I am sharing Metabase with you all today, as its launching publicly, after finding it really useful the past few months inside Expa. I have been using Metabase to make sense of Company data in a way that is easier and simpler than using any other external tool. It’s been great as its platform agnostic and you can use it on; Heroku, Elastic Beanstalk (AWS), as well as your own hosted instance if you wanted. I have used a ton of business intelligence tools in the past and this is a super fast and simple way to get actionable data - great for showing your CFO/CMO/CRO the data they need to make smarter decisions.
Obviously I am a little biased, but after using this tool for the past few months I was excited to share what Sameer + team has been working on!
Hey Eric -
Thanks for the mention and appreciate the kind words. Been great working with all the NYC Expa companies.
To add a little color to the line about how great Metabase is, one of its primary strengths has been that it has a very simple interface that’s usable by anyone in a company. It’s not just for folks with “engineer”, “analyst” or a “C” in their title. We’ve had folks on growth teams, sales support, customer happiness and bizdev teams use it on their own.
Appreciate the love and if anyone has any questions, I’d be more than happy to answer them.
Cheers.
-Sameer
Congrats Eric, Sameer! Love that it increases access and participation in data analytics to more employees In a company. Can you share the story behind making it open source?
@nikhilkal Thanks Nikhil!
We had originally built it for the Expa portfolio. After using it for our first handful of companies, and getting feedback from others who had been guinea pigs for it, it seemed like something that people would find useful.
And on many levels, it's the same thing I've wanted at every company I've worked on for the last 10+ years, so there was a bit of scratching our own itches.
We've been using this at Drip for a while and it's been really helpful in getting the non-engineering team members digging into the data. Its also had some unintended benefits for our team, like giving everyone a simple interface to our database which comes in handy when doing customer support (i.e. How long has this member been in the system, how much have they spent with us, etc). We recently setup a stats radiator in the middle of our space with a handful of Metabase dashboards rotating throughout the day. Recommended.
@htmiguel Thanks! Working with you guys has been awesome.
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@sameer_alsakran looks like something that is a lot more user friendly then some of the advanced tools we use today like Tableau. Maybe not as flexible (yet) but much better for the majority of our teams working with log data. I see redshift is in development. Any plans to add BigQuery?
@imrat Thanks! We've definitely focused on making it accessible to non-analytsts as a primary design goal. BigQuery is definitely something we've discussed a lot. Hoping to tackle it once we get a sense of how many people would use it. If it's not too much to ask, could you open an issue (https://github.com/metabase/meta...) to let us know you'd like a BQ driver?
Access to information within an organization is so key. You never know where the next great idea will come from. I've been in the hot seat at Clearspring (now AddThis) building tools on top of tools and it took so much of my time away from building our products. The ability to collaborate, synthesize, annotate, analyze and summarize seems too good to be true. Checking it out now to learn more.
@blake No, other than the fact that we're both in Soma and have a rather high percentage of hipster employees. We are looking into building a connector to Metamarket's Druid database however.
@nathantbernard Most of the small startups that have tried us out tend to settle on common pattern. It's typically pointed at the main application DB (or a read replica), and it's used for setting up a dashboard + automating all the little questions that get asked all the time. Initially it's an alternative for mysql workbench or something similar. As companies grow, we typically find companies spending a bit of time transforming their data into a more "analytical" shape.
Which DB are you guys using?
Sexiest open source product I've seen in a long while, I've got it connected to our staging database for playing around with but I'm planning on spinning up a shared instance for the team soon :)
@tommoor Thanks! And would love to hear about how it goes with real data. If you run into issues DM me or leave a note at http://discourse.metabase.com/ were the team hangs out
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