Who are Retool's main competitors and how does it differentiate itself from them?

This is a great question, because the answer is unintuitive. 

Retool's primary competitor—what we lost the most deals out to—was React. 

It was not a company. It was not a startup. It was not another tool. It was always engineers choosing to build internal tools themselves. That could be in Django, or it could be in React, or it could be in anything—but usually it was React. 

The way that Retool positioned itself against build-it-yourself was as a massive timesaver. That was the one value we focused on, we focused: build tools much faster. 

There's no reason for you—when you're building an internal UI for your team—to be writing React code from scratch to set up your infrastructure, and then setting up your web server, and then setting up your table component, and then setting your date picker component, and then every time you want to make a change, you have to go through your whole Git workflow. 

That was very resonant. They'd be like, "Look, I built maps in React and you know what that looks like here, I'm going to build you an admin panel in four minutes. That's going to work just as well, and if we want to change any part of it, it's just as simple as clicking something and changing it." 

It was a time-saving thing. If we were to have to position more against enterprise competitors, which I can run through in a bit, or other startups, they think that the value prop might have been different. But when I was there, it was very clearly like we are positioning against a building-this-yourself situation.