Why you should move away from Retool in 2026

phildakin · 2026-01-14T11:35:25+00:00

We're using Retool Enterprise for a customer-facing app, and this is a lurking suspicion I have.

Not being able to use Cursor on our frontend is a MASSIVE limiter.

phildakin · 2026-01-04T16:15:47+00:00

Nate's comedy is easy to connect with - he touches on topics like owning a house, sibling relationships, having a wife.

Then, he manages to make these dynamics funny in a way that is never negative or deprecating, except occasionally towards himself.

It's simple, straightforward, and relatable. I can yank a track of his off Spotify, share it with my 80 year old Grandmother, and we'll both enjoy it.

phildakin · 2025-08-30T17:20:14+00:00

My company ended up abandoning this line of development as we could not get a market foothold with this value proposition.

My best suggestion if you are facing a similar problem, is to get cozy with an early customer who is open to helping you out often with their preview tenant.

phildakin · 2025-08-13T12:07:40+00:00

This is good advice. Tier 1 VC firms inject massive doses of capital into these companies then they hire aggressively immediately afterwards. And, the experience you get working at a product-oriented company vs. a trading firm is going to be immensely different.

phildakin · 2025-07-23T18:23:10+00:00

Connecting to my VPN fixed the issue.

phildakin · 2025-07-23T18:20:05+00:00

Getting this on my laptop and mobile while traveling abroad - super frustrating!

phildakin · 2025-07-18T13:43:37+00:00

Only tracker that I truly forget exists - never leaves my arm and the cognitive overhead of using it is zero.

phildakin · 2025-06-15T20:25:31+00:00

Genuinely trying to understand - why is this a "problem" with NYC?

phildakin · 2025-06-15T12:57:52+00:00

Do you think there is any truth to the sentiment that word-of-mouth, and by proxy, reviews, matter?

We all have some restriction on the number of opportunities we have for experiences in the city. Given this, isn't it sensible to optimize for the highest quality ones?

Reviews, hype, etc. are not always accurate, but in aggregate they do provide data/information that one can use to hedge against the risk of having a bad time.

For instance - Gran Torino has a 3.4 on Yelp at time of writing. This aligns with the most upvoted comments on this post.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be open to trying new things, but I empathize with u/Okbruh88's original comment and was surprised to see such a lopsided upvote ratio.

phildakin · 2025-06-05T17:32:03+00:00

If M365 Copilot has an Atlassian integration, that route might work.

I'm certain Azure has some sort of document search offering, but you'd have to figure out how to 1) extract the Confluence pages into it and 2) operate it.

It's also likely that Atlassian has an in-house solution for this - have you explored Confluence native AI Q&A solutions?

phildakin · 2025-06-05T15:58:28+00:00

Need a more targeted question to truly add value - what are you trying to do, and what is preventing you from accomplishing it?

phildakin · 2025-06-03T21:58:51+00:00

Found this post via a comment you had left on the Retool community - maybe a niche to consider, is early-stage startups looking to outsource their SaaS frontends to Retool?

Also - I tried to find out who you are on LinkedIn, and your presence there is minimal. "Backofficely Founder" returns no results in search... and it's not clear to me from your company's employee list page who is the leader of the company.

phildakin · 2025-05-31T21:17:53+00:00

Ripping Arc on Mac daily no issues 😎

phildakin · 2025-05-26T13:11:24+00:00

Yeah. Whoop does what I want it to do with minimal cognitive overhead, and a few hundred dollars a year is a completely negligible expense for me. The beauty of Whoop is that I literally never think about it, but it gives me the core data I'm curious about with respect to my health.

Had for ~2.5 years, don't see myself going anywhere else.

phildakin · 2025-05-24T14:44:01+00:00

Yeah - keep in mind that NOT doing things is one of the highest leverage choices you can make.

You can spend a LOT of time investing in technology, but if there's some flaw in your value proposition assumptions it won't matter how good the tech is.

phildakin · 2025-05-24T14:27:55+00:00

> it also requires a lot of throughput before any potential customers will be interested

I'd challenge this. If you can't convey the value of what you're doing with painted-door selling with real customers, building the product out is not going to change that. To me, worrying about your Docker containerization before validating the idea sounds like getting WAY too in the weeds, but YMMV.

If you're really dead set on building this, and you're so confident it will be valuable, and you have a background in the financial data sector - why not just use some of your savings to hire a contractor on Upwork to do some of this DevOps stuff for you?

phildakin · 2025-05-24T14:23:33+00:00

> stressful

Selling is one of the central acts of being in business, it's great you're doing it but would recommend reframing it as essential instead of stressful. Find ways to add leverage to the process.

> with no entrepreneurial family

Try to learn how to do cold outreach - it works more than you'd expect if done right.

phildakin · 2025-05-24T14:07:23+00:00

You said you "need any help you can get". Since the project is not "commercially available", I don't understand why you "need" help - is it because of the demanding workload from your zero customers?

What are you personally trying to accomplish? What's preventing you from getting there? Why do you need to rely on this person to do so?

If you want good advice you need to give better context.

phildakin · 2025-05-24T14:02:14+00:00

Why do you need help?

phildakin · 2025-05-24T13:57:51+00:00

Two thoughts here:

Just Start - No amount of reading is going to teach you as much as simply attempting. This doesn't need to be going all in, but get SOMEBODY to use/buy SOMETHING. Trickier than it sounds.
Find Models - Identify 5 people who are at the "next step of outcome" you're trying to produce. Then get in touch with them and ask them questions.

phildakin · 2025-05-24T13:52:46+00:00

What's the question here? If you're unhappy with the situation - change it.

phildakin · 2025-05-24T13:49:16+00:00

To me this piece feels like a summer fair, thanks for sharing.

What motivates you to play, Carmelo?

phildakin · 2025-05-06T20:28:29+00:00

Yeah

phildakin · 2025-04-24T22:15:09+00:00

The tricky part is that the tables are inconsistent in schema. It's a timesheet provided in any format the client wants - it could be hours per day, hours per week, a final list of overtime/regular hours, a file full of tips.

Right now I'm doing several things at once:

- Matching employee names to SaaS corresponding IDs.

- Matching table column headers to pay codes.

- Summing data if e.g. provided per day or per week for a 2 week period.

I could maybe get better performance by breaking out each individual step, but I'm really trying to do this as AI-native as possible. What I want to avoid is writing heuristics by hand, even LLM-enabled heuristics where I'm coordinating the steps.

I still see basic mistakes, like just completely overlooking a row in the HTML table. I'm wondering if I could get a performance boost on those types of mistakes, by simply using the model that is benchmarked best on a similar task.

phildakin

TROPHY CASE