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by benmcredmond 1225 days ago
Hi HN, I’m Ben, one of the founders of Equals.

My co-founder and I started Equals to build the data tool we always wished we had as part of the early Intercom team. We found no matter which new BI tool we adopted, we’d ultimately end up back in a spreadsheet. Yet, we’d then come back to the BI tool for easy access to live data.

So - Equals is a spreadsheet with live data. Equals has native connections to databases, data warehouses, and other data sources. You can write SQL directly in the spreadsheet to pull in data from your database, or you can write Python/Javascript to pull data from any API. We launched the core Equals product about a year ago.

Today we’re launching Dashboards. With Dashboards you can hook in multiple data sources at once and build charts and tables that auto-expand. As your data updates, so does your spreadsheet and dashboard. We believe this is the simplest and most flexible tool for founders to stay on top of their business.

We’re still super early and so would love to hear your feedback on the product.

Ben

5 comments

I just gave it a go and am super impressed with the Salesforce connector, most of the tools I've tried are awful for SFDC (including data sync tools like airbyte etc)

I loaded in around 100k rows and performance was fantastic.

I think the only feature so far I haven't found is whether there is a way to join tables together in the app. With SFDC particularly it doesn't seem to have an option to write the SOQL query directly, and I can't access relationships with the field builder, so I have no easy way to do a client side join (apart from a ton of VLOOKUPs which is not ideal)

I do love how calculated columns stay even after I re-query the source data, that and the auto-expanding are killer features.

Super exciting product, very polished, I can't wait to see where it goes.

PS. $18/mo for the pro version with scheduled queries is an absolute steal

Oh what was not working with Airbyte? (Airbyte co-founder that is very interested to see how we can improve it ;) )
Hey! Airbyte was working in theory, but it was not very user friendly to handle a large Salesforce instance (this was for a client of mine with 100k+ employees)

I've just given it another go with Airbyte Cloud and I think some of the issues I had have been fixed (I remember back when I tested it was pretty clunky to select tables to sync with hundreds of custom tables) because I didn't have any major problems.

One thing that is a showstopper that is probably very specific to my use case is it doesn't allow you to filter tables before syncing, my client has offices worldwide but I mostly work within a couple regions so some of the tables I want to sync I would like to put a filter on as they have a "Market" custom field for the country.

I can of course just sync everything and then filter on the destination but as a consultant I'm wary to sync data that I have no business working with, plus it would increase the data size of the sync massively.

Overall I do love airbyte though! it's a great tool, and I use it for other data sources, just didn't work for me in this specific case

EDIT: I just noticed I was unnnecessarily harsh in the parent comment, I was more thinking about other tools that have very basic SFDC integration (only standard tables, no custom tables/fields) – airbyte's integration is overall good, it just didn't work for my specific usecase

Thanks so much for the kind words and glad it resonates!

Joins are coming very very soon. Stay tuned.

Looks interesting, but if I cannot self-host it on my company's internal cloud, I can't use it. I suspect there are similar requirements for a lot of potential enterprise clients. If self-hosting is part of the Enterprise pricing plan, you should mention that on the page.
Sorry to hear that. We don't have self-hosting yet and no timeline unfortunately.

We do have a few enterprise customers who were satisfied with our security after digging in. We're SOC 2 Type II, etc.

Yeah something like this would be awesome in the investment management business. Unfortunately, I don't care how many certificates you quote I'm not going to hand over data to you. And the vast majority of the industry is that way. A large untapped market but so many nifty tools are built which just insist on not providing a self hosted solution...
In Europe nobody cares. It’s not a dig, just stating it blatantly.
Yup. Considering the data that would end up in this, a hosted solution is a non-starter for us, and most of my peers orgs. Interesting idea tho...
Don't take the above comment as a negative (OP) because I want my boss to buy this yesterday. We really don't want to manage servers or manage anything so SaaS and a good privacy policy/our security team not complaining is all that matters.

Edit: Just had time to go through the site, SSO would be important for enterprise.

This is a really interesting product.

Are these dashboards able to be used with any UI elements to filter down certain criteria? Say your dashboard chart shows all widgets, but you want to see certain widgets rather than all. I'd love to enable my team, who would ideally be viewers, to have a dropdown selection or something similar, to then filter the chart by what they need to see.

One of the Tableau features I like is the ability to export the data that was used to calculate the dashboard. Plus with the filtering capabilities it allows my team to get out what they might need to then use as needed. Anything like that available in Equals? I really dig the Hubspot integration because Hubspot integration with Tableau is a real pain in the ass.

Filters within the sheet is something on our roadmap - don't have it just yet. But! You can use our visual Query Builder to let less technical users change the underlying data that your charts + tables are pulling from.

In terms of exporting the data, you can export to a CSV but typically you don't need to do this step to debug something. The biggest difference from Tableau is we are actually a full featured spreadsheet. You can do any investigation you want to do within Equals itself. When we want to go deeper on some dashboard we tend to make a copy of the document in Equals and dig in from there.

Thanks for the information.

Do you offer any discounts for non-profits?

Send me an email ben@equals.app with what you need and I'll see what we can do.
This is immediately useful to my clients and I, but...

1. I want to add GA as a datasource but I'm stuck on unique page views and can't seem to change anything outside of the date range

2. The help center article on GA has a broken link: https://help.equals.app/en/articles/6584898-add-a-google-ana...

3. The UX is a bit unclear and the upgrade path isn't straightforwardly accessible for a free user in the workflow.

I'm glad you launched and I'm looking forward to using it. Hit me up if you need more feedback.

Damn sorry about the broken link will fix that.

GA datasource is most primitive today, only supports unique pageviews. An expanded one is being built currently, will be out in a few weeks.

Could you share a bit more on #3?

#3 was more driven by my frustration with GA. It wasn't clear if GA is limited as a datasource or feature limited by free/paid tier.

I'd suggest removing GA from the site as a feature or calling out the current limitations more clearly. While I could go get data out of BigQuery, that's more of a lift and the ease of using this to import GA for clients is a major draw.

Thanks for the quick response and I'm looking forward to using it more.

Ah got it - yeah our free plan is very generous. Only limitations are 3 editors, scheduled queries, and saved queries. It can do everything else. Keep an eye out for updated GA in next few weeks.
FWIW I'm a product designer and I try onboarding for dozens of different products every month to make sure I'm aware of the latest and greatest patterns. I love your approach to self-serve onboarding for connectors.
We just redesigned this, so really glad to hear it resonates.