Show HN: Castled Data – Customer engagement software on top of data warehouses

[aruntdharan]

Hi HN, We're Frank, Abhilash, and Arun from Castled Data(https://castled.io). Castled is a Customer Engagement platform built directly on top of cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Postgres.

In essence, Castled is identical to Braze and Iterable with a crucial difference - we don't keep a copy of your customer data. Instead, we enable marketers to create audiences directly on their cloud data warehouse and engage them across channels like Email, Sms, WhatsApp, Push, and In-app notifications - no SQL knowledge, no engineering favours required.

Here is a quick demo: https://www.loom.com/share/217a31ac47de451992573b1b37c1b8e5

We started our journey by building an open-source Reverse ETL solution to make warehouse data actionable to marketers. However, after talking to 100s of marketers, we realised that modern B2C marketers needed to leverage billions of customer data points from the data warehouse to run personalised marketing campaigns. While Reverse ETL could sync all this data to marketing tools like Braze, Iterable, etc., the traditional marketing solutions were fundamentally not designed to store and process so much data.

That's when we changed course to build a warehouse-first customer engagement solution. With Castled, marketers could finally use "all" the data from their data warehouse to engage their customers without any tradeoffs.

Customer Engagement platforms have historically been built on top of transactional databases. So, solving the same use cases on top of a data warehouse optimised for analytical workloads was a significant challenge. But fortunately, B2C marketing use cases primarily warranted bulk data access, which data warehouses were uniquely designed to solve. The architectural change also enabled us to offer capabilities that were impossible with traditional solutions.

As Castled is a "headless" platform - meaning we don't store any customer data - we offer a pricing model based solely on the number of team members using our platform, not the volume of data processed. The approach allowed our customers to focus on marketing efficiency without worrying about the fluctuating costs associated with data usage.

We have been building Castled for more than a year and have enabled many businesses to overcome the data limitations of existing marketing platforms. If you have a data problem in marketing, feel free to sign up and try our product for free - no credit card required. We have our solution hosted at https://castled.io.

We have been avid followers of HN for years now. So we look forward to your thoughts, insights, questions, and concerns about our product in the comments below. I will monitor the thread throughout the day to answer questions from the community. Also, feel free to reach out to me personally at [e-mail].

[latchkey]

> after talking to 100s of marketers, we realised that modern B2C marketers needed to leverage billions of customer data points from the data warehouse to run personalised marketing campaigns

I like this. You learned one of the most important lessons quickly. Get customers first and then build what they need.

Update: I just watched your demo, this is really fantastic work. A couple suggestions: 1) your demo is a tad bit fast and showing a lot of content, so it makes me have to stop the video and rewind. you obviously know the product too well. 2) for dropdowns with only one item (there are a few of them in your demo), don't make people click on it, just select the item, by default.

[aruntdharan]

Thanks! Yes, for sure - pivoting at the right time is important.

[latchkey]

No, it isn't really a pivot. Pivot is a dumb startup term for when you haven't figured out your customers yet.

What I'm referring to is the realization that you should build only what customers are asking for, not what you think they need.

When you do that, you don't need to convince anyone to use your product, since you've built what they are asking for already.

It is a much better way to do things that will always lead to success if you can execute on it.

[ernestoo]

Customers want smaller CDs, not iPods. So I think this statement is true if you are improving on an existing idea (such as castled). But if you’ve got a transformative idea, talking to customers probably doesn’t help as much

[latchkey]

There is only one Steve Jobs. The rest of us are better off talking to customers first. That thinking (transformative idea... which generally amounts to nothing more than 'X of Y'), is why most startups fail.

[ernestoo]

True, from a numbers perspective most startups are a Y (in an X of/for Y) but every once in a while someone becomes an X (Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox) and that’s what’s exciting about reading a “Show HN” for me.