I’m excited to share a new startup I’ve been working on, Grapple! Grapple is a no-code data platform for exploring, reporting, and sharing data. Grapple makes it easy to analyze your existing data, visualize it in beautiful dashboards, and share it with your team. Even better, Grapple keeps your data fresh with hourly data syncs. If you’ve ever been held back by the data tools like Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Google Data Studio, then Grapple is the tool for you.
Grapple is launching in Spring 2025, and you can join the waitlist at cloudgrapple.com.
What sets Grapple apart is that it’s ridiculously easy to use. Teams that currently use Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Google Data Studio or spend way too much time writing vlookups and pivot tables in spreadsheets will love Grapple. Grapple is the tool I wish I would have had when I started learning data reporting and business intelligence tools.
The problem with existing data tools is they require a lot of manual setup, ongoing maintenance, and aren’t nearly flexible enough. When doing in-depth problem solving, you often need to work with multiple disparate datasets but these tools aren’t setup for that. As a workaround, you probably export data into spreadsheets or make the leap and learn SQL to explore the data warehouse yourself. Overall, these approaches are expensive, time consuming, and ineffective.
With Grapple, simply signup and connect your data sources like Salesforce, Stripe, or Shopify. You’ll be able to start querying and reporting on your data in minutes. Minutes! Traditional data platforms require days or weeks of manual implementation, modeling, and training.
In data nerd speak, Grapple ships with a built-in ETL, data warehouse, data models, visualization layer, and a bunch of other niceties that typically require a lot of manual setup. Without Grapple, you’d need half a dozen or more tools to accomplish the same thing. And even if you had these other tools, you’d still spend days waiting on your data team to add the data you need to the warehouse, fix a data model problem, or train you on how to use the expensive self service data tool they bought for you to use.
This strikes at the fundamental problems that Grapple tries to solve 1) data access, 2) ease of use, and 3) freeform data exploration.
Data Access
If you’re lucky, all your data is centralized in your data warehouse. If this is you, you might have a self service data tool like Tableau, Google Data Studio, Power BI, or BigQuery to access the data warehouse. Tableau has a steep learning curve, Google Data Studio crashes all the time, and BigQuery means writing tons of SQL. Not great! If your data isn’t in the warehouse or you don’t know how to use it, you probably fallback to spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are fine, but you have to update the data in them manually and joining data across sources becomes really tedious. In either option, you spend a lot of time learning or maintaining your reports.
Ease of Use
I alluded to this above, but learning self service data tools, writing SQL, or maintaining complicated spreadsheet formulas and pivot tables is...complicated! Let's say you somehow get access to all your data, you still have to spend a lot of time learning how to query it. This means the time it takes for you to get to the insights you're after is hours but more often days. And in cases where you're trying to build something even slightly more complex, you usually have to file a ticket with the data team to get it done. What you really need is a tool that's easy to use and powerful enough to help you gather the insights you're after.
Freeform data exploration
Inside every company, there’s operators who run the business and move mountains to scale it. A friend of mine calls this work the “spreadsheet hustle”. These people work across a dizzying number of internal systems, data tools, spreadsheets, web apps, and more to scrape together insights to optimize and grow the business. Doing this requires a doggedness to persevere across data silos, undocumented processes, and disconnected software. But the insights from this work are real! You might uncover for example that there’s a ton of help desk tickets that get referred to the sales team for account upgrades but your GTM team doesn’t know this and so they haven’t capitalized on this motion. Or, your product team might not be able to quickly pull up a list of your most important customers for product research. In any event, these users need a tool that works at the speed of thought as they move across the business.
There aren’t ANY tools that completely solve this freeform data exploration problem. And I’m not even sure Grapple will, but we’ll try. Really, #3 is the holy grail for Grapple. If we can figure out a way to help people move across their data at the speed of thought, like a canvas, I think there’s a real opportunity to completely change what “problem-solving” even means. The closest I think we’ve come to this is actually Tableau. Tableau offered a less-technical audience a way to do advanced data exploration across amorphous data sources and present it in a digestible way. But Tableau was built almost 20 years ago and doesn’t work well with how we use software today where all our data is scattered across dozens of web apps. Imagine a modern Tableau that works well across dozens of data sources and that’s easy enough so anyone with a web browser can become a data analyst. That’s Grapple’s vision.
Mission In the meantime though, our mission will be unlocking the latent opportunity in the data reporting market. Grapple believes there are two underserved segments in this market. First, Grapple will unlock a lot of value for existing data reporters who are currently spending time in spreadsheets or poorly utilized self-service data platforms. For these folks, Grapple will feel like a breath of fresh air—the data tool they’ve always wanted. The value Grapple can offer them compared to the existing data tools they’re already paying for will make the price point of their existing data tools (versus the price of Grapple) disruptive.
The second and more significant segment are the people who think about data but don’t work with it enough because they’re dismayed by the complexities of the data tooling technology stack. For these people, Grapple will finally help them become data reporters. A central thesis of mine, and this is mirrored by a lot of software history, is people are smart and can generally reason about how to solve the problems they’re working thru but are held back by the interface decisions of the products available to them. In the data world, this means learning how data warehouses work, learning SQL, or learning a specific data viz tool. But if we can deliver them a tool that makes sense to them immediately and helps graduate them from novice to expert, progressively revealing more functionality and sophistication, we can finally tap into their excitement and passion to analyze problems with data.
The example I’d point to here is Canva. Canva made a bunch of people who would never consider themselves graphic designers into minimally capable designers. Canva’s easy to use interface and robust marketplace of templates made this possible. Grapple will do the same thing for data reporting and in the process dramatically grow the addressable market of the data tooling space.
Grapple is launching in Spring 2025, and you can join the waitlist at cloudgrapple.com.