7 ms·

Post mortem of our 1st YC startup: a Reverse ETL

57 points by AnhTho_FR 4y ago

eternalban 4y ago
Sounds like an application for ChatGPT. I would try this again getlago.
- AnhTho_FR 4y ago
  You mean writing this using ChatGPT instead of « handwriting » it?
  - eternalban 4y ago
    The issue seems to be the lack of data modeling interest/knowledge of users. ChatGPT could be trained on the schema and so be able to map user's plain english to api calls. So minimally the front-end could be GPT -> api-encoder -> api-call.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
Why is this not on a corporate blog? It makes no sense to me post this sort of stuff on GitHub. Are they that broke they can't afford to host a static site on s3? Edit: Nevermind, I see why. So people star their GitHub repo. People go there and oh that sounds interesting. Give a GitHub star. Then they use that as social proof which they do in the post. Smart idea.
- 99failures 4y ago
  They expect the blog to survive the company.
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    I may be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure they're not saying they're shutting down and are not in the process of shutting down. They are pivoting. And are in the process of the pivot. If they think that blog will survive long than the company then really it doesn't make any sense for them to keep all their marketing efforts up. Which this is clearly a part of. And it really does not make sense for them to publish that they're shutting up shop in the same post as they're talking about signing 5 companies to support deals.
- l-lousy 4y ago
  Putting “here’s how we changed on a previous product” doesn’t really need to be on a small corporate site. It being a sort of investigation fits better on GitHub where fewer people will accidentally stumble across it from their current product.
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    There is a whole lot of bigging up their current product. That blog post is part of their marketing campaign. And the entire point of it is so people will get to their product. Also: * it's mixed up with all their other marketing material for this product. * it's in their current product's repository It's more likely people will stumble across it when looking at their product. As I said in my edit. The reason for it being on their GitHub is to increase the likihood of GitHub stars which they use as social proof.
unwind 4y ago
I guess "ETL" in the article stands for "extract, transform, load" [1] which seems to describe a workflow/pipeline concept for importing data into a database. The described company was into "reverse ETL" so I guess ... report-generation? Taking data from a database and presenting it nicely. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BillinghamJ 4y ago
  Reverse ETL is where you take data from your warehouse and load it back to places you might typically use as sources. Eg you might send data from BigQuery to Google Ads, Intercom, your transactional DBs, Google Workspace, etc. It's not really reporting in the visualisation or "send a PDF to a human" sense
- jerrygenser 4y ago
  Taking data from a database and pushing it into another tool, not just a static report
  - flandish 4y ago
    As a long time “back end” ETL guy - it’s just “etl” in different words. Marketing for powercenter. :p (i love informatica products..)
- sails 4y ago
  Some details here [1] > Reverse ETL enables companies to move transformed data from their cloud warehouse out into operational business tools, doing the reverse of ETL (which enables companies to ingest data into their data warehouse for transformation and modeling). It’s a new approach to making data actionable and solving the “last mile” problem in analytics by empowering business teams to access—and act on—transformed data directly in the SaaS tools they already use every day. [1]https://www.moderndatastack.xyz/category/reverse-etl-tools https://www.moderndatastack.xyz/category/reverse-etl-tools
sails 4y ago
> Growth marketers wanted more autonomy to manage their data, but were not necessarily willing to put the extra effort into: (i) understanding the structure of a database (dozens of tables), (ii) practice lightweight data modeling. This highlights the primary issue for most tools in the data analytics space: poor data modelling, leading to the exposed data being "too difficult to use in Business Tools". I've gathered some thoughts [1][2], but it boils down to the following: What users experience as the problem, is probably not the cause of the problem. Most builders respond to the user's poor experience at the interface as sufficient signal to start building solutions that improve that interface, while the underlying cause is deeper within the system (and the primary method for improving that underlying, currently, is data modelling). Here [3] is a snippet towards an example of Facebook building a solution that addresses the complexity issue. Also common for ex-FAANG engineers to their surprise, discover that none of this type of infra exists outside of FAANG. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33804938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33804938 [2] https://twitter.com/rdrn_/status/1604528546784870402 https://twitter.com/rdrn_/status/1604528546784870402 [3] https://seattledataguy.substack.com/p/a-zero-etl-future#:~:text=Integrating%20Data%20%2D%20One,the%20analytical%20side https://seattledataguy.substack.com/p/a-zero-etl-future#:~:t....
- _bohm 4y ago
  poor data modeling, or data modeling that is well suited to the needs of the application, but not to the needs of analysts
  - sails 4y ago
    Great addition, and a very important point. Analysts are expected to use the exhaust and incidental output of applications to try and generate insight instead of their needs being better considered at the design stage. This is all within the context of analysts also needing to reconcile across multiple source (SaaS and other) systems leads to very brittle pipelines, and consumers downstream completely dissatisfied.
newmac 4y ago
re: posting to github blog. It is simply to get additional stars on the repo. It's smart if you can pull it off, but it does get a bit weird on news.yc where you expect to be going to a repo when you see github links. The OP/Author has recycled posts from their corporate blog to their GitHub and then submitted them to YC many times in the last few weeks: For example, this post was submitted by them 2 days ago [1] and is on their blog here [2]. Their submission history shows a this is a pretty regular pattern at this point. [3]. To be honest, they've done a very impressive job of content marketing in this community in the last 6 months. I'm not sure anyone has been able to place more of their own stuff on the front page. From that perspective, they are doing something quite successfully. From the perspective of the community, it might feel like things have been a bit over manipulated at this point. I'm not sure at which point you earn a shadowban for self-promotion, but I have to wonder if it's worth the risk. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016490 2: https://www.getlago.com/blog/post-mortem-of-our-1st-yc-startup-a-reverse-etl https://www.getlago.com/blog/post-mortem-of-our-1st-yc-start... 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=AnhTho_FR https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=AnhTho_FR
- pc86 4y ago
  I'm not sure how based on the title of this submission you could expect it to be any sort of code repository.
- inerte 4y ago
  It really shows their Growth background :)
- swyx 4y ago
  > I'm not sure at which point you earn a shadowban for self-promotion, but I have to wonder if it's worth the risk. is simply submitting your own company blogposts a basis for shadowbanning? i understand if the titles are overly promotional but i dont think submitting your own content is - if it is of interest to the community
  - newmac 4y ago
mdorazio 4y ago
I'd love to see more posts like this on HN. You generally learn far more from what didn't work for others than you do from the many survivorship biased stories that usually get posted. Curious what questions you think you could have asked in your up-front interviews to uncover the issues prior to building?
- AnhTho_FR 4y ago
  Thanks! Not sure about the exact questions but I think we could have dug deeper into what the persona (growth team) was ready to invest or learn to be autonomous with their data needs. And if they had shown a history of « learning curve », so that we could have made sure it wasn’t just « wishful thinking ».

57 points by AnhTho_FR 4y ago

eternalban 4y ago

Sounds like an application for ChatGPT. I would try this again getlago.

AnhTho_FR 4y ago
You mean writing this using ChatGPT instead of « handwriting » it?
- eternalban 4y ago
  The issue seems to be the lack of data modeling interest/knowledge of users. ChatGPT could be trained on the schema and so be able to map user's plain english to api calls. So minimally the front-end could be GPT -> api-encoder -> api-call.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

Why is this not on a corporate blog? It makes no sense to me post this sort of stuff on GitHub. Are they that broke they can't afford to host a static site on s3? Edit: Nevermind, I see why. So people star their GitHub repo. People go there and oh that sounds interesting. Give a GitHub star. Then they use that as social proof which they do in the post. Smart idea.

99failures 4y ago
They expect the blog to survive the company.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  I may be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure they're not saying they're shutting down and are not in the process of shutting down. They are pivoting. And are in the process of the pivot. If they think that blog will survive long than the company then really it doesn't make any sense for them to keep all their marketing efforts up. Which this is clearly a part of. And it really does not make sense for them to publish that they're shutting up shop in the same post as they're talking about signing 5 companies to support deals.
l-lousy 4y ago
Putting “here’s how we changed on a previous product” doesn’t really need to be on a small corporate site. It being a sort of investigation fits better on GitHub where fewer people will accidentally stumble across it from their current product.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  There is a whole lot of bigging up their current product. That blog post is part of their marketing campaign. And the entire point of it is so people will get to their product. Also: * it's mixed up with all their other marketing material for this product. * it's in their current product's repository It's more likely people will stumble across it when looking at their product. As I said in my edit. The reason for it being on their GitHub is to increase the likihood of GitHub stars which they use as social proof.

unwind 4y ago

I guess "ETL" in the article stands for "extract, transform, load" [1] which seems to describe a workflow/pipeline concept for importing data into a database. The described company was into "reverse ETL" so I guess ... report-generation? Taking data from a database and presenting it nicely. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BillinghamJ 4y ago
Reverse ETL is where you take data from your warehouse and load it back to places you might typically use as sources. Eg you might send data from BigQuery to Google Ads, Intercom, your transactional DBs, Google Workspace, etc. It's not really reporting in the visualisation or "send a PDF to a human" sense
jerrygenser 4y ago
Taking data from a database and pushing it into another tool, not just a static report
- flandish 4y ago
  As a long time “back end” ETL guy - it’s just “etl” in different words. Marketing for powercenter. :p (i love informatica products..)
sails 4y ago
Some details here [1] > Reverse ETL enables companies to move transformed data from their cloud warehouse out into operational business tools, doing the reverse of ETL (which enables companies to ingest data into their data warehouse for transformation and modeling). It’s a new approach to making data actionable and solving the “last mile” problem in analytics by empowering business teams to access—and act on—transformed data directly in the SaaS tools they already use every day. [1]https://www.moderndatastack.xyz/category/reverse-etl-tools https://www.moderndatastack.xyz/category/reverse-etl-tools

sails 4y ago

> Growth marketers wanted more autonomy to manage their data, but were not necessarily willing to put the extra effort into: (i) understanding the structure of a database (dozens of tables), (ii) practice lightweight data modeling. This highlights the primary issue for most tools in the data analytics space: poor data modelling, leading to the exposed data being "too difficult to use in Business Tools". I've gathered some thoughts [1][2], but it boils down to the following: What users experience as the problem, is probably not the cause of the problem. Most builders respond to the user's poor experience at the interface as sufficient signal to start building solutions that improve that interface, while the underlying cause is deeper within the system (and the primary method for improving that underlying, currently, is data modelling). Here [3] is a snippet towards an example of Facebook building a solution that addresses the complexity issue. Also common for ex-FAANG engineers to their surprise, discover that none of this type of infra exists outside of FAANG. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33804938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33804938 [2] https://twitter.com/rdrn_/status/1604528546784870402 https://twitter.com/rdrn_/status/1604528546784870402 [3] https://seattledataguy.substack.com/p/a-zero-etl-future#:~:text=Integrating%20Data%20%2D%20One,the%20analytical%20side https://seattledataguy.substack.com/p/a-zero-etl-future#:~:t....

_bohm 4y ago
poor data modeling, or data modeling that is well suited to the needs of the application, but not to the needs of analysts
- sails 4y ago
  Great addition, and a very important point. Analysts are expected to use the exhaust and incidental output of applications to try and generate insight instead of their needs being better considered at the design stage. This is all within the context of analysts also needing to reconcile across multiple source (SaaS and other) systems leads to very brittle pipelines, and consumers downstream completely dissatisfied.

newmac 4y ago

re: posting to github blog. It is simply to get additional stars on the repo. It's smart if you can pull it off, but it does get a bit weird on news.yc where you expect to be going to a repo when you see github links. The OP/Author has recycled posts from their corporate blog to their GitHub and then submitted them to YC many times in the last few weeks: For example, this post was submitted by them 2 days ago [1] and is on their blog here [2]. Their submission history shows a this is a pretty regular pattern at this point. [3]. To be honest, they've done a very impressive job of content marketing in this community in the last 6 months. I'm not sure anyone has been able to place more of their own stuff on the front page. From that perspective, they are doing something quite successfully. From the perspective of the community, it might feel like things have been a bit over manipulated at this point. I'm not sure at which point you earn a shadowban for self-promotion, but I have to wonder if it's worth the risk. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016490 2: https://www.getlago.com/blog/post-mortem-of-our-1st-yc-startup-a-reverse-etl https://www.getlago.com/blog/post-mortem-of-our-1st-yc-start... 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=AnhTho_FR https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=AnhTho_FR

pc86 4y ago
I'm not sure how based on the title of this submission you could expect it to be any sort of code repository.
inerte 4y ago
It really shows their Growth background :)
swyx 4y ago
> I'm not sure at which point you earn a shadowban for self-promotion, but I have to wonder if it's worth the risk. is simply submitting your own company blogposts a basis for shadowbanning? i understand if the titles are overly promotional but i dont think submitting your own content is - if it is of interest to the community
- newmac 4y ago

mdorazio 4y ago

I'd love to see more posts like this on HN. You generally learn far more from what didn't work for others than you do from the many survivorship biased stories that usually get posted. Curious what questions you think you could have asked in your up-front interviews to uncover the issues prior to building?

AnhTho_FR 4y ago
Thanks! Not sure about the exact questions but I think we could have dug deeper into what the persona (growth team) was ready to invest or learn to be autonomous with their data needs. And if they had shown a history of « learning curve », so that we could have made sure it wasn’t just « wishful thinking ».