Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

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Style Pass

2024-10-28 23:00:38

Back in late 2020, my good friend Raiden and I co-founded Slight. Over the next two and a half years, we got it off the ground, raised a pre-seed round, and got some customers on-board, but in the end we didn’t have enough traction to raise our seed round. We got close with a few investors (after I talked to many…), but getting close still means the company dies.

Before we dive in — Slight was a data “switchboard” that turned SQL queries into user-friendly interfaces for anyone who needed data. Click the details below for more.

We found a lot of friction within companies doing something that should be simple: getting data to people, and specifically the right data.

For non-technical users, the typical assumption is that you’d send files or use the BI tool. For technical users, generally they could access the databases themselves but you’d still have to send them the query, they’d have to parameterize it themselves, and there was no central place to put the query to suit both teams. For external users, setting up anything beyond sending files was generally deemed too much hassle.

Slight solved this: someone on a data team would write a parameterized query, and we’d create the interfaces to suit each user, keeping them in sync regardless of how they wanted to interact with the data. Data teams wouldn’t have to schlep data around, and users could use spreadsheet integrations, a web UI, R/Python SDKs, an API directly, etc., along with appropriate caching and security, for internal or external use.