[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) - Presentation softwar...
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Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) - Presentation software that works
with your data
Hi HN! We're Dori, John, and Ellen from Thorntale
https://www.thorntale.com/, a new tool for making data driven
presentations. We make it easier for product, engineering, and data
teams to communicate their work. Here's a video demo:
https://youtu.be/yLCIo3jG2GM, and you can try it now at
https://app.sandbox.thorntale.com without signing in. Why? Because
one of us (the data scientist) kept asking the other (a backend
engineer) to move metrics from ClickHouse and CockroachDB, to
Snowflake, to Looker, and then to Excel, so that she could make a
chart in Excel for the BizOps team to screenshot, and finally stick
in Google Slides. Besides being annoying for everyone, this
produces inconsistencies and inaccuracies between the actual data
and what got presented. We wasted three peoples' time tracking down
queries, going back and forth, and reformatting the same
information. We're building something that can replace
PowerPoint/Google Slides for this kind of recurring presentation,
with direct data connections and native charting, so that we can
all stop screenshotting. Here are some example presentations: - A
postmortem report: https://app.thorntale.com/report/Postmortem-
Template-1755293... - A product weekly OKR update:
https://app.thorntale.com/report/Weekly-Product-OKR-Update-8... -
An exoplanet analysis: https://app.thorntale.com/report/Exoplanet-
Analysis-demo-rep... Thorntale has direct data connections and
native charting, eliminating the need for screenshotting or pixel
pushing. Currently, we can connect to and visualize data from
Google Sheets, Snowflake, and Postgres, with plans to add more
source types. We can create or update decks for recurring meetings
(like weekly product updates) in minutes instead of hours, and our
charts can be re-segmented to answer questions mid-presentation,
instead of as a followup days later. Another thing we're trying to
fix is the need to write a report in a document, only to recreate
that report later in a slide deck. This is duplicate work, and
splits what should be a single point of truth. Every Thorntale
report is actually both a presentation and a document, in one. You
can write your long version, choose which points are the most
important, and include only those points in the presentation view.
When people go back to read your work later, they can see the full
context you started with. Try it with the /reportonly command in
the tool. We have grand plans for more -- dbt support, more
datasource connectors, direct embedding from BI tools like Looker
and Tableau, contextual search, and more graph types -- but right
now we've got an early beta. You can check out our sandbox at
https://app.sandbox.thorntale.com. Some features are restricted in
sandbox mode, but if you like it, we've also got free and open
signups at https://app.thorntale.com. We're really excited to
share this with you all, and looking forward to your comments and
feedback!
Author : ellenfkh
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-03-28 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
| frankdenbow wrote:
| Congrats on launch! From reading a bit more about what you're
| doing, I do think there is something there with creating
| presentations that are evergreen, something beyond just a
| geckoboard dashboard that lives on past just creating a
| presentation one time. Do you have an idea of the main types of
| users who would want to use this? More thoughts
| https://youtu.be/cwjm6JhS5ZE
| dori23 wrote:
| Thanks for making a video & detailed feedback! It's super
| helpful hearing your take. We'll definitely work on adding real
| use cases and vision to our home page.
|
| Main users are people that make presentations and communicate
| data. It's not one specific role, as this could mean PMs, tech
| leads, BizOps, Data Scientists, etc. Specific workflows: weekly
| product updates, post mortems, ad hoc analyses, all-hands,
| board decks, revenue updates. Anything where understanding data
| is important.
|
| Also, in your video description you linked the wrong startup
| homepage!
| gepeto42 wrote:
| I work in security and a use case I've had in the past and
| hacked together using a combination of Power BI and
| powerpoint (hey, license was already paid for!) was exporting
| tons of data from logs, load into Power BI to generate charts
| and metrics that related to security (especially
| vulnerability management). It was the same slide every time,
| just new data.
|
| One thing that could be useful though is the ability to
| export a snapshot of what the slides would've been on any
| given day, for reference in the future (data might not be
| available in 2 years etc).
| ellenfkh wrote:
| Snapshots are on our roadmap! It's partially implemented
| already, we didn't quite have enough time to finish it
| before launch.
| gepeto42 wrote:
| Nice!
|
| Good luck with your product. As someone who regularly
| worked with tools like R Studio or Jupyter notebooks, it
| boggles my mind to still see monthly and quarterly
| presentations that are the same, except for some (badly)
| copy-pasta'd data, so there is a need for this!
| mritchie712 wrote:
| It's nuts you can't easily embed Looker charts into Google
| Slides. Google acquired them 4 years ago. If I search for "looker
| embed in google slide", most of what I see is about a company
| called "rollstack".
| ellenfkh wrote:
| There's a couple of embedding startups out there -- I think
| there was one doing embedded analytics in our batch earlier on,
| but I don't remember if they pivoted. Looker is especially
| egregious in my opinion, since Google owns it.
|
| Mostly, we think it's unhinged that companies spend so much
| cash on Snowflake/BQ/Looker and friends, not to mention the
| cost of hiring data engineers and data scientists, and then
| don't actually finish integrating it into the presentation
| layer.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Hard agree on the unhinged cost.
|
| One thing we're working on at https://www.definite.app/ (full
| data stack for less than you spend on your daily coffee)
| xz18r wrote:
| Congrats on the launch, but just so you know your website is
| broken to the point of being unusable on mobile. Bookmarked to
| check on desktop because the story sounds intriguing!
| johnstimac111 wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out! What seemed broken to you, exactly?
| We've tested pretty extensively on mobile, but there always
| seem to be more edge cases in the wild
| Klonoar wrote:
| Unrelated to their point, but if you click on the "view a
| query" icon in a presentation and then try to get the popover
| to disappear, it's stuck and doesn't go away.
|
| (Safari)
| ellenfkh wrote:
| Never mind, found it. Just deployed a fix, it should work
| now!
| xz18r wrote:
| I messaged your LinkedIn company account with some
| screenshots.
| khalilmiri wrote:
| Congrats on the Launch !
| apimade wrote:
| This is a tough sell except maybe for product pre sales demos
| which you know the types of questions to expect, and the UX needs
| to be slick as hell.
|
| For internal office presentation, I don't see this being all that
| beneficial. Throwing multiple views and cuts of data in the
| appendix is pretty standard, and the data team usually collects
| those views as they decide what data to present to the business.
| dori23 wrote:
| You're right, unfortunately it is pretty standard, and I found
| it to be a massive waste of my time. I was the person on the
| data team prepping those appendix slides. Before meetings, I
| talked with key stakeholders to make sure I had created charts
| that would answer potential questions. Instead of working on
| strategic projects, I was herding cats and formatting charts. A
| lot of times I was just doing riffs off the same table or
| query.
|
| This is of course for larger readouts and companies. At smaller
| companies & for non-critical presentations, I didn't even have
| time to create appendix slides. So instead my audience ended up
| with a backlog of questions that would never be answered.
| jallmann wrote:
| Congrats on the launch - rooting for y'all!
| mahsima wrote:
| What a great product. why its not on
| https://productivity.directory?
| shuangly wrote:
| The app loads very fast. Looks neat. What more data sources do
| you plan to add? Would use this for my investor updates
| ellenfkh wrote:
| Thanks! We've got a PostHog integration baking in our staging
| environment at the moment, and are working on Metabase and
| BigQuery next.
|
| What sources are you using for investor updates?
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