Hello, HN comrades!
I'm Ghalib, with my co-founder Nathan, and we've built Polytomic (https:///www.polytomic.com). Polytomic is a no-code web app to sync your company's internal data from databases and spreadsheets to business systems like Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Google Sheets, and others.
Business teams who live in these systems often want data piped in from databases or spreadsheets. Think about the salesperson who lives in Salesforce and wants to generate a report there about which of their customers have logged into the product recently. Well, all the user data sits in a database outside of Salesforce and needs to be piped into the right fields before this report can be generated.
I founded and ran the data team at PlanGrid (YC W12) for four years and was at the crossroads of every data request from the business side of the office. So many of the data problems I witnessed could have been solved by sending data to where business teams lived, but I never prioritised enough of that work because of how painful it was. I've always felt guilty about that - my co-workers on the business side worked so hard and I should have served them better. So we decided to start a company to pay for my sins, by inventing a product that removes the pain from solving these problems.
The integrations market is not a new one; some of you may remember TIBCO from the 90's, which was followed by MuleSoft and countless other vendors. But our approach is different: we're focused on data syncing and don't make the customer create a query workflow from scratch every time they want to move data. Instead, in our web app, the business team can first create a master model of the data they care about, surfaced from any number of databases and spreadsheets with a few clicks (or SQL queries). From there, anyone can sync any fields from this master model to CRMs or spreadsheets with a few clicks. For example, a single scheduled sync to Salesforce can combine real-time data from production databases, fields from spreadsheets, and analytical data from a data warehouse. We transfer the data efficiently and automatically take care of necessary cross-system joins while not storing any of your data.
I've been on HN for 14 years and am always surprised by how varied the community is. So I'm curious: does anyone here regularly work with Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, or other CRMs? Do you face any annoyances with data integrations? Or perhaps you have more general tales of CRM horrors?
I imagine you'll be able to find a number of startups / SMB willing to connect their systems to yours to facilitate integrations like this.
But as you start to go upmarket, you'll run into people who won't use your service unless you can quell their security concerns. Generally I wouldn't recommend thinking about things like SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc this early on, but in your case it might be a worthwhile investment earlier rather than later considering the sensitivity of the data / integrations and access your systems have to PII. I see Vanta's logo on your homepage, that's a great place to start for SOC 2.
Best of luck to you!