For the past 1.5 years, I’ve been building at Retool. Retool is a B2B SaaS company and a fast way to develop internal tools. As an engineer on the Connect Team, I’ve shipped a wide range of products, from new resource integrations to a public-facing developer API. Retool has a strong maker culture, and I’ve always been impressed by how fast they can build. I’d like to start my own company one day, so I’ve been reflecting on what I can take away from my experiences there.
Retool isn’t afraid to fund big bets, and this is something I respect the company for. When Retool AI was proposed, no one really knew whether it would be impactful, but the company took a risk and invested in a large AI launch. While the long term success of the project remains to be seen, the short term success has been solid. Most notably, the launch itself led to the second highest number of same-day signups in Retool history.
Retool places a much larger emphasis on speed than on craft. You’re incentivized to ship new products, as that moves the needle on ARR, but you’re not really incentivized to improve existing ones. This system is what causes Retool to feel almost complete in so many places: the product works as you’d expect about 80% of the time. That other 20% is often deprioritized due to less perceived impact, but in reality, it’s just as critical. Craft and speed are not mutually exclusive; in order to build a high quality product, you need to strike the right balance.
Activation is often overlooked. The idea is fairly simple: the faster customers can derive value from your product, the more likely they are to use it. Retool is powerful but also incredibly complex, and that complexity often drives customers away. To counteract that, the company has invested into improving the onboarding experience and designing more intuitive user flows. Nowadays, when I’m building, I actively think about user friction and usability. I want to build products that are easy to use, so that people want to use them.
It sounds simple, but if no one knows about your product, then no one is going to use it. During my time at Retool, we released 2 new resources: Databricks and Microsoft Teams. They were the most requested integrations over the past few years, but neither saw much usage post-launch because no one really knew about them. The company didn’t do any marketing or outreach to customers, other than a small Twitter post. From my experience, small product launches can be just as meaningful as large product launches. As a company, you want to be seen as always shipping. It’s important to set up the right marketing channels early, so that you can continuously share the cool things you’re building. In my opinion, GitHub is a great example of a company that does this well.