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 blocked on (i.e. I need to remind them to review my PR). I’d also like a quick summary of what a PR is. So I built this dashboard that loads all this information with the Github API at once, so I can just browse through them without waiting for each page to load. (Apparently this is an actual internal tool at Stripe that engineers check every day.)

Please let us know what you think! You can use any template to create your own app by clicking on “Use Template”.