"As the CTO of a high-growth startup, I was looking for a platform that would let us spin up new tools to better support our customers. We tried Retool in the past, but we kept having new tooling needs, and the tool setup and maintenance experience was too frustrating. In Dataland, it's 10x faster to build tools. And, it's a lot more user-friendly for my customer-facing team."
Andy ChenCTO & Co-Founder, Nira Energy
The challenge
Andy Chen, CTO and co-founder of Nira, faced a common startup problem: creating efficient internal tools to support rapid growth. Nira's platform helps developers choose optimal sites for energy projects based on transmission capacity and run simulations for future infrastructure.
Initially, Nira used homegrown tools built with Retool for basic tasks like managing software licenses. But as they grew, so did their need for more sophisticated tools to enhance customer support. The team ran into two main issues:
- Building new tools was time-consuming, always requiring coding just to display data.
- Maintaining and updating these tools was a hassle, especially when transferring responsibility between team members.
Enter Dataland
Dataland offered Nira a solution that addressed their pain points:
- Lowest "Total Cost of Ownership": Tools could be created 10x faster, significantly reducing time and resource investment.
- Easy setup: Connecting to databases and creating views became straightforward, eliminating much of the initial setup frustration.
- User-friendly UI: Features like full-text search, intuitive filtering, and AI-assisted data analysis made the tools accessible to non-technical team members.
The impact
With Dataland, Nira was able to quickly build tools that made a real difference:
- A tool to quickly identify affected customers + emails based on usage data, so they could send targeted announcements about product updates and new offerings
- A tool to investigate customer data pipeline issues faster
Beyond these specific tools, Dataland freed up valuable time and resources:
- No more hours wasted on tool maintenance
- Easier creation of custom tools for new use cases as they arose
By adopting Dataland, Nira significantly improved its ability to support customers while freeing up dev resources to focus on core product innovation. This shift allowed the team to be more responsive to customer needs and ultimately drive better business outcomes.
For Andy and his team, Dataland wasn't just about building tools faster—it was about empowering the entire organization to be more data-driven and customer-focused.
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