[dalton]

Congrats to Retool!

I worked with Retool when they were in the YC W17 batch. They were previously working on a p2p finance app for the UK, and I remember sitting in the conference room when they told me they were pivoting to Retool.

The Retool idea made immediate sense to me because at my prior startup we used django-admin to crank out internal pages and it was amazing. So it seemed clear to me that having something along those lines that was available in every programming environment would be useful, but it was harder for me to wrap my head around competing with free. This sort of reminds me of Algolia competing with Apache Solr - as it turns out can be a great business if you build a great product and really understand your customers. Also I did not appreciate the power of having a drag-and-drop interface, all of the integrations etc.

David and the whole Retool team have done a truly brilliant job executing since then, excellent work.

[ignoramous]

Thanks. (if I may) Since you emphasize that Retool built a 10x product and really understood their customers, what are some ways they did both of those? Did they hire the right product / UX people early-on? Had initimate understanding of the problem at-hand? Knew which features to leave out and which ones to build in face a barrage of feature requests? Kept in constant touch with their early adopters? Ran really good user interviews? Or...

[dalton]

I realize that this is likely to be less illuminating than you would hope, but the Retool founders were relentlessly focused on getting their first users, building quickly, and getting to profitability as if their lives depended on it. Witnessing them go from 0-10K MRR was to witness someone walking through walls.

To give a perspective on how much of an outlier this team is, my recollection is they got to ~1M ARR very quickly and with just the 2 cofounders and one employee. That is rare.

[algo_trader]

What are your thoughts/reactions after a pitch with an novel idea+execution+traction but no obvious moat?