A few weeks before YC Demo Day 2017, we were burning $1000 a day trying to build a UK-based Venmo competitor. Less than 60 days of runway. Time to pivot.

The Insight

Building our fintech, we'd created tons of internal tools - fraud detection, KYC verification, withdrawal approval. Then it hit us: all internal tools look the same. Tables, buttons, forms. What if there was a drag-and-drop way to build these faster?

Prototype to Pilot

Within days, we had a working prototype. A few weeks later at Demo Day, we announced we'd signed a $1.5M enterprise pilot. The pivot worked.

Outbound Sales Machine

For the first 18 months, growth was purely outbound. We used Crunchbase to find 10,000 target companies, hired freelancers on Upwork to find leads ($0.10 each), and A/B tested email copy relentlessly. 8% reply rate - right at the SaaS benchmark.

The Hacker News Moment

August 2018: we posted on Hacker News and everything changed. Business immediately shifted to inbound. 5, 10, 20 companies signing up daily.

Real-Time Customer Success

We built tools to watch customers in real-time. When a large account was using Retool at 3:30pm, we'd get a Slack alert. When they hit an error, we knew before they did. We'd proactively reach out: "Hey, saw your query timed out. Want to debug together?" This saved 80% of customers who would have churned.

• YC: W17
• Demo Day pilot: $1.5M
• First HN launch: Failed (wrong messaging)
• Second HN launch: Exploded
• Current valuation: $3.2B
• ARR: $93.5M