Re:Launch HN: Narrator (YC S19) – a data modeling platform b...
by ahmedelsama on Thursday October 01, 2020 @12:11PM
(#24652607)
That is really great to hear! I think you make a great point and we will discuss your recommendations internally to improve our messaging.
I am excited to chat in person.
The main thing this product strikes me as is "The ETL tool that understands your business". Whereas the domain language of most ETL tools is at the level of DW technologies (rows, columns, schemas, facts, dimensions, indexes, join algos, views, dags, orchestration schedules), the domain language of Narrator is at the level of the business (activities, customers, relationships, spend, etc). In a way it's sort of similar to the old convention over configuration religious war. I could see companies using Narrator for the 80% of ETL that is just plain table stakes in order to compete nowadays and offloading most of the definition and minor customization of this ETL to less technical folks. And maybe in parallel the data engineers would use plain old code to do the last 20% of ETL that is truly proprietary and specific to the business.
Not sure if my biased initial reading of your pitch was off but it seemed like you were focusing heavily on addressing the pain points of the star schema. I've found that most people fall into two camps: either they don't care at all about the kimball star schema world and they're just loading tables however they see fit into their warehouse or they are willing to go to their grave defending the star schema and its variants. In either case, I don't think you gain much by positioning yourself as the antidote to the star schema. I think you could capture customers in both camps by focusing instead on the fact that your ETL tool has a deep understanding of how companies that rely heavily on a web presence work. I think this would also better align you with the ability to increase your customers' revenue as opposed to optimizing engineering/infrastructure concerns which is an easier sell.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. I'm going to shoot you a short email in case you want to connect.