Top all-time · #8306
Retool Blog
Company blog · tryretool.com/blogprogrammingbusiness
Retool Blog is the company blog at tryretool.com, writing about programming and business. Since 2018, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “Show HN: Retool – build internal tools faster”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link the Retool homepage, a product for building custom internal tools, in threads about spreadsheets, Visual Basic, Salesforce and CRUD apps. The comments do not discuss any blog post's writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Build, deploy, and manage internal tools with Retool's unified engine. Connect to any database, API, or LLM. Leverage AI throughout your business.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: Retool – build internal tools faster4 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2018-08-09
- Technology That Changed Air Travel2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-11-19
- What's Salesforce?2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-02-21
What Hacker News says?
(I work at Retool, and Patrick is an investor.) > Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? I think that most end-user applications now have APIs that allow you to manipulate the data. For example, Salesforce, Lever, Excel, etc. all have APIs for reading and writing data. Allowing end users to build custom UIs on top of those APIs seems like a simpler problem. Retool ( https://tryretool.com…
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on “Questions”Submitted What's Salesforce? as a story · 619 points
HN discussionAs an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood. If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) that is essen…
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on “Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B”Submitted Show HN: Retool – build internal tools faster as a story · 592 points
HN discussionHi, I'm one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I've always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the "business people" always used. Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool; https://tryretool.com ), I now understand a lot more, hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the business-side of things (sales, marketing,…
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on “What's Salesforce?”Submitted The Slide Rule as a story · 162 points
HN discussionRetool | SF, ONSITE Hi! We're Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) - a fast way to build internal tools. We recently launched on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966 ). We're profitable, growing quickly, and have raised money from great technical founders, including Paul Graham, John + Patrick Collison, Nat Friedman, Greg Brockman, etc. We've significantly de-risked the business (good signals of early pmf,…
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on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)”Submitted Building apps on top of Google Sheets as a story · 87 points
HN discussionHi! I'm David, the founder of Retool ( https://tryretool.com ). We describes ourselves as "a fast way of building custom internal tools". (That's what's on our landing page, in fact!) We're inspired heavily by Excel and visual programming. The idea is that business apps — even custom ones — all have the same building blocks for their front-ends: tables, buttons, dropdowns, textinputs, etc. And so we give you all of…
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on “Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL”Submitted Technology That Changed Air Travel as a story · 67 points
HN discussionHave you looked at Retool[0] at all? I don't know if you have a budget > $0, but they are awesome for this sort of thing. [0] https://tryretool.com
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on “Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL”Submitted Typography for Developers as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHi — that’s what we’re working on! Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) is similar to Excel, except the cells are themselves React components. And you can refer to other components inside the props for each component. You can pull in data either via SQL, APIs, or any other data source we support. Everything inside Retool is also JavaScript, so it’s pretty hackable. If you’ve got any feedback, please let me know! I’m dav…
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on “Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets”Submitted Salesforce, for Engineers as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWe're Retool ( https://tryretool.com ). We're not successful startup yet. But we're definitely a startup, haha. We did a Show HN a year ago: ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515494 ). Then we did YC, raised a bit of money (almost entirely off our HN traction), and launched around a few weeks ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966 ). Now we're profitable!
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on “Ask HN: Did any Show HN posts turn into successful startups?”Submitted Retool: Build tools on top of Firebase as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://tryretool.com (YC W17) is great for this use case.
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on “Ask HN: What's the fastest tool for basic CRUD?”Submitted What's Salesforce, and why's it worth $100B? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWow, this comment got me really excited. I, too, have always wondered why programming has always been us programmers, sitting down in front of a text editor, writing tokens (def, if, = etc.). It’s what got me working on Retool ( https://tryretool.com ). The idea is that visual programming has a bad rap, primarily because it’s being used in the wrong places. Most people try to apply visual programming to end-user sof…
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on “Sketch raises $20M in Series A funding”Submitted How booking air travel works as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI’m so glad people are finally talking about VB! For a certain subset of programming, VB is very effective. I’ve been working on “VB, but hosted in the cloud, and built specifically for developers”: https://tryretool.com . We’re still early, so I'd appreciate any feedback :). To use Retool, you’re ideally an engineer who knows both SQL and JS. We connect to most databases, as well as any arbitrary REST / GraphQL API…
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on “The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic”Submitted The Technology That Changed Air Travel as a story · 3 points
HN discussionVisiCalc is really cool. I think it was probably the earliest "killer app" — you would buy a computer literally to use VisiCalc. As an engineer... I've always struggled with understanding spreadsheets. To me, it always seemed that writing code was strictly better. For example, as somebody mentions further down the thread, spreadsheets don't a) connect to external datasources easily, b) are very limited in terms of t…
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on “VisiCalc's Spreadsheets Changed the World”Submitted The Slide Rule as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you are considering this and it’s a small business, please consider Retool ( https://tryretool.com ) or something similar. The thing with SF is that it’s way too big for starting small and it’s hard to customize when you start getting bigger. You don’t need more than a couple of SQL tables to have a basic, simple, CRM and you own the data that you would be able to easily analyze in your favorite dashboard tool.
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on “Open-sourcing the Lightning Web Components framework”Submitted Building a version-controlled S3 file manager as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNice. Looks like a competitor to Retool: https://tryretool.com/ . (or perhaps the other way around, since Bubble predates Retool)
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on “YC Hackathon without writing code”Submitted What's Salesforce? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tooling to build custom internal tools as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Admin Panel Roundup as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
