Building a modern, on-prem software business
Retool is a fast way for engineers to build internal tools. Here’s a 4 minute video demo. We started building the product in 2017, and in ~a year got to $1M ARR with 4 people at the company. Today, many customers rely on us to build internal applications, including Amazon, Peloton, Progressive, and NBC.
Since starting Retool, we've always found it challenging to explain how the exactly the product works, without showing it directly. For example, we could tell an engineer that Retool is a "drag and drop way to build internal front-ends". But engineers have a very negative impression of most drag-and-drop tools! (Not flexible enough, always not customizable enough, or tries too hard to be smart, and of course fails.)
Today, the best way of explaining Retool is to first show them the demo video, and then get them to build something they wanted, in Retool, in just a few minutes. Nothing quite compares to the magic of being able to drag and drop together a UI on top of a database or API in a few minutes. That's the only way we know how to get a user to become a paying customer.
But in order to build a useful app for themselves, users typically have to connect their own database. For Retool to access your postgres database hosted on RDS, for example, users have to add our IP addresses to their whitelist.
