7 ms·

Show HN: Parabola.io – Automate your work with visual programming

291 points by alexyaseen 8y ago

Hi HN! I’m Alex from Parabola (https://parabola.io https://parabola.io). Parabola is a visual programming tool for creating functional data flows that everyone can use. It’s entirely drag-and-drop, handles data sizes much larger than a traditional spreadsheet, calculates everything live, and can run your flows on a schedule of your choosing. I used to work in strategy consulting, doing data analytics for SMBs and Fortune 500 companies. The amount of time wasted on menial tasks was astounding. Things like cleaning data, generating custom reports, creating human workflows to solve shortcomings in third party tools, etc. Non-technical people have to rely on doing things manually or using fragile spreadsheets that solve only part of their use cases. We don't think everyone should have to learn to code in order to work productively (https://medium.com/parabola-labs/not-everyone-needs-to-learn-how-to-code-32f47ea7a171 https://medium.com/parabola-labs/not-everyone-needs-to-learn...). That’s why we’re building the tools to help people stop wasting so much time on manual processes, and instead focus on their actual core competencies. We’ve made some interesting decisions in the design of Parabola’s visual programming “language”. We’d love to hear what you think and are happy to discuss our thought process in the comments.

sharemywin 8y ago
Nothing for windows? MS Office?
- alexyaseen 8y ago
  Parabola is browser-based so should work great on windows! And we support importing .csv and .xls files.
- badtechstuff 8y ago
  Microsoft has "Flow" which is basically Parabola, but considerably more confusing for end-users.
  - hug 8y ago
    This is about as true as it gets. Also, the UI for flow is absolutely atrocious once you start adding large numbers of conditionals.
adamfeldman 8y ago
This feels like https://ballerina.io/ https://ballerina.io/ but for non-programmers, and with SaaS integrations built-in. I've spent so much time moving CSV between systems at an ecommerce company. Congrats on the launch, this looks awesome! Would love to learn more about how it was built.
- cbkirk 8y ago
  Thanks @adamfeldman. Parabola originally was pure JS: running the majority of each step function of the language in the user’s browser, making use of some python API endpoints and React and Immutable.js for some performance enhancements to know when steps needed to be calculated and rendered. Given there are definite limitations with browser based JS and user’s systems, we’re now a fully cloud based compute environment. As users make changes in our React UI, we send the work to a queue and then distribute it by parsing the flow tree across various node worker servers so steps can run in parallel (if your flow is built that way). Each step is self contained and we then use sockets (powered by PubNub) to notify the UI of changes.
  - markatkinson 8y ago
    Can I ask what cloud products you use and the provider? Azure, AWS GC?
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    This is a great way to scale your system. Well done. AWS Lambda is fairly reliable for running untrusted functions (as well as trusted functions with carefully managed inputs) at scale for customers, but any function provider should work well for this purpose (as long as their container lifecycle meets your needs).
- rpadude 8y ago
  Very cool. Similar to https://airflow.apache.org https://airflow.apache.org https://Composable.ai https://Composable.ai ...
alexyaseen 8y ago
Hi HN! I’m Alex from Parabola (https://parabola.io https://parabola.io). Parabola is a visual programming tool for creating functional data flows that everyone can use. It’s entirely drag-and-drop, handles data sizes much larger than a traditional spreadsheet, calculates everything live, and can run your flows on a schedule of your choosing. I used to work in strategy consulting, doing data analytics for SMBs and Fortune 500 companies. The amount of time wasted on menial tasks was astounding. Things like cleaning data, generating custom reports, creating human workflows to solve shortcomings in third party tools, etc. Non-technical people have to rely on doing things manually or using fragile spreadsheets that solve only part of their use cases. We don't think everyone should have to learn to code in order to work productively (https://medium.com/parabola-labs/not-everyone-needs-to-learn-how-to-code-32f47ea7a171 https://medium.com/parabola-labs/not-everyone-needs-to-learn...). That’s why we’re building the tools to help people stop wasting so much time on manual processes, and instead focus on their actual core competencies. We’ve made some interesting decisions in the design of Parabola’s visual programming “language”. We’d love to hear what you think and are happy to discuss our thought process in the comments.
- zeptomu 8y ago
  Hey, nice work. What would you say differentiates this service from say, Zapier?
  - alexyaseen 8y ago
    I really like how dbranes described it below: >"drag-and-drop data transformation pipelines that comes with app integrations at both ends" Parabola is very focused on data transformation/manipulation. Our best customers end up with hundreds of steps in their flows, essentially creating full-fledged programs. As part of this focus on data transformation, we primarily operate in a batch-processing fashion. We also perform calculations live while you work on your flow, similar to a spreadsheet or a python notebook. Zapier on the other hand is great at connecting with TONS of tools, and makes integrations between those tools really smooth. It operates best in an event-based paradigm when you don't need to do much transformation/calculation in between connection points. There's probably a small amount of overlap at the edges, but in general it's pretty clear when a use case will be a good fit for a tool like Zapier or when it's a good fit for Parabola.
markatkinson 8y ago
This is awesome. I am currently working with a team to develop a workflow tool with an eventual designer. This is very inspiring. Take a look at Microsoft's logic apps, it is slightly more generalist, and not so focused on data processing but not nearly as polished as Parabola.
skanga 8y ago
Great idea - especially for non-programmers. The question I have is - can it outperform the command line? (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135841 for more) I almost always use awk/mawk for such things.
arosier 8y ago
Love the UI. One bit of feedback: on https://parabola.io/ https://parabola.io/ under "Self Documenting and Repeatable" I keep clicking the play buttons in the screenshot.
- nickreese 8y ago
  Did the exact same thing.
antoineleclair 8y ago
Congratulations for the launch. Definitely a good idea. I'm a developer and personally won't need this, but I'll definitely suggest this when I think this could replace some "real coding".
web007 8y ago
This looks pretty good, like Yahoo Pipes or IFTTT with a decent flow editor.
tlavoie 8y ago
Does this all run as some user's ID? Is it storing/managing credentials for them? RPA tools seem to be all the rage, but questions around accountability, auditability and other security aspects still stand out.
asasidh 8y ago
you should allow to quickly testrun the product without having to signup.
dickbasedregex 8y ago
I've been brainstorming a shallow, poor-man's poor man version of this. I couldn't hope to compete. This looks incredible. Kudos!
- w_t_payne 8y ago
  I've been trying to write a python-based version for embedded applications...
  - dickbasedregex 8y ago
    I could see that. I've heard the tools in that space are terrible. That related to your day job industry? python-based version for tabular data processing & management, ecom oriented mostly (so basically op's product), myself.
    - w_t_payne 8y ago
      My main motivation is to have a tool that I can use for both prototyping algorithms and bringing those algorithms into production without having to jump to an entirely different set of tools and techniques.
dbranes 8y ago
Had to scroll down the page for a while before understanding the point of this: drag-and-drop data transformation pipelines that comes with app integrations at both ends. It’s a great idea!
nickreese 8y ago
Any plans for a “grab the latest file of this naming pattern from an SFTP” workflow?
- alexyaseen 8y ago
  We do indeed! We're adding name pattern matching to our file storage sources (dropbox, box, etc.) and also adding an FTP source. If you send an email to hi [at] parabola.io we can add you to the list to get notified. Also let us know if there are any edge cases you'd need it to support so we can make sure you'll be good to go.
hoppelhase 8y ago
Looks a bit like http://luna-lang.org http://luna-lang.org to me. Are there similarities?
everdev 8y ago
How is this different from Zapier or IFTT?
- chrisfrantz 8y ago
  More transformations it looks like. You could probably pipe things through Google Sheets to replicate most of what this is doing but that’s an extra step. The whole point is to eliminate those.
pier25 8y ago
Obviously this is meant for companies or individuals without developers or technical skills. If you have the technical knowledge a lock in service like this doesn't make much sense. The problem is that someone without a technical background won't initially see the value in a tool like this and I doubt non technical companies/individuals will need as much automation to justify it's price. Edit: I think a much more sensible pricing would have been to offer a desktop app and then charge users for the automations they want online on a consumption basis.
- sharmata 8y ago
  wouldn't it save programmers time? Instead of setting up a writing a program, debugging it, maintaining it, etc?
closetnerd 8y ago
Is there any plans to offer Jira/Atlassian integration?
- cbkirk 8y ago
  That's definitely on our roadmap, and we move things around based on need/interest of users. Shoot us an email to hi [at] parabola.io with what you're looking to do and we'd love to see how we can help.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nathan_f77 8y ago
This looks really awesome! I would love to build an integration for FormAPI [1], which would allow people to fill in PDFs. We would save the PDFs to Dropbox or send them as an email. I'll send a message on the site chat! [1] https://formapi.io https://formapi.io
snrji 8y ago
This looks exactly like an online version of Talend.
omegote 8y ago
Pentaho anyone?
chatmasta 8y ago
I’ve seen a lot of attempts at this product, and none have really caught my eye. Looks like you really nailed it. Btw, great marketing website. The use cases section is critical and it’s amazing how many sites miss that. As others have alluded to, the challenge will be when users need to do something non-standard with the data. From your comments, it sounds like everything is built in JS. Is your multitenancy isolated enough that you would be able to build a JS scripting engine? That is, to enable power users to drop in some custom logic when they need to, by writing JS against a simple API. How long ago did you launch? How did you find your first customers, and are they happy with the product? Also would be keen to hear the story of your journey to product/market fit. Did the product always look like this? Did you talk to users as you built it? It’s such an ambitious project, I’d be scared I was building the wrong thing for months while getting to launch. But it seems like you’ve already hit product/market fit, so kudos for that.
BerislavLopac 8y ago
This is pretty much exactly what was supposed to be the main product of a startup I worked with some three years ago. Unfortunately the founders had unrealistic ideas about funding and the work required.
sireat 8y ago
Looks great, reminds of Labview a bit. :) Target market is something that UIPath currently addresses is it not? How does Parabola handle authorization issues? Is it mostly through the right API? I am teaching Python to office personnel who balked at the high price of UIPath but might find Parabola pricing easier to accept.
sebringj 8y ago
What features are better than Zapier? I am curious as I use Zapier for automating stuff I don't want to program especially for marketing releated and this does look like the flow can be more advanced?
pathartl 8y ago
So, SSIS? Where I work we're currently replacing everything that's SSIS with .NET services. I get the idea that taking the code out of it seems easier, but I've found it usually just leads to frustrating limitations. For our latest data migration we're moving things out of some SQL-based ticketing system, online accounting services, and FileMaker into Dynamics 365. Sure, it's not pretty to look at, but we can do some deep manipulation and mapping to existing entities in Dynamics that is frankly a chore in any sort of other migration tool. Ninja Edit: To handle stuff like scheduling, endpoints, etc we use Azure functions.
ApolloRising 8y ago
I understand your business pricing but your personal pricing is quite high at 600/yr for a regular simple user. You may want to consider testing it because consumers are used to 10 per month for the entire adobe photography suite. I know you are just starting up but I think you are going to get less traction at that price point.

291 points by alexyaseen 8y ago

sharemywin 8y ago

Nothing for windows? MS Office?

alexyaseen 8y ago
Parabola is browser-based so should work great on windows! And we support importing .csv and .xls files.
badtechstuff 8y ago
Microsoft has "Flow" which is basically Parabola, but considerably more confusing for end-users.
- hug 8y ago
  This is about as true as it gets. Also, the UI for flow is absolutely atrocious once you start adding large numbers of conditionals.

adamfeldman 8y ago

This feels like https://ballerina.io/ https://ballerina.io/ but for non-programmers, and with SaaS integrations built-in. I've spent so much time moving CSV between systems at an ecommerce company. Congrats on the launch, this looks awesome! Would love to learn more about how it was built.

cbkirk 8y ago
Thanks @adamfeldman. Parabola originally was pure JS: running the majority of each step function of the language in the user’s browser, making use of some python API endpoints and React and Immutable.js for some performance enhancements to know when steps needed to be calculated and rendered. Given there are definite limitations with browser based JS and user’s systems, we’re now a fully cloud based compute environment. As users make changes in our React UI, we send the work to a queue and then distribute it by parsing the flow tree across various node worker servers so steps can run in parallel (if your flow is built that way). Each step is self contained and we then use sockets (powered by PubNub) to notify the UI of changes.
- markatkinson 8y ago
  Can I ask what cloud products you use and the provider? Azure, AWS GC?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  This is a great way to scale your system. Well done. AWS Lambda is fairly reliable for running untrusted functions (as well as trusted functions with carefully managed inputs) at scale for customers, but any function provider should work well for this purpose (as long as their container lifecycle meets your needs).
rpadude 8y ago
Very cool. Similar to https://airflow.apache.org https://airflow.apache.org https://Composable.ai https://Composable.ai ...

alexyaseen 8y ago

zeptomu 8y ago
Hey, nice work. What would you say differentiates this service from say, Zapier?
- alexyaseen 8y ago
  I really like how dbranes described it below: >"drag-and-drop data transformation pipelines that comes with app integrations at both ends" Parabola is very focused on data transformation/manipulation. Our best customers end up with hundreds of steps in their flows, essentially creating full-fledged programs. As part of this focus on data transformation, we primarily operate in a batch-processing fashion. We also perform calculations live while you work on your flow, similar to a spreadsheet or a python notebook. Zapier on the other hand is great at connecting with TONS of tools, and makes integrations between those tools really smooth. It operates best in an event-based paradigm when you don't need to do much transformation/calculation in between connection points. There's probably a small amount of overlap at the edges, but in general it's pretty clear when a use case will be a good fit for a tool like Zapier or when it's a good fit for Parabola.

markatkinson 8y ago

This is awesome. I am currently working with a team to develop a workflow tool with an eventual designer. This is very inspiring. Take a look at Microsoft's logic apps, it is slightly more generalist, and not so focused on data processing but not nearly as polished as Parabola.

skanga 8y ago

Great idea - especially for non-programmers. The question I have is - can it outperform the command line? (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135841 for more) I almost always use awk/mawk for such things.

arosier 8y ago

Love the UI. One bit of feedback: on https://parabola.io/ https://parabola.io/ under "Self Documenting and Repeatable" I keep clicking the play buttons in the screenshot.

nickreese 8y ago
Did the exact same thing.

antoineleclair 8y ago

Congratulations for the launch. Definitely a good idea. I'm a developer and personally won't need this, but I'll definitely suggest this when I think this could replace some "real coding".

web007 8y ago

This looks pretty good, like Yahoo Pipes or IFTTT with a decent flow editor.

tlavoie 8y ago

Does this all run as some user's ID? Is it storing/managing credentials for them? RPA tools seem to be all the rage, but questions around accountability, auditability and other security aspects still stand out.

asasidh 8y ago

you should allow to quickly testrun the product without having to signup.

dickbasedregex 8y ago

I've been brainstorming a shallow, poor-man's poor man version of this. I couldn't hope to compete. This looks incredible. Kudos!

w_t_payne 8y ago
I've been trying to write a python-based version for embedded applications...
- dickbasedregex 8y ago
  I could see that. I've heard the tools in that space are terrible. That related to your day job industry? python-based version for tabular data processing & management, ecom oriented mostly (so basically op's product), myself.
  - w_t_payne 8y ago
    My main motivation is to have a tool that I can use for both prototyping algorithms and bringing those algorithms into production without having to jump to an entirely different set of tools and techniques.

dbranes 8y ago

Had to scroll down the page for a while before understanding the point of this: drag-and-drop data transformation pipelines that comes with app integrations at both ends. It’s a great idea!

nickreese 8y ago

Any plans for a “grab the latest file of this naming pattern from an SFTP” workflow?

alexyaseen 8y ago
We do indeed! We're adding name pattern matching to our file storage sources (dropbox, box, etc.) and also adding an FTP source. If you send an email to hi [at] parabola.io we can add you to the list to get notified. Also let us know if there are any edge cases you'd need it to support so we can make sure you'll be good to go.

hoppelhase 8y ago

Looks a bit like http://luna-lang.org http://luna-lang.org to me. Are there similarities?

everdev 8y ago

How is this different from Zapier or IFTT?

chrisfrantz 8y ago
More transformations it looks like. You could probably pipe things through Google Sheets to replicate most of what this is doing but that’s an extra step. The whole point is to eliminate those.

pier25 8y ago

Obviously this is meant for companies or individuals without developers or technical skills. If you have the technical knowledge a lock in service like this doesn't make much sense. The problem is that someone without a technical background won't initially see the value in a tool like this and I doubt non technical companies/individuals will need as much automation to justify it's price. Edit: I think a much more sensible pricing would have been to offer a desktop app and then charge users for the automations they want online on a consumption basis.

sharmata 8y ago
wouldn't it save programmers time? Instead of setting up a writing a program, debugging it, maintaining it, etc?

closetnerd 8y ago

Is there any plans to offer Jira/Atlassian integration?

cbkirk 8y ago
That's definitely on our roadmap, and we move things around based on need/interest of users. Shoot us an email to hi [at] parabola.io with what you're looking to do and we'd love to see how we can help.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nathan_f77 8y ago

This looks really awesome! I would love to build an integration for FormAPI [1], which would allow people to fill in PDFs. We would save the PDFs to Dropbox or send them as an email. I'll send a message on the site chat! [1] https://formapi.io https://formapi.io

snrji 8y ago

This looks exactly like an online version of Talend.

omegote 8y ago

Pentaho anyone?

chatmasta 8y ago

I’ve seen a lot of attempts at this product, and none have really caught my eye. Looks like you really nailed it. Btw, great marketing website. The use cases section is critical and it’s amazing how many sites miss that. As others have alluded to, the challenge will be when users need to do something non-standard with the data. From your comments, it sounds like everything is built in JS. Is your multitenancy isolated enough that you would be able to build a JS scripting engine? That is, to enable power users to drop in some custom logic when they need to, by writing JS against a simple API. How long ago did you launch? How did you find your first customers, and are they happy with the product? Also would be keen to hear the story of your journey to product/market fit. Did the product always look like this? Did you talk to users as you built it? It’s such an ambitious project, I’d be scared I was building the wrong thing for months while getting to launch. But it seems like you’ve already hit product/market fit, so kudos for that.

BerislavLopac 8y ago

This is pretty much exactly what was supposed to be the main product of a startup I worked with some three years ago. Unfortunately the founders had unrealistic ideas about funding and the work required.

sireat 8y ago

Looks great, reminds of Labview a bit. :) Target market is something that UIPath currently addresses is it not? How does Parabola handle authorization issues? Is it mostly through the right API? I am teaching Python to office personnel who balked at the high price of UIPath but might find Parabola pricing easier to accept.

sebringj 8y ago

What features are better than Zapier? I am curious as I use Zapier for automating stuff I don't want to program especially for marketing releated and this does look like the flow can be more advanced?

pathartl 8y ago

So, SSIS? Where I work we're currently replacing everything that's SSIS with .NET services. I get the idea that taking the code out of it seems easier, but I've found it usually just leads to frustrating limitations. For our latest data migration we're moving things out of some SQL-based ticketing system, online accounting services, and FileMaker into Dynamics 365. Sure, it's not pretty to look at, but we can do some deep manipulation and mapping to existing entities in Dynamics that is frankly a chore in any sort of other migration tool. Ninja Edit: To handle stuff like scheduling, endpoints, etc we use Azure functions.

ApolloRising 8y ago

I understand your business pricing but your personal pricing is quite high at 600/yr for a regular simple user. You may want to consider testing it because consumers are used to 10 per month for the entire adobe photography suite. I know you are just starting up but I think you are going to get less traction at that price point.