For my company, we don't have complex chains, but generally are giving a large context and looking to get structured outputs. Curious how this could help with that? We don't currently use any eval frameworks.
Hey! You can use Explo to explore your database and visualize data, but it requires using SQL to initially access to data so it is not completely visual.
Retool is a great example of a tool that we feel is adjacent to us but different specifically because it is not built to be customer facing. You can expose a retool dashboard but it isn't built to be embedded natively into your web app and there is no way to customize the styles to fit your app.
Additionally, our charts, visualizations, and data representations are much more catered to application dashboards - whereas retool has generic charting components in a more raw form.
This is super cool, thanks for sharing! I am always excited to see dashboards in different large products because it helps us understand how to push our product to make it so that the dashboard is buildable in Explo.
Super interesting (and thorough) thread of thoughts, thanks for sharing!
We are definitely hoping to launch self serve in the near future but have decided not to while we iterate on the core features and ensure things work with a qualified and controlled set of customers. However, it is helpful to understand how important self serve is to developers.
1. We have a few customers who have switched over from Metabase for a few different reasons. The main ones are that we offer much more extensive UI components, more chart capabilities, better security guarantees, and highly customizable styles. While $500 is more than Metabase's price point, we believe that an embedded first solution is worth the price since it will save you 10-20x the cost per month on development and maintenance costs.
2. Yes! A dashboard is just a collection of one or more charts/UI elements and so if you make a "dashboard" which is just a single chart, you can easily embed that. We have many customers who have this use case to embed analytics granularly throughout their app.
3. Not currently, though I'd love to understand more about how/why you would want that. We've heard this a few times as a "nice to have" but would love to build it out with a customer that really needs it.
4. It sounds like you'd be a great customer for Explo! It takes all of the hard work of building out user interfaces out of the equation and makes it so that you just need to specify data queries with SQL and then use our drag and drop interface for UI building.
Hi, really appreciate the feedback! I 100% agree that the way we handle initial page load is not ideal and is an area I have been meaning to prioritize for some time. We've just been swamped with other customer requests for new UI interface and charting functionality.
I am curious your thoughts on a better way to approach this. My initial thought is for a single loading state which ends when all the data is ready to display on the page. It feels inevitable that there is some loading moment when we are fetching the data. It sounds like, based on your comment, that you would prefer there to be no loading state thought?
That is cool use case for customer facing analytics/information!
Every part of what you described other than the actual QR code generation is possible today! For each user input in the dashboard, URL parameters can be defined to default the input to a specific value on page load.
Your point around using the Explo dashboard to show more information is super relevant to one of the longer term ways that we are thinking about our product. Rather than just typical "dashboards", what we've built with Explo is a way to create user interfaces that share and communicate data. And we want to take it a step further since we've realized that a lot of web development and user interfaces is really just visualizing and communicating data.
Hi, thanks for the thoughts and glad to hear this could be useful for you! Startups and smaller companies we work with are paying $500/month (pretty cheap for replacing months of engineering working and maintenance). Our pricing then goes up from there depending on number of end customer groups.
We work with our clients on how the pricing scales up since some customers have very few end customer groups with tons of usage, whereas some customers have tens of thousands of end customer groups by virtue of being more consumer facing.
Let me know if you have more specific questions about pricing!
That makes sense. We are definitely not trying to hide an outrageous enterprise price tag. I responded to mchusma's comment with how our pricing currently works. Let me know if you have any specific questions about it and happy to dive deeper!
Got it - thanks for the feedback. To be transparent, startups and smaller companies we work with are paying $500/month (pretty cheap for replacing months of engineering working and maintenance). Our pricing then goes up from there depending on number of end customer groups.
We work with our clients on how the pricing scales up since some customers have very few end customer groups with tons of usage, whereas some customers have tens of thousands of end customer groups by virtue of being more consumer facing.
Let me know if you have more specific questions about pricing!
Hi! We offer different pricing packages since we work with a varied set of companies that use the product in different ways. Some example use cases: metrics and data viz on a landing page, admin panel dashboards, billing dashboards, custom dashboard share links, etc. Depending on your use case we'd be happy to chat more and figure out a pricing model that makes sense for you.
In general we don't charge for # of dashboards or even traffic to the dashboards. We charge based on the # of end customer groups you are presenting dashboards to. This has been the most aligned with our customers since you can use the full power of the tool and only pay more as your own business scales up.
Thanks for the suggestion! We are mostly migrated over to Highcharts, though we have a few customers using legacy charts in some of the other libraries you mentioned. We've talked about how we want to build our own visualizations with more low level concepts (mostly haven't due to resource constraints), and visx looks like a really solid place to start.
To your point, we have already had a few customers that display their dashboards on mobile web apps and have had a few native applications want to use us.
We’re Andrew, Gary, and Rohan, and we’re the founders of Explo (https://explo.co). Explo is a platform that allows you to create external-facing dashboards and embed them directly into your application, admin portal, or website. Create usage reports for your dev tool, dashboards for your educators on an online learning platform, or sales and profitability dashboards for sellers on your e-commerce platform.
We applied to YC with an idea in the restaurant space (we knew nothing about restaurants), but quickly pivoted to build a tool that allowed you to analyze data directly in your database or data warehouse without knowing SQL. As former data analysts and engineers, we spent hours diving into databases to understand data and conduct analyses, so we wanted to speed up this process. Our early customers used Explo to analyze data by creating charts and graphs. They then wanted to share their visualizations, so we built dashboards, and then they wanted to share these dashboards with their customers. In fact, we first discounted the request as we wanted to focus on internal analytics. But as we continued to work with our customers, we learned that B2B companies were getting more and more requests to share data with their clients. For example, a construction tech platform we were working with wanted an easy way to surface customer data on purchase orders and contracting costs directly from their database securely and directly within their product. A virtual events platform needed to share stats on registrations, attendance, engagement times, for event admins after each event they hosted.
These companies want a snazzy dashboard in their application, but that usually requires a dedicated engineer weeks or months to build along with ongoing maintenance costs. They also don’t use BI tools such as Looker, Tableau, or Metabase because they are either not great for embedded applications, or too heavy for this use case. Instead, they settle for sending CSVs over email, taking screenshots of internal analytics tools, and uploading pictures to shared drives.
After learning about the various pains in sharing data with customers, we decided to pivot and build Explo. We saw that sharing data with customers was becoming increasingly important, and the external analytics space was much more greenfield than the internal space. Our goal is to be the easiest and cheapest way for companies to create dashboards that can be embedded directly into their application.
Our current platform connects directly to SQL databases and warehouses. We don't copy, cache, or manage any data. This makes security much easier to negotiate and allows us to offer a plug-and-play solution that's easy to stand up. We provide a SQL editor and dynamic parameters that you can inject into your SQL queries so that our users can transform and manipulate data before it renders into charts and tables. We've seen our customers use these temporary transforms as a template for future data pipelines so that the heavy lifting is done ahead of time. We work with companies with a variety of data infra setups from startups who create a read replica of their production database that we connect to directly, to companies that have a dedicated Snowflake warehouse with multiple data pipelines and clean data model built out.
As part of building out our product, we’ve had to tackle some pretty interesting and essential technical challenges. We created a SQL builder that can generate SQL across every major database and data warehouse. We implemented a git-like version control system for our no-code tool so that the embedded solutions could be versioned just like code. We’ve had to put our networking hats on to programmatically connect to very secure databases through firewalls and SSH servers.
We have a lot of ideas as to where Explo will go beyond a dashboard platform to enable our clients to share data better and we’re excited to hear your thoughts on the topic. How do you currently share data with customers, have you built out dashboards for customers before, or used embedded analytics solutions such as GoodData, Looker, or Tableau? We’d love your feedback and to learn more about your own experiences sharing data!
While working as a software engineer on a 50-person product team, I faced this problem acutely. We had copy input from our PM, product designer, and a dedicated copy writer. Our product designer and copy writer created all sorts of spreadsheets and figma hacks to try and align on copy and then communicate it to me.
We found it pretty cumbersome to both get the initial copy in the product and then to iterate on it in the same ways we would iterate on visual design or bugs.
In our code base, we also had tons of different ways of defining constants and organizing our copy constants in the code. It didn't feel organized and was definitely not intentional. It made it pretty hard to imagine doing something like internationalization.
Based on all the teams you've talked to, I'm curious what stage you typically see a company start to develop better copy hygeiene? I am currently at a startup <10 people and we haven't put much thought to it.