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Launch HN: Secoda (YC S21) – Searchable Company Data
Hey HN, we’re Etai and Andrew, and together with our team, we’re building Secoda (https://www.secoda.co https://www.secoda.co). We do search (that actually works!) for your company data. The name Secoda stands for "Searchable Company Data".
As a company grows, so does its data. Tables, metrics, queries, and dashboards often become isolated and are difficult to find. Even with great practices, organizations still struggle to get value out of their data - up to 73% of all enterprise data goes unused. One of the big contributors to this problem is that organizations create data silos by not documenting and centralizing their data knowledge in a single place where every employee can access information about data.
Andrew and I experienced this problem first hand at the last company we worked at. Andrew led the Product team and I led the Operations team and found that it was extremely difficult to find, understand and use data without looping in someone on the data team to help. The problem was that we only had 1 employee on the data team who supported over 100 employees asking questions about how to find and use company data, which meant that it would take around 2 weeks to get an answer to any data request.
Other data management tools focus on listing all data resources, regardless of their relevance or accuracy - you generally just get a list of what's available, but not in a form that's very meaningful. We adopted some of these tools in our last jobs but found that they created an overwhelming index of too many tables, dashboards and queries that weren’t relevant to most employees. This meant that even after adopting a tool to solve the problem, most employees still couldn’t use them to find, understand and use data.
Our approach to solving this problem is to build Secoda as a tool that helps data teams curate metadata for less technical employees. Instead of listing every resource, data teams can use our tool to curate and document data for specific departments or roles. As a result, employees who are less familiar with data will not be overloaded by information that is irrelevant or too technical. Our goal is basically to be like Google search for in-company data. You enter what you need and you get back the relevant information. We integrate into databases, data warehouses, BI, and transformation tools and offer both an on-prem and cloud-hosted deployment.
Over the last six months, our team has been improving our product closely with our early adopters to build a better product. Today, we’re excited to share the launch of our self-service product with the HN community. You can now sign up to Secoda, connect your database or data warehouse and start using Secoda without a sales call. We offer a free 14-day trial (no credit card required). After the free trial, we charge per editor, per month. If you’d like, you can also take a look at this video of us setting up our Secoda workspace: https://www.loom.com/share/f41b317441554a36930b9cfe4c91a45f https://www.loom.com/share/f41b317441554a36930b9cfe4c91a45f.
We're also hiring for a number of roles, which you can find here: https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/secoda https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/secoda.
We’d love to hear about your experiences with data discovery and any ideas/feedback/questions you might have about what we’re building!
- coderintherye 5y agoWe've been using Secoda since the Meet the Batch thread. It's come a long way already since then. Great product! Hard part is still getting the team to use it, but we've been making inroads.
- dang 5y agoThat thread was at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28156461, for those curious.
- nchudleigh 5y agoWe have exactly this problem (and have tried to solve it in various ways) and launched Secoda internally at PartnerStack a few days ago. Excited to see it roll-out in the org and build a solid data knowledge base.
- mritchie712 5y agoHow is this different than ThoughtSpot?
- andrewmcewen 5y agoSecoda is different from ThoughtSpot in a few ways: 1. It is likely that you'll need to setup a 1:1 meeting with a ThoughtSpot expert to help get your company up and running on the software. Our goal with Secoda is to be a self-service platform that is designed for any company, large or small, to get their data knowledge base setup in 5 minutes. 2. ThoughtSpot's price point is typically in the six figure range, which is much higher than Secoda's price point that starts at $29/editor on the platform. 3. Thoughtspot's core focus is providing answers to data questions through visualizations. Secoda takes a more comprehensive approach to documenting data knowledge. In addition to having visualizations that help answer questions, we also provide a shared data dictionary for defining metrics, as well as a catalog that can store tables, dashboards, jobs, and many other data resources.