Retool Blog

I started in Visual Basic 3 and then moved to Delphi. My first job at 18 was working for one of the large ActiveX component libraries, providing technical support to many developers when I wasn't one myself yet!

On my first day, I found a book on my desk—"Learn Visual Basic 3 in 21 Days"—along with a brand new 486DX250 and a 14" monitor. I learned a lot quickly! We answered support queries by fax back then.

I never fully understood why this programming paradigm died off. Building business apps beyond Access or Excel was so straightforward. It was great to get an .EXE that you could package up with InstallShield or Wise Solutions and send to anyone.

I guess the web came soon after, and trying to do WYSIWYG for HTML and CSS has never gone well—even today.

FrontPage came out but died soon after, and mixing desktop apps with web apps was never great.

Today, I feel .NET is overly complex and much harder for beginners compared to the old days.

Sometimes, I think there are only so many ways to control the appearance of business apps. I'd constrain visuals but provide the most straightforward visual builder possible.

The No-Code world is fascinating, and the best I've seen in this space is https://retool.com/, but it's expensive and locks you into their ecosystem.

Even today, small businesses need to build out simple apps that were simple to do back in the Visual Basic days—a stock control system, a basic support system, sales tools, etc. Today, it's a minefield of options…

Hi, I’m Yogi, the engineer who worked on templates. Retool (https://retool.com) itself is a fast way of building custom internal tools (think Visual Basic, but in the cloud).

One thing that’s been challenging for us: because Retool is such a horizontal product, it was always hard for us to explain a) what exactly Retool is, and b) what people use it for. That’s why I decided to work on templates. A template is a pre-made app that you can plug your datasource (Stripe, Postgres, Github, etc.) into. Think old-school MS Word templates but for apps instead. You can plug in your credentials to get an extensible UI for your data. These templates aren’t meant to be 100% usable out of the box, but really to give you an idea of what you can do with Retool, quickly. (For example, here’s a video of us building the Github PR dashboard, which I mention below, in 15 minutes: https://cdn.tryretool.com/github_dashboard.mp4)

All of these templates are built from real-world use-cases that other companies are using Retool for. For example, we have customers using something very similar to our “Stripe refund tool” template. It pulls in data from Stripe, joins it to purchases in our database, and lets you refund an order in one click. (It updates the database, POSTs back to Stripe, and sends an email to the customer.)

My favorite is probably the Github PR dashboard. As an engineer myself, I want to start work everyday knowing who I’m blocking (i.e. I need to review their PR), and who I’m…

Haha. I was an engineer on Honeycode in 2017. I initially joined the project because the best talent was flocking to finally make a frontend builder for developers. When I was there, the vision was there (allow people to build apps with spreadsheet skills), but the execution was all over the map: we had engineers mostly interested in getting promoted, so it was super political. I remember that every team had their own redux store (including one for the navbar, one for the login screen, one for the home screen, etc.). It was totally dysfunctional, but a lot of people got promoted. All while we didn’t have a single customer!

Today, I’m pretty skeptical about no-code. It just feels like the citizen developer is a dead-end. I think Honeycode was in this uncanny valley where you can’t really use it for real applications. Honeycode didn’t have source control, custom React components, nor testing).

Now, at my current company, we use Retool (https://retool.com). It comes with source control (not perfect, the diffs can be overly complex at times), custom React components (so I can import whatever libraries I want), and good developer ergonomics.

Retool isn’t as powerful as code, but it really scratches the itch of “I just need a CRUD front-end, and don’t want to learn redux” really well. We’ve probably built 30 - 50 apps with it at my current company. I think that, combined with AI, might be the future of programming.

> I’m looking for AI that can do things other than make capitalism more efficient at parting people from their money.

I think you're really under-estimating the positive, human value that can come out of what I'm describing.

If you leave the world of software companies you'll find that a lot of humanity is wasting huge amounts of time on tasks that could be easily be automated. My most recent experience was the Electronic Vehicle research space - I was able to rather straightforwardly reduce testing cycles for certain key components from 1 year to 1 month through some straightforward software and collaboration with some scientists.

Most of what I accomplished could have been achieved by the scientists if they had used something like Retool[0], but Retool is too sophisticated a tool for them to ramp up on. If AI could make Retool accessible to someone with the technical sophistication of Material Scientist who can write a little Python, it might greatly speed up the rate at which we advance EV technology.

The point I'm making is that making it easier to make products that are accessible means that it's easier to distribute the positive effects of innovation to the rest of society faster. If anything, there's the potential to lower profits long term because today creating a product that is both valuable and accessible is an incredible moat.

[0] https://retool.com/

I don't know about that. I suspect, generally speaking, per-user billing does not work for the vast majority of SaaS. It can really only work well in communication tools, where (1) most organizations receive a lot of value, (2) there's a network effect in play, and (3) expenses incurred by the provider generally correlate with the number of users. Slack. Jira. Notion. Etc.

For an APM tool like Apollo, only one of these requirements is true. It does provide a lot of value. But, there's no network effect, and their expenses do not correlate with users on the platform. That last point is the craziest one; being long-time users of Meteor and Apollo, I've always questioned the technical and executive leadership behind the Meteor Development Group (now Apollo), and they've done nothing in recent history to give faith that its a well-ran organization.

Retool (https://retool.com/) is another weird one. Amazing, amazing product. Truly transformative; what they're building there is unreal. There's a very light network effect in play, and usage may correlate better with users-in-app than it would with Apollo Engine, but charging per-user still feels weird. For them, I feel some form of bucket'ed plans, which allot X users, Y "applications", plus gated feature sets like SAML and Audit Logging, would make more sense. But, what do I know.

WOW.

Okay, this is really, really cool and is exactly my niche, as you mentioned it's kinda a combination of things like Stylus/uBlock Origin filters and custom filters/etc. This is really needed, as for example GitHub code preview is completely and utterly fucked, to put it lightly. Showing symbols, not being able to select code properly without weird visual glitches happening..... requires a bunch of scripts to fix. (https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/54962).

What's your funding plan? You mentioned paid plan, but what's the actual benefit for users that they would pay for this? (I totally would, FWIW).

Do you foresee companies who need to build special widgets for whatever reason for random websites they use as kind of "Extension light" alternatives - your product reminds me of Retool (https://retool.com/), but for website tweaking.

Very cool product, love the ability to do "extra things" which will fix a whole bunch of websites I use everyday that I CBF'd either making an extension to fix or battling the uBlock/stylus filters.

Discoverability will also be needed, kinda like [karabiner elements complex modification rules](https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/)

edit: no firefox support, sadpants.