dvdhsu (u/dvdhsu) - Readit News

dvdhsu commented on Form to DB formtodb.com/... · Posted by u/donjh

electroly · 2 years ago

As a counterpoint--from another potential user who looked at Retool first but landed on a competitor's product because Retool was too expensive--another way for me to avoid that outcome is to choose a tool that's open source and self-hosted. That's precisely what we did. If/when the company goes out of business, we can keep using it; this already happened to us with RethinkDB and we continue to run that in its community-maintained form. I'll likely want to find a new platform for new development but I won't have to rewrite my existing apps by a deadline.

You're right that it's a big concern, but it's a pretty tough sell to solve this problem by just charging so much that it's clear you could not possibly go out of business. I had to go pretty far down the list of your top competitors to find a good one that was open source, but I did find it.

All that said, Retool's pricing at that time was MUCH worse than it is today. This is what Retool was offering us at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20230315060042/https://retool.co... -- no distinction between developers and end users! No access controls until the $50/user/month level! That was totally out of the question. The current pricing looks a bit more reasonable, but it's too late; we already committed to the competitor offering an open source solution.

dvdhsu · 2 years ago

Thank you for your feedback (seriously!). I myself talked a few users that shared your point of view last year and that's why we ended up changing our pricing.

I do think there is more work for us to do — I do think especially as we get more enterprise customers (currently 4 of the Fortune 10 are customers; we're aiming to get to all 10 soon!), we'll be able to make it cheaper and cheaper for indie developers (maybe one day even totally free for up to, say, 100 users, or perhaps to introduce a plan that you can build public apps with unlimited users for free).

We have considered open-coring Retool. I think there are many pros to that (as you note). But my main fear is that it would be difficult to build a business around it, since we'd be stuck selling either hosting or support (neither of which is particularly high margin; cf. Elastic). Or we'd be forced to limit the open-source version to not have important features (e.g. SSO)... and it feels like we wouldn't be true to the open-source philosophy if so.

Thank you for considering Retool!

dvdhsu commented on Form to DB formtodb.com/... · Posted by u/donjh

_Marak_ · 2 years ago

Hey David! I love the sustainable work you are doing for developer tools.

We were emailing back in 2021 about one of the many products you and your team have built for developers. Exciting conversation, for sure!

If anyone is interested in reading about my experience with ReTool's approach to developer tools, I have a link: https://marak.com/blog/2021-04-25-monetizing-open-source-is-...

dvdhsu · 2 years ago

Hi Marak! Let me know if you think this response is fair: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27252331. I'd summarize it as "we used a MIT library to generate some data, and unbeknownst to us, this MIT library linked to proprietary data. We then immediately removed such data once we found out."

If you don't think that's a fair reaction, would love to hear your perspective and buy you a coffee next time I'm in NYC. I'll send you an email now. :)

dvdhsu commented on Form to DB formtodb.com/... · Posted by u/donjh

mehal · 2 years ago

Dynaboard shutting down does not relate to pricing for end-users.

From a Low Code product perspective, we were still able to build a beautiful and functional product. Our product unit/engineer ratio is much higher than our competition (see, for example, Retool), which allows us to provide the best value for our users. Regarding the transition, I don't see any indication from the note you posted that users will have to rebuild all their apps. Rather, the founder is saying he will provide more information and possible steps. Who knows – maybe it would be integrated into Figma? And Figma would gain great runtime and IDE capacities?

dvdhsu · 2 years ago

Sorry I didn't link to a Dynaboard email. Here's what an (unhappy) customer of theirs sent me: https://imgur.com/a/qTGpgbQ. They were unhappy because they're a) losing all their data, and b) losing all their applications.

dvdhsu commented on Form to DB formtodb.com/... · Posted by u/donjh

nextworddev · 2 years ago

As a side note I found retool to be the most prohibitively expensive out of 6-7 solutions I was researching for “low code admin app builder” ecosystem.

dvdhsu · 2 years ago

Hm, sorry you found us to be expensive. Two notes:

* Forms (ie the product here) is free.

* We’ve always aimed to build a sustainable business where we charge reasonable prices and can guarantee we’ll stay in business ourselves. It’s true there are other products that are cheaper, but every single one of those companies is unprofitable and many will probably be dead in a few years. See, for example, Airplane, Interval, or Dynaboard. Dynaboard just got acquired today (their founder is apparently “thrilled” about it: https://dynaboard.com/blog/figma-acquires-dynaboard) and they’re shutting down on April 30th. If you’re a paying customer you’ll need to rebuild all your apps by then. Ouch! (I’d rather pay more and not have worry about core pieces of my business getting shut down with three months’ notice.)

dvdhsu commented on Form to DB formtodb.com/... · Posted by u/donjh

no_wizard · 2 years ago

When you say on the website that Amazon uses this product, is Amazon a paying customer or is it simply an engineer (or a few I suppose) are using it?

I’m curious how to interpret the “trusted by” statement here

dvdhsu · 2 years ago

Amazon pays us more than $1M annually. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37426191

dvdhsu commented on Vision Pro teardown part 2: What’s the display resolution? ifixit.com/News/90409/vis... · Posted by u/mzs

mrcwinn · 2 years ago

The display may be 3,386 PPI, but wow my laptop screen has never looked sharper after taking the AVP off my head. Screen sharing from my Mac looks distractingly bad, which is a huge bummer. (AVP apps, by contrast, look fantastic.) No matter how I scale or where I place the space, it just never looks very good.

I'm really hoping this improves because it's nice to turn my 14" MacBook Pro into a theater screen of sorts alongside native apps. For the moment, though, AVP doesn't seem very useful apart from watching movies (which is amazing).

dvdhsu · 2 years ago

Agreed. I find my AVP actually quite bad for using my Mac. I use a MBP instead of a MBA because 120hz makes a big difference. The MBP screen within AVP is probably something like 30hz (likely because it's using Airplay, and it doesn't have enough bandwidth). And I can't change the resolution either! It's kind of like working on a TV — I don't see why it's any better than the 14" MBP screen.

Overall, the AVP is a disappointment for me. Most of the new UX patterns I find far worse than keyboard shortcuts. (For example, a window manager is _much_ easier to use than having to pinch to drag windows around. For example Vimium is much easier to use than looking at elements and pinching at things.) I don't consume much content (e.g. TV), but of the content that I do consume, it feels lower resolution to me. The demos they have (e.g. the Alicia Keys video) feels nothing like real-life to me. As a parallel to what you said — real life has never looked better (after taking off the AVP), haha.

dvdhsu commented on Airtable acquires Airplane airplane.dev/blog/airtabl... · Posted by u/axfan

swyx · 2 years ago

> You just have to build a great product [1],

sarcasm or is there a missing reference somewhere?

dvdhsu · 2 years ago

Sorry, forgot to write the footnote so just removed it. Agreed that building a great product and finding PMF is hard. But "not hiring" shouldn't be!

(So yes, I suppose the comment was tongue in cheek, haha.)

dvdhsu commented on Airtable acquires Airplane airplane.dev/blog/airtabl... · Posted by u/axfan

dvdhsu · 2 years ago

I have a lot of respect for the product and the folks at Airplane. And I (even as a "competitor") find it sad that such a great product is being shut down. My best guess is that they were running out of cash.

This to me is pretty surprising... because it's actually not hard to make a SaaS business profitable. You just have to build a great product, and be disciplined at hiring. It's weird that they seem to have done well on #1, but failed at #2 (which I'd deem the "easier" problem).

RE #2, I've heard they have less than $1M in ARR, but somehow (according to LinkedIn), have 61 employees. We had 4 employees when we were at $1M in ARR (and growing around 700% YoY). Even when we were growing quickly, we hired slowly: IIRC we were at around 30 employees at around $10M ARR. (That's less than half the employees Airplane had... even though we were 10x their revenue.)

When we started Retool, average headcount costs were around $300k / year. So if you have 60 heads burning $300 / year, that's $18M / year. If you only have $1M in ARR, you're burning $17M a year. Ouch! (If you're burning $17M a year, it's not hard to see why a fundraise of $32M would only last you 18 months.)

To me, it's tragic that a great product like Airplane has to shut down. Tragic both for the team, but also for its customers (who have three months to rebuild everything). Building a great product is the hardest part of starting a startup, not "not hiring". I'm hoping that a more challenging fundraising environment will make ~profitable startups more common going forward. (Especially because it shouldn't be that hard to make a SaaS company profitable!)

My sense is that many other startups are going to be going through something similar over the next few years. For example, last I heard, another one of our competitors (with the initials SB) has less than $1M in ARR and has 40+ employees. I feel that the 2020 - 2022 fundraising environment has spawned a bunch of fairly unsustainable businesses — and many of them will shut down in the next year or two. As consumers, it would be wise for all of us to be conservative when it comes to which platforms we choose to build our infrastructure on.

dvdhsu commented on When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished retool.com/blog/mfa-isnt-... · Posted by u/dvdhsu

hnburnsy · 3 years ago

Thanks for all this insight, this is why HN rules. What is your impression of law enforcement, everyone claims to reach out after an attack, but I've never seen follow up of sucessful law enforcement activity resulting in arrests or prosecution. Thanks again.

dvdhsu · 3 years ago

(May also have to delete this later, but...)

Law enforcement is currently attempting to ascertain whether or not the actor is within the US. If it's within the US, I (personally) believe there's a good chance they'll take the case on and presumably with enough digging, will find the attacker. (The people involved seem to be... pretty good.)

But if they're outside US (which is actually reasonably high probability, given the brazenness of the attack, and the fact that they're leaving a lot of exhaust [e.g. IP address, phone number, browser fingerprints, etc.]), then my understanding is that law enforcement is far less interested, since it's unlikely that even an identification of the hacker would lead to any concrete results (e.g. if they were in North Korea). (FWIW, the attack was not conducted via Tor, which to me implies that the actor isn't too worried about law enforcement.)

To give you a sense, we are in an active dialogue with "professionals". This isn't a "report this to your local police station" kind of situation.

dvdhsu commented on When MFA isn't MFA, or how we got phished retool.com/blog/mfa-isnt-... · Posted by u/dvdhsu

batmansmk · 3 years ago

Are the claims of deepfake and intimate knowledge of procedures based of the sole testimony of the employee who oopsed terribly? This is a novelisation of an events

Retool needs to revise the basic security posture. There is no point in complicated technology if the warden just gives the key away.

dvdhsu · 3 years ago

It is not based on the sole testimony of the employee. (Sorry I can't go into more details.)