Retool: A Must Have Business Efficiency

Issue #1 Retool

The latest tool I’ve fallen in love with is Retool. It allows you to easily visualise and automate your data and processes. By building custom interfaces that integrate with a wide range of data sources without coding, you can 10X your project growth in no time.

Takeaways you’ll fall in love with

• Pre-built components: Most of what you need has already been built and you can just drag and drop components.

• Centralisation: An easy way to centralise all your data across multiple data sources (Airtable, Google Sheets etc.)

• Integrations: Retool supports a wide range of integrations whether via API or third party services.

The reality of it’s limitations

• Customisation limits: As with any No Code tool, there are limitations to how much you can actually customise.

• Performance concerns: Very large datasets and complex applications are probably a bad fit since applications run on Retools servers.

• Cost: Retool can save development costs but the pricing model quickly adds up as the size of your team and application complexity increases.

Interesting use cases

• Customer support dashboard: Provide support teams with a comprehensive overview of customer issues, requests, and interactions. Integrate support tickets, user profiles, and communication histories into a centralized dashboard

• Financial Reporting and Analysis: Build financial dashboards that aggregate data from various sources, such as sales platforms, payment processors, and internal databases. These dashboards can provide real-time insights into financial metrics.

• Customer Onboarding and Success Programs: Build tailored onboarding platforms for new customers, including step-by-step guides, resource libraries, and tracking progress.

Insider hacks you should know about

• Utilise templates: Don’t start from scratch. Let somebody do 80% of the work and customise an existing template.

• Add Javascript: Advanced users can use Javascript to extend the functionality such as performing advanced data transformations or advanced logic.

• Optimise queries: Use Retool's query caching feature to reduce load times for frequently accessed data. This is particularly useful for data that doesn't change often.

For building internal tools. I can’t recommend Retool enough! Share with somebody that might find this useful.

Until next time,

Dominic