[HN Gopher] Show HN: Build auto-updating dashboards in a spreads...
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Show HN: Build auto-updating dashboards in a spreadsheet
Author : benmcredmond
Score : 80 points
Date : 2023-02-15 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (equals.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (equals.app)
| realworldperson wrote:
| [dead]
| topicseed wrote:
| Are we able to enrich data via custom endpoints? Imagine a list
| of leads with a website column, can I hit my own endpoint for
| each row to fetch/scrape the email address from it? And if so,
| are there any caching options?
|
| Same with scraping data from LinkedIn or anywhere, really.
| benmcredmond wrote:
| You could use an import script
| (https://equals.app/integrations/import-scripts/) to pull data
| from a custom API and enrich at the same time. Import scripts
| let you run any arbitrary code and have the result added to a
| spreadsheet.
| adawg4 wrote:
| Product Hunt when?
| msencenb wrote:
| Any chance you are considering offering a white label solution
| for embedding in other SaaS products?
|
| One of my big features this quarter is to get deep into
| dashboarding/reporting for my own saas and I am incredibly
| impressed with your UI/UX.
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Appreciate the kind words. Unfortunately we're unlikely to
| offer a white label solution, we're pretty focused on building
| for end users. You could check out our import scripts which let
| people build custom integrations with python/js:
| https://equals.app/integrations/import-scripts/.
| airstrike wrote:
| Cool idea, congrats! Have you run into any performance issues
| with "Very Large" spreadsheets (>1M rows) given that this is
| running in the browser? Or can JS power something like that these
| days?
|
| Separately how does the SQL querying work? Do you just pass the
| query along on the connection to an external database or are you
| running a query engine on the data that's available to the app?
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Today we have a cap of 200k rows per sheet - this is a level
| where we feel performance is acceptable. We actually just
| doubled the limit from 100k and we have a plan to get to 1M
| rows by EOY. Definitely some meaty performance work here but
| it's tractable.
|
| For SQL querying, you set up a connection to your SQL database
| in Equals and then we pass queries to your database. Query
| results are copied into the spreadsheet where you can use full
| spreadsheet formulas, pivots, etc. against it.
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Hi HN, I'm Ben, one of the founders of Equals.
|
| My co-founder and I started Equals to build the data tool we
| always wished we had as part of the early Intercom team. We found
| no matter which new BI tool we adopted, we'd ultimately end up
| back in a spreadsheet. Yet, we'd then come back to the BI tool
| for easy access to live data.
|
| So - Equals is a spreadsheet with live data. Equals has native
| connections to databases, data warehouses, and other data
| sources. You can write SQL directly in the spreadsheet to pull in
| data from your database, or you can write Python/Javascript to
| pull data from any API. We launched the core Equals product about
| a year ago.
|
| Today we're launching Dashboards. With Dashboards you can hook in
| multiple data sources at once and build charts and tables that
| auto-expand. As your data updates, so does your spreadsheet and
| dashboard. We believe this is the simplest and most flexible tool
| for founders to stay on top of their business.
|
| We're still super early and so would love to hear your feedback
| on the product.
|
| Ben
| nrjames wrote:
| Looks interesting, but if I cannot self-host it on my company's
| internal cloud, I can't use it. I suspect there are similar
| requirements for a lot of potential enterprise clients. If
| self-hosting is part of the Enterprise pricing plan, you should
| mention that on the page.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Yup. Considering the data that would end up in this, a hosted
| solution is a non-starter for us, and most of my peers orgs.
| Interesting idea tho...
| sredevops wrote:
| Don't take the above comment as a negative (OP) because I
| want my boss to buy this yesterday. We really don't want to
| manage servers or manage anything so SaaS and a good
| privacy policy/our security team not complaining is all
| that matters.
|
| Edit: Just had time to go through the site, SSO would be
| important for enterprise.
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. We don't have self-hosting yet and no
| timeline unfortunately.
|
| We do have a few enterprise customers who were satisfied with
| our security after digging in. We're SOC 2 Type II, etc.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| In Europe nobody cares. It's not a dig, just stating it
| blatantly.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Yeah something like this would be awesome in the investment
| management business. Unfortunately, I don't care how many
| certificates you quote I'm not going to hand over data to
| you. And the vast majority of the industry is that way. A
| large untapped market but so many nifty tools are built
| which just insist on not providing a self hosted
| solution...
| selykg wrote:
| This is a really interesting product.
|
| Are these dashboards able to be used with any UI elements to
| filter down certain criteria? Say your dashboard chart shows
| all widgets, but you want to see certain widgets rather than
| all. I'd love to enable my team, who would ideally be viewers,
| to have a dropdown selection or something similar, to then
| filter the chart by what they need to see.
|
| One of the Tableau features I like is the ability to export the
| data that was used to calculate the dashboard. Plus with the
| filtering capabilities it allows my team to get out what they
| might need to then use as needed. Anything like that available
| in Equals? I really dig the Hubspot integration because Hubspot
| integration with Tableau is a real pain in the ass.
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Filters within the sheet is something on our roadmap - don't
| have it just yet. But! You can use our visual Query Builder
| to let less technical users change the underlying data that
| your charts + tables are pulling from.
|
| In terms of exporting the data, you can export to a CSV but
| typically you don't need to do this step to debug something.
| The biggest difference from Tableau is we are actually a full
| featured spreadsheet. You can do any investigation you want
| to do within Equals itself. When we want to go deeper on some
| dashboard we tend to make a copy of the document in Equals
| and dig in from there.
| selykg wrote:
| Thanks for the information.
|
| Do you offer any discounts for non-profits?
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Send me an email ben@equals.app with what you need and
| I'll see what we can do.
| mpeg wrote:
| I just gave it a go and am super impressed with the Salesforce
| connector, most of the tools I've tried are awful for SFDC
| (including data sync tools like airbyte etc)
|
| I loaded in around 100k rows and performance was fantastic.
|
| I think the only feature so far I haven't found is whether
| there is a way to join tables together in the app. With SFDC
| particularly it doesn't seem to have an option to write the
| SOQL query directly, and I can't access relationships with the
| field builder, so I have no easy way to do a client side join
| (apart from a ton of VLOOKUPs which is not ideal)
|
| I do love how calculated columns stay even after I re-query the
| source data, that and the auto-expanding are killer features.
|
| Super exciting product, very polished, I can't wait to see
| where it goes.
|
| PS. $18/mo for the pro version with scheduled queries is an
| absolute steal
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Thanks so much for the kind words and glad it resonates!
|
| Joins are coming very very soon. Stay tuned.
| kposehn wrote:
| This is immediately useful to my clients and I, but...
|
| 1. I want to add GA as a datasource but I'm stuck on unique
| page views and can't seem to change anything outside of the
| date range
|
| 2. The help center article on GA has a broken link:
| https://help.equals.app/en/articles/6584898-add-a-google-ana...
|
| 3. The UX is a bit unclear and the upgrade path isn't
| straightforwardly accessible for a free user in the workflow.
|
| I'm glad you launched and I'm looking forward to using it. Hit
| me up if you need more feedback.
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Damn sorry about the broken link will fix that.
|
| GA datasource is most primitive today, only supports unique
| pageviews. An expanded one is being built currently, will be
| out in a few weeks.
|
| Could you share a bit more on #3?
| kposehn wrote:
| #3 was more driven by my frustration with GA. It wasn't
| clear if GA is limited as a datasource or feature limited
| by free/paid tier.
|
| I'd suggest removing GA from the site as a feature or
| calling out the current limitations more clearly. While I
| could go get data out of BigQuery, that's more of a lift
| and the ease of using this to import GA for clients is a
| major draw.
|
| Thanks for the quick response and I'm looking forward to
| using it more.
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Ah got it - yeah our free plan is very generous. Only
| limitations are 3 editors, scheduled queries, and saved
| queries. It can do everything else. Keep an eye out for
| updated GA in next few weeks.
| cscheueuer wrote:
| FWIW I'm a product designer and I try onboarding for dozens of
| different products every month to make sure I'm aware of the
| latest and greatest patterns. I love your approach to self-
| serve onboarding for connectors.
| deburo wrote:
| Cool! I'll bookmark it for sure.
|
| I'd be interested in that product if I can figure out how to
| bring the data from a self-hosted MSSQL database into it somehow,
| and refresh it regularly without too much trouble. Perhaps I
| could whitelist IP addresses in our firewall to allow the site to
| connect to the database.
|
| Another problem is about sharing the dashboard; we are a Ms365
| business. Could we re-use those logins to log into shared
| Dashboards? I'm mostly concerned about the ease of viewing those
| Dashboards from the end-users' POV (our internal employees).
| benmcredmond wrote:
| Yep we easily connect to MSSQL and always from a static IP, so
| you should be able to whitelist. Our team will be happy to help
| if you run into any trouble.
|
| Unfortunately we don't support signing in with MS365 accounts.
| But we do allow you to turn on "auto-join from my domain" so
| anyone with a verified email at your domain can automatically
| join your Equals account.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I do this now with Google Sheets and SQL in the Google Apps
| Script. I've even got it hooked into my IDE for local dev.
| nokicky wrote:
| This comment all but guarantees Equals will be a huge success
| :)
| theturtletalks wrote:
| In fact, companies that do what Equals does are successful
| already:
|
| - NocoDB
|
| - Baserow
|
| - Rowy
| benmcredmond wrote:
| If that's working, great!
|
| Few differences I'd call out:
|
| - If you have summary tables with formulas we'll auto-extend
| those tables as we see new periods in your data. e.g. If you
| have "revenue by month" calculated using SUMIFs on top of
| charge data and we see a new month, we'll copy your formulas
| down/across.
|
| - Any charts based off those tables will also update. Sheets
| doesn't do either of these things.
|
| - Finally, people who've switched from Sheets have found our
| query UX to have much tighter iteration loops by being more
| deeply integrated into the product.
| dominicwhyte wrote:
| Big fan of Equals. We use it at our startup to track cohorts
| (using live data from Stripe)
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| I use APIConnector & Google Sheets and haven't looked back.
| https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/api_connector/9...
|
| This is working beautifully for BI applications in my company
| within our existing GSuite environments.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2023-02-15 23:01 UTC)