Hi HN! I'm one of the creators of Retool, and we're excited (and very nervous again) to be posting this on HN. We first showed Retool to HN around a year ago (
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494).
When we posted Retool last time, we thought it was a cool idea (visual programming + functional reactive programming). But we didn't really know whether it was useful, and whether people would pay for it.
Since last year, we've been hard at work talking to customers and writing code. We discovered that internal tools (eg. to manage deliveries) is a good use case for a visual programming language like Retool.
Basically, Retool gives you components (textinputs, dropdowns, tables, etc.), and queries (connect easily to APIs, SQL databases, etc.). In a FRP way, they can interact with each other. So your tables can pull in data from queries, and buttons can pull in data from a table's selected row.
When we show Retool to people, they often think "oh! it's visual basic for the web!". And in many ways - it is! Maybe that's something you think is great - maybe not. In any case, I'd love to hear HN's thoughts. :)
Here's a 3 minute video demo I just made this morning: https://cdn.tryretool.com/approval_video.mp4 of me making an approval workflow in 3 minutes
If you're curious how it works - here are the docs: http://docs.tryretool.com/.
Thanks!
When we posted Retool last time, we thought it was a cool idea (visual programming + functional reactive programming). But we didn't really know whether it was useful, and whether people would pay for it.
Since last year, we've been hard at work talking to customers and writing code. We discovered that internal tools (eg. to manage deliveries) is a good use case for a visual programming language like Retool.
Basically, Retool gives you components (textinputs, dropdowns, tables, etc.), and queries (connect easily to APIs, SQL databases, etc.). In a FRP way, they can interact with each other. So your tables can pull in data from queries, and buttons can pull in data from a table's selected row.
When we show Retool to people, they often think "oh! it's visual basic for the web!". And in many ways - it is! Maybe that's something you think is great - maybe not. In any case, I'd love to hear HN's thoughts. :)
Here's a 3 minute video demo I just made this morning: https://cdn.tryretool.com/approval_video.mp4 of me making an approval workflow in 3 minutes
If you're curious how it works - here are the docs: http://docs.tryretool.com/.
Thanks!