Equals goes full stack
Because you’ve got dirty data. And cleaning it costs you a fortune.
You join a startup as the “numbers” person and get an endless list of responsibilities.
From making sure the company doesn’t run out of money to managing the board, investors, and founders to measuring every metric you can imagine to help drive your understanding of the business.
Yet when I was in this role at Intercom, those weren’t the parts of the job that most daunted me.
It was setting up all the infrastructure to support measuring our business. And I’m decently technical. I die on the hill that every finance person should know SQL. I’ve been known to dabble in the ever-so-egregiously hideous Python script.
Most finance folks aren’t this technical.
When somebody told me that the best way to continue reporting on things at Intercom would require me to spin up a database (what’s Redshift?), hire a data engineer who would implement Airflow, Yoshi, and dbt, and build fact and dimension tables or Snowflake and star schemas… I was wholly and completely lost and overwhelmed.
That sounded like a complete clusterf*ck.
And it sounded like it would take forever.
But down that path, I went.
And it took years.
And teams of people.
But I figured it was just me. I just didn’t know how to do this. I must be the idiot.
Every other startup on the planet must have figured this out by now, I thought. I’m just playing catch-up.
So, in many ways, we built Equals assuming that if you give folks access to their data in a spreadsheet, they’ll stick it on top of their beautifully designed database, and voila, we’ve done it!
Turns out that was wrong. Very wrong.
(Ok, I oversimplified our actual thinking here; we weren’t that naive.)
Yet, selling Equals now to young startups, I’m surprised at the number of “startups” – big and small – that haven’t figured this out either.
The messes I’ve seen. Holy moly! 🙈
And yet they’re all faced with the same daunting challenge I was at Intercom:
Go hire a data engineer → they’ll buy various tools to build pipelines to bring your data into a warehouse.
Go hire an analytics engineer → they’ll buy other tools to transform the data you’ve imported to your warehouse.
Go hire analysts → they’ll buy yet another set of tools to build analyses and dashboards.
All in, you’re looking at spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. You’ll make countless mistakes. And it will take years.
There’s (now) a better way
I’m so excited about what we’ve launched today.
We’ve gone full stack with the release of Equals Warehouse.
It provides an alternative path—a better, more affordable, pain-free one.
Equals Warehouse solves the most daunting problem I felt at Intercom—the one I had no clue how to solve.
How? It’s as simple as 1-2-3:
We connect to your data for you–Stripe, Salesforce, HubSpot, and more.
We clean and sync the data for you–in your Equals Warehouse powered by Snowflake.
We run the pipeline for you—no need to hire a data engineer.
And there’s one more thing…
Starting next week, we’ll release the first of many Equals transformation modules. We call them ‘Blueprints.’
Blueprints are out-of-the-box transformations designed specifically for SaaS companies and tailored to the specifics of your business.
You don’t have to manage the transformations or think about what the right schema should look like. We take care of that for you.
So now, with Equals, you suddenly have one tool that can do it all.
Finally, you can get clean data and start making sense of your business… at a fraction of the cost and the time it normally takes.
Of course, on top of it all is the most familiar and flexible data tool on the planet—a spreadsheet—that makes it dead easy to build and distribute beautiful BI-grade dashboards.
Equals is the only data tool that lets you go from raw data to beautiful dashboard– all in one place.
Getting to this point has been one of the most fascinating parts of building Equals.
It’s why great companies like Notion, Intercom, LaunchDarkly, Attio, Descript, and many others are making the switch and trusting Equals.
Come join them. You’ll be in great company.
