What does dbt Labs consider their core competency or unique selling proposition?

The coolest thing for me, it’s why I joined dbt Labs, is the sheer enthusiasm that people have for the product. dbt is not just software in the traditional sense. It changes an entire workflow of how people do their day-to-day jobs. 

It's very common for people to say, "I won't work at a company that doesn't use dbt," because what it means for them is, “If your employer doesn't invest in dbt, your day-to-day is going to be hard, and you’re going to have all these downstream data quality and reliability problems.”

People can describe their business transformation logic and their metrics in dbt code and get the benefits of built in documentation, testing, version control, which makes actual data table creation a lot safer and the quality a lot higher. 

You can try to do this in GUI based transformation tools but it's just not as powerful or descriptive as you'd like, or you can pick another tool like Airflow, but that’s maybe overkill for what you're trying to do.

Where I think dbt is exceptional is this Goldilocks approach—we say, "If you know SQL, we can empower you to do all these other amazing things and help you earn the right to create clean tables in your production warehouse." That was really never done before dbt.