarkably avoids the word "chat" anywhere on their site. Is that the case, and why?

[rvz]

> With the customer traction we've seen so far, we're delighted to announce that Retool has raised a $50M Series B, led by Sequoia. Other participants in the round include the founders of Github, Gusto, PagerDuty, Plaid, Segment, Stripe, and Y Combinator.

This is great news. You've really come a long way from a Show HN and now raising a Series B lead by Sequoia Capital. Congratulations to you and Retool. I look forward to see Retool growing with more customers and features in the near future.

Well done!

[vannevar]

Would it be fair to say Retool is a spiritual successor to Visual Basic, upon which a whole generation of enterprise apps was built?

[jeswin]

I like Retool, but having used both (VB for nearly a decade in the 90s, till .Net came along), and I don't think the comparison is accurate.

Visual Basic represented the high-water mark for developer productivity[1] when it came to small/medium apps. And that's not just Forms apps. You could build a TCP server on it. You could build embeddable COM components, embed a Web Browser, do Distributed Transactions, make a System tray app, connect to any database that you choose, Web Apps, etc. It had a great interop story with COM/C++ code (which allowed you to do embed stuff like, say Telephony, with just a few lines of code).

There's truly a market for a reincarnation of VB. I don't think Retool would be that, because the capabilities will never align. VB is much "lower level" relatively, and that was its strength.

[1]: As long as you stuck to Windows, which was the case in the 90s.

[dvdhsu]

Yes, certainly! "VB in the cloud" is a pretty good description of Retool. (I think we're a quite a bit more developer friendly, but it's certainly 80% correct.)

[swyx]

surprised at the final comment. was VB not developer friendly? this wasnt my perception.

[mst]

Depends how you define developer.

VB was definitely "business oriented scripter" friendly. When I needed to do something that felt more like programming than scripting it annoyed the hell out of me.

Note: It was still awesome overall, and the time I spent swearing at it for the complex logic parts was more than worth it for the time and pain I saved elsewhere, but I think that's what the retool founder's trying to gesture at.

[zubairq]

Retool definitely has similarities to Visual Basic. Actually we are also trying to build a spiritual successor to Visual Basic at Appshare.co, but we still have a long way to go. I think that Retool is far more like a polished RAD tool right now than Appshare as a SQL Builder tool however, so really happy to see this investment and wish them best of luck!

[swyx]

congrats David! just a broad question as a React/frontend dev looking for devtools/startup ideas - how do you feel about your bet on React now? any pain points, wishlists? Would love to hear about any non obvious things in doing visual builder interfaces in React. I found the relayout algorithm (the brief pause when i hover one element over another) interesting, have you ever written that one up?

[joshAg]

We really like your product! It's made it super easy to create internal dashboards and admins actions that we can safely trust nonengineers to use without making an entire website for them.

Got a question for the best way to (ab?)use the fact that retool already talks to the db. Say I've got a database that's off in some cloud and i've hooked it up to retool.

What's the best way to use retool as a psql connection, because i'm too lazy to configure and setup and start psql to do that (say, because I'd have to start up a google cloud sql proxy and make sure that's pointing at the right db, and make sure to use a nonstandard port if i've got a dev container up at the time and and and and...)?

Right now I've just got a personal dash that i edit that has an empty table and a query that i can preview, but i feel like there's gotta be a better way that doesn't involve biting the bullet and spending the time to make the bash commands for psql (or pgadmin) just work.

[dvdhsu]

Hi there! Thanks for the comments, and thank you for using Retool!

We have a product in beta that (I think) does what you're looking for: the Query Library (https://docs.retool.com/docs/query-library). This lets you run queries, save them, and share them across your company. LMK if that's what you're looking for?

(In the future, we will be adding more permissions, etc. to it. We are actively developing this right now and would love to get some feedback from you on it if you'd be open to it? I will have our engineer email you!)

[joshAg]

That's pretty close, and would definitely be super useful to us beyond just my personal use case. Saving would be absolutely awesome because right now I "save" queries by doing this [1] in the query editor and saving a giant comment block. Then when i want to run something i edit and uncomment the single query i need.

I just tried playing around with it, and it looks awesome, but I can't fully commit to it yet, because it doesn't have a way to select staging vs prod like my dash does.

I'd be happy to give feedback! My personal email is in my hn profile, but if you'd prefer i can email you from my work account.

[1]:

  -- select 
  -- select
  -- select
  -- update

[TheMagicHorsey]

David, I wish you would build some tools to help us build custom document management functions.

One of the challenges of highly regulated verticals is that we have to produce a lot of paperwork for regulators. This paperwork is documents in a particular format (from templates we create) but is populated by data from various databases (and other sources like JIRA, google docs, etc.).

If we could program custom logic that pulls data from our various sources to create an exportable document (PDF) based on the data all over our organization, we could replace two dozen document management people with one script ... and have it be more accurate to boot.

[dvdhsu]

Hi, thank you for the message! That is a very interesting use case. Do you mind emailing me at david AT retool? We've previously built something like this, but for Excel (you upload an Excel template, and we pull in data from various APIs [e.g. SFDC, JIRA, etc.] and fill it into the xlsx file). If you're interested in using Retool for it, I'd love to chat and learn more about the use case. (I bet there are many others who have a similar use case, hah.)

[demarq]

Hi,

I’m interested in understanding what it is you need exactly.

I’m working on something that may have overlap.

let me know how I can get in touch!

[cpeterso]

Off-topic but when reading some of the early HN discussions about Retool, I noticed that the old https://retool.in/ links don't redirect to retool.com. The retool.in HTTPS certificate expired last year. :)

[dvdhsu]

Fixed. Thank you!

[kamyarg]

Just wondering what is the most interesting use case(s) you have seen for retool.

We were actually looking for a similar tool, considered some famous SaaS and decided we should go for our in-house backoffice because of niche requirements.

I am really interested in understanding the full potential for future projects. :)

[sails]

Hey David, I've been thinking about using Retool within a data warehouse context, as I see you created a Snowflake connector. I feel like direct CRUD access on data in the data-warehouse that exists elsewhere by business users might be an antipattern, but I also can see many scenarios where this might be useful. Do you have any users/use-cases/demos where this has been used successfully?

Thanks!

[pbreit]

How do you compare to https://internal.io?

[arisa_a]

Full disclosure: I’m co-founder and CEO of Internal. The biggest difference between Internal and Retool is that Internal is designed for everyone (engineers and non-engineers) whereas Retool is designed for engineers. Both are legitimate approaches - just depends on what you’re looking for.

My co-founder and I have led several product and engineering teams at tech companies - and have experienced first hand the struggles of building and maintaining internal tools. We believe that empowering product teams, operations teams, IT teams, etc. to build and update some of their own tools would speed the business up, and free engineers to focus on bigger things.

Set up is lighting fast and you can customize and update your tools whenever you want.

We also provide developer tools as well. You can read/write via API, manipulate data with javascript, and more. We’re making some big investments in this area.

[dvdhsu]

internal.io is pretty similar to https://www.forestadmin.com/, or even djangoadmin. If you're looking for a quick, non-customizable CRUD interface on top of your database, both of them are pretty good solutions.

Retool is really aimed at engineers who are building custom internal applications. For example, if you're Coinbase and looking to build a complex approval workflow for withdrawals above $100MM (with a custom UI depending on which Okta groups you're in, with custom approvals required depending on the KYC status of the customer, etc.), it's very very hard to do with either internal or forest (since the customizability and flexibility are much lower with both of them).

So: forest and internal are good if you want something quickly but have no intention of customizing it later. Retool takes longer to get started, but allows you to customize substantially more.

In the mid-term (i.e. 1 - 6 months' time) we want to make starting in Retool much easier. We will probably allow users to quickly generate admin panels (similar to internal or forest) with a few clicks on top of common datasources.

[seyz]

Hey David, I'm the founder and CEO of Forest Admin (https://www.forestadmin.com). Thanks for mentioning us! First of all, I wanted to congratulate you for this fund raising. I'm a big fan of what you're building. For Retool, Internal, Forest Admin or any others... I think it's great to create this new SaaS product category and to design this new market all together! That's exciting!

From my point of view, Retool helps you build any internal tools using a frontend builder where you can build your UI from scratch or from templates after connecting any type of data sources.

With Forest Admin, we decided to focus on the administration panel of any webapps. From the ground up, we've designed our solution accordingly by providing a fullstack framework using an on-premise backend/API (open-source) connected to the application's database(s) and an off-the-self SaaS frontend (learn more about architecture here: https://medium.com/forest-admin/a-deep-dive-into-forest-admi...).

The reason behind having such an architecture is to let our users to keep full control of their data and to be able to access the code locally to extend the API without any restriction. That's why I don't agree when you say "Forest Admin is good if you want something quickly but have no intention of customizing it later". Our mission is to do the exact the opposite.

To be fully convinced, I think examples are always better than words. We spent time with some of our customers to demonstrate how Forest Admin can be adapted to handle complex workflows: https://www.forestadmin.com/customers. To react on your example about the KYC stuff, approval workflows, etc. This is something that some of our Fintech/Banking system customers are doing with Forest Admin.

[AntonioL]

Hi David,

Congrats on the funding!

I am wondering whether retool can fit this use case? I have some bunch of data which I would like to sell, and would like to give a dataviz tool to a 3rd party customer to play with my data.

Are you aware of any customer of you with such an use case?

[dvdhsu]

Yes, that should work well with Retool. You just need to build the app in Retool, and then enable "public applications", which'll let you expose the app publicly. We don't bill for public users.

(Theoretically, the end users could get all the data by inspecting the network requests. But there's really no way around that given that you're exposing the app and its data publicly. I suppose you could get around it by adding a password to the public app. LMK if you need help with that!)

[brainless]

Congratulations David, this made me have a nice feeling yesterday since I am building in the same space. Thanks for taking the efforts to shape a great product.

[vincentchu]

Congrats David, we're a big fan (and users) of Retool.

[dvdhsu]

Thank you for using Retool! If you ever have any feedback, feel free to email me directly. :)

[antaviana]

Your link to the 4-minute demo videos issues an “access denied” error.

[dvdhsu]

Fixed. Thank you!

[tzvsi]

Demo video link is not accessible

[dvdhsu]

Fixed. Thank you!