You're going in the right direction! for the near future, I suggest you to add a cli, connectors, simple symbolic calculation on notebooks (take some inspiration from calca http://calca.io/examples), offline support and fully encrypted namespaces.
That will put you miles away from everyone else in the field :)
You're probably busy with the launch, but you can contact me if you wanna discuss the list above,
1. product managers will try to make things dead easy, by setting up simple excel formulas & charts. Taking screenshots etc
2. data engineers will do more technical but opensourced solutions like superset & dbt
3. corporates usually tends to build the end UI themselves. I remember sth that (maybe?) Pinterest opensourced.
I deeply understand how hard it is to build a notebook like this. And there are indeed some problems lying in the collaboration and UX.
It's just so hard to propose those features, given the problem is usually the data itself and a highly competitive market. Popsql does not thrive as I remembered.
The data itself is indeed a problem. More than that, I'd add that the very definition of what's being measured or calculated is an even bigger problem (i.e. what's an active user?)
Still, I think that we can get to a place where everyone uses the same tool to collaborate on data matters, like a "Retool for data/BI". At a high-level, that's the direction we're going, and we're starting with notebooks and dashboards.
Just my 2 cents. Somehow got a chance to look into the competitive landscape. And found that which ever ICP to start with there's no immediate reason for adoption.
But who knows? Back in 90s no one knows they need an iPhone. Wish all the luck for your journey onwards.
Congrats on the launch! This is such an interesting project, as it could bridge the gap between analysis in the business world and engineering. Our organization has been making use of Streamlit extensively, but small changes require involvement of someone on the software side. This potentially makes a possible for anyone to do fairly complicated analyses and produced meaningful dashboards once groundwork has been laid.
Honestly, I’d love to start trialing this as our dashboard creation to the platform today.
On the downside, after setting up an account and creating a couple notebooks, my experience has been unusable slow. While this is likely growing pains as there’s no cost as a user for compute resources, it’s also a nonstarter for us to actually use as an organization. What’s the roadmap to make this more usable?
Lastly, adopting a new platform like this without a data export or local deployment option gives me pause. What can I expect for the longevity of what we create - pieces that become central to business decisions? This is especially true considering how much upfront training will inevitably go into getting started.
Congrats on the launch! Hope this isn’t too OT but I’m very distracted by the 90s Mac finder chrome on your example GIFs. Consider cleaning things up (visually and semantically) by removing them!
On a surface level, we're doing a lot of work on UX. We intend the UI to be more presentable and easier to navigate through so that technical users find it easier to use while non-technical users find it more approachable and can more easily find what they're looking for.
In terms of capabilities:
1. We want to merge all data-related features in one place, including BI. That's why you can create and publish dashboards too. It's also why we've been putting a lot of effort into making the no-code visualizations flexible and powerful.
2. You'll eventually be able to connect your own computer to Briefer. That way, you can use your AWS/Azure/GCP credits and your own GPUs if you have already paid for them.
3. There will be a way for you to manage notebooks and dashboards as code if you want to. We love the idea of versioning your notebooks, internal data apps, and dashboards, but we think current tools can't do it well.
There's also a huge change coming up in about 2 months. It'll make it really clear how we're different from Hex, but unfortunately I can't talk about that yet!
Don't undersell yourselves – you might also be able to sell this as an online collaborative "next step" for non-technical orgs who build LOB trackers in Excel! (If I had a penny for every time someone here says "I wish we could have Microsoft Access but more convenient"...)
It's funny you say that - we had users who simply wanted to run queries and didn't have direct access to a database, so they just asked someone from the technical team to connect their DB to Briefer and then they started querying from there because it's more convenient.
After a while they realized there were a bunch of other cool features and started engaging with those too.
In these cases it’s usually an operations-related team who is able to write queries just fine, but they don’t want to use a terminal with PSQL or have creds spread around in their own machines.
The AI also helps folks do queries without having to explore the schema for a while.
We do not support running notebooks locally right now, but offline access is coming soon.
With regards to running code on high-end GPUs: currently, we manually allocate GPUs to our customers when they need that. Still, we do want to eventually allow people to connect to their cloud providers to spin-up compute instances there.
I teach a lot of Python and data science (pandas, Polars, scikit learn, XGBoost...) in Jupyter.
(I also teach a bunch of software engineering best practices to folks who claim they don't want to be "software engineers".)
My experience is that with training, many of these issues go away. Just saw this again firsthand at a client last week.
My current take is that many focus on making the code newbie friendly. I think they should level up and start writing code for a professional audience, using software techniques that a professional would use. Newbies won't like this code.
I get a lot of flak on social when I post this from naysayers, but the overwhelming response from my students and those who have read my books indicates there might be something to this.
I strongly agree with your comment. I'm a software engineer and I was surprised to find out about the practices of some data teams.
I do believe we should bring software best practices to the data world, not only regarding code design but regarding infrastructure and tooling too (like versioning everything).
Still, I get where they're coming from. A software engineer would also be frustrated if they had to learn everything a data scientist knows (probably even more).
I think the tooling itself can solve this issue by encouraging best practices though.
I have a question I ask people I interview now for data science jobs -- can you run a python hello world from the command line? A non-trivial number of people who say they have multiple years of data science + python experience do not know how to do this!
People need to know how to write functions to write professional software, not just put a soup together of notebook cells.
Disagree with Matt even that they won't like this code -- it is just learning basic stuff like file structure and python environments, see how I approach it in the first two chapters running stuff from REPL here https://crimede-coder.com/blogposts/2023/EarlyReleasePython.
The people I train can certainly use the command line to run Python, create virtual environments, and install packages. (But many of them have never used it previously.)
That’s possible. For it to work you’d have to create a “dropdown block” and select the “dynamic” option in its settings. Then, you will be able to select a dataframe and the column from that dataframe you want to use as dropdown options.
By the way, every query automatically becomes a dataframe so you can use either a query result’s column or a raw Python dataframe.
As a side note, I’m putting together detailed product documentation this week too and I’ll make sure to include it there.
The products are similar in the sense that both are cloud-based notebooks, but we have different approaches to building them.
I answered a question about Hex below, and the general outline applies here. To summarize:
1. We want to go beyond just notebooks. We want to centralize all data tasks in Briefer, including traditional BI so we’re building specific features for that, like dashboarding and everything that comes with it.
2. We’ll enable people to use their own compute for the notebooks.
3. We want to allow people to manage notebooks, dashboards, and apps “as code” so they can version it whenever necessary.
We unfortunately didn’t finish items 2 and 3 yet because we’ve only started working on Briefer six months ago, but we’re fast and we’ll get there soon.
Also, we’re working on something new that will make the distinction clearer, but I can’t talk about that yet.
Hey there, CEO of Deepnote here. It looks like we are thinking about this very similarly, as all 3 points are something that we are already doing or will be shipping in the coming weeks. Either way, good luck with Briefer and happy to chat about our learnings building all of these things.
Nice explanation and execution. Looks super Pro ! Congrrats !
One question : how do you manage database credentials ? That's a question I've had a lot working on my project so I'm pretty sure customers will have the same for you.
Especially given the latest Snowflake security issues.
We do a lot of things to keep the credentials safe that go beyond just putting everything behind a VPN and setting pods' SECCOMP profiles. That obviously includes encrypting credentials and putting in place tight access controls both to the credentials themselves and the encryption keys.
Also, even though we're not SOC2 compliant (yet) we do run pen tests.
This looks very promising. All the best growing it.
From my brief look at the site, the product seems to allow users to query and display data only. Can we edit the data at all?
It looks like this product targets teams and not well-suited to individuals (ie private note taking app with database like Notion). I did not see any way to create new data or edit existing data, or if you even have a mobile app.
The first 2 problems you mentioned did not apply to me at all, while the 3rd problem has been my wishlist for Notion for a long time
Having built workflows myself like this, using a patchwork DAG of notebooks and cron jobs and state saving, I’m really glad someone is tackling the problem holistically!
On pricing page for annual pricing, there's a dot in the free plan "Free." There's no dot anywhere on the plans including on the monthly "Free" plan. What does the dot give you if you "pay" annually on the free plan? :D
Question: I am in charge of financials for our condo building. The other people in charge are older than me and only know excel. How do you suggest I think about wanting to use better tools to present analysis while also making sure that everyone else can understand the work and modify?
In Briefer you can hide the blocks you don't want others to see, like the ones in which you're just manipulating data. Instead, you can show only the results so that your analysis is really easy to understand.
You can also display your analyses as dashboards or build small data apps with inputs and dropdowns for them to use.
Still, I wouldn't recommend completely non-technical users to create content within Briefer - only to read it and interact with the apps/dashboards there.
Just minor bug; on /auth/signup the zebra background pattern is not on the entire page on my vertical display (1080x1920). You might want to fix this before release.
Hey Suchintan! Great to see you here - we're happy that you've been using Briefer!
Regarding your questions:
1. Briefer is definitely a Jupyter replacement and it can be a Metabase replacement. Most of our users with BI use cases start using Briefer for more advanced types of dashboards and analyses, and they eventually end up slowly replacing their traditional BI with Briefer.
2. That's indeed something that's crossed our minds before. We're not open-sourcing it right now though.
I really appreciate the positive feedback, I'm glad you like the launch.
Regarding self-hosting: Yes, we have discussed that with other potential customers.
If you're interested in a self-hosted offering, please reach out to me at lucas.costa [at] briefer [dot] cloud and I'll help you out there and walk you through what that would look like.
At this stage, we're putting a lot of effort into "selling" the (free) community tier because (1) that leads to great feedback and (2) the vast majority of paying customers come from the free tier anyway.
We want the free tier to be so good it becomes the new notebook standard - and then we'll only charge for features that companies need, like Slack integrations or a large number of seats.
Regarding AI, we currently go with GPT-4o by default, but you can change it on the settings panel. Currently, we have only enabled GPT-4o and Mistral though, but we want to add more - it's just not our priority right now because the OpenAI model is just incredibly good.
Unfortunately, that's not possible yet. We want to fix that, but very few people use public pages, and even fewer use public dashboards, so we didn't prioritize it.
Thanks for reporting it, it helps us understand what people want!
Great work Lucas;
You're going in the right direction! for the near future, I suggest you to add a cli, connectors, simple symbolic calculation on notebooks (take some inspiration from calca http://calca.io/examples), offline support and fully encrypted namespaces.
That will put you miles away from everyone else in the field :)
You're probably busy with the launch, but you can contact me if you wanna discuss the list above,
Abraços
Hey Fernando, thanks for the enthusiastic comment.
Would love to hear more about what you mean regarding the CLI and connectors. Can you give me a few examples of what these would look like?
By the way, I didn't know Calca. Looks neat, I'll definitely have a look.
From my own startup & corporate experience,
1. product managers will try to make things dead easy, by setting up simple excel formulas & charts. Taking screenshots etc
2. data engineers will do more technical but opensourced solutions like superset & dbt
3. corporates usually tends to build the end UI themselves. I remember sth that (maybe?) Pinterest opensourced.
I deeply understand how hard it is to build a notebook like this. And there are indeed some problems lying in the collaboration and UX.
It's just so hard to propose those features, given the problem is usually the data itself and a highly competitive market. Popsql does not thrive as I remembered.
The data itself is indeed a problem. More than that, I'd add that the very definition of what's being measured or calculated is an even bigger problem (i.e. what's an active user?)
Still, I think that we can get to a place where everyone uses the same tool to collaborate on data matters, like a "Retool for data/BI". At a high-level, that's the direction we're going, and we're starting with notebooks and dashboards.
Just my 2 cents. Somehow got a chance to look into the competitive landscape. And found that which ever ICP to start with there's no immediate reason for adoption.
But who knows? Back in 90s no one knows they need an iPhone. Wish all the luck for your journey onwards.
Congrats on the launch! This is such an interesting project, as it could bridge the gap between analysis in the business world and engineering. Our organization has been making use of Streamlit extensively, but small changes require involvement of someone on the software side. This potentially makes a possible for anyone to do fairly complicated analyses and produced meaningful dashboards once groundwork has been laid.
Honestly, I’d love to start trialing this as our dashboard creation to the platform today.
On the downside, after setting up an account and creating a couple notebooks, my experience has been unusable slow. While this is likely growing pains as there’s no cost as a user for compute resources, it’s also a nonstarter for us to actually use as an organization. What’s the roadmap to make this more usable?
Lastly, adopting a new platform like this without a data export or local deployment option gives me pause. What can I expect for the longevity of what we create - pieces that become central to business decisions? This is especially true considering how much upfront training will inevitably go into getting started.
Congrats on the launch! Hope this isn’t too OT but I’m very distracted by the 90s Mac finder chrome on your example GIFs. Consider cleaning things up (visually and semantically) by removing them!
Agreed. Everything else is very nice
I like it.
This looks very interesting. Congrats on the launch! I’m curious how you see it developing compared to an existing tool like Hex?
Hey Trevor, that's a great question!
On a surface level, we're doing a lot of work on UX. We intend the UI to be more presentable and easier to navigate through so that technical users find it easier to use while non-technical users find it more approachable and can more easily find what they're looking for.
In terms of capabilities:
1. We want to merge all data-related features in one place, including BI. That's why you can create and publish dashboards too. It's also why we've been putting a lot of effort into making the no-code visualizations flexible and powerful.
2. You'll eventually be able to connect your own computer to Briefer. That way, you can use your AWS/Azure/GCP credits and your own GPUs if you have already paid for them.
3. There will be a way for you to manage notebooks and dashboards as code if you want to. We love the idea of versioning your notebooks, internal data apps, and dashboards, but we think current tools can't do it well.
There's also a huge change coming up in about 2 months. It'll make it really clear how we're different from Hex, but unfortunately I can't talk about that yet!
Don't undersell yourselves – you might also be able to sell this as an online collaborative "next step" for non-technical orgs who build LOB trackers in Excel! (If I had a penny for every time someone here says "I wish we could have Microsoft Access but more convenient"...)
It's funny you say that - we had users who simply wanted to run queries and didn't have direct access to a database, so they just asked someone from the technical team to connect their DB to Briefer and then they started querying from there because it's more convenient.
After a while they realized there were a bunch of other cool features and started engaging with those too.
I’m genuinely glad that you’ve had that experience. I’m curious - what type of users, like non-technical (e.g. administrative) staff?
In these cases it’s usually an operations-related team who is able to write queries just fine, but they don’t want to use a terminal with PSQL or have creds spread around in their own machines.
The AI also helps folks do queries without having to explore the schema for a while.
The Python/code block support looks interesting.
But Jupyter notebooks can run anywhere including local. Do you support that (via a local install or by relaying a connection to local python install)?
Or would all Python code have to run on your cloud servers (and thus not have access to things like high-end GPUs and such)?
Thanks!
We do not support running notebooks locally right now, but offline access is coming soon.
With regards to running code on high-end GPUs: currently, we manually allocate GPUs to our customers when they need that. Still, we do want to eventually allow people to connect to their cloud providers to spin-up compute instances there.
Interesting.
I teach a lot of Python and data science (pandas, Polars, scikit learn, XGBoost...) in Jupyter.
(I also teach a bunch of software engineering best practices to folks who claim they don't want to be "software engineers".)
My experience is that with training, many of these issues go away. Just saw this again firsthand at a client last week.
My current take is that many focus on making the code newbie friendly. I think they should level up and start writing code for a professional audience, using software techniques that a professional would use. Newbies won't like this code.
I get a lot of flak on social when I post this from naysayers, but the overwhelming response from my students and those who have read my books indicates there might be something to this.
I strongly agree with your comment. I'm a software engineer and I was surprised to find out about the practices of some data teams.
I do believe we should bring software best practices to the data world, not only regarding code design but regarding infrastructure and tooling too (like versioning everything).
Still, I get where they're coming from. A software engineer would also be frustrated if they had to learn everything a data scientist knows (probably even more).
I think the tooling itself can solve this issue by encouraging best practices though.
I have a question I ask people I interview now for data science jobs -- can you run a python hello world from the command line? A non-trivial number of people who say they have multiple years of data science + python experience do not know how to do this!
People need to know how to write functions to write professional software, not just put a soup together of notebook cells.
Disagree with Matt even that they won't like this code -- it is just learning basic stuff like file structure and python environments, see how I approach it in the first two chapters running stuff from REPL here https://crimede-coder.com/blogposts/2023/EarlyReleasePython.
The people I train can certainly use the command line to run Python, create virtual environments, and install packages. (But many of them have never used it previously.)
Btw, when I click the Amazon link in your bio it goes here:
https://www.amazon.com/hapi-js-Action-Matt-Harrison-ebook/dp...
And it's some random kindle book about some JavaScript library I never heard of.
But I'm pretty sure you are the Matt Harrison I follow on twitter:
https://x.com/__mharrison__
This looks like it could be a really useful tool for us building internal query catalogues and dashboards.
Does the dashboard feature support any dynamic field selectors (similar to "variables" in Grafana)?
Thanks for the comment!
That’s possible. For it to work you’d have to create a “dropdown block” and select the “dynamic” option in its settings. Then, you will be able to select a dataframe and the column from that dataframe you want to use as dropdown options.
By the way, every query automatically becomes a dataframe so you can use either a query result’s column or a raw Python dataframe.
As a side note, I’m putting together detailed product documentation this week too and I’ll make sure to include it there.
Can you tell me how it compares to Deepnote.com please?
Thanks for asking!
The products are similar in the sense that both are cloud-based notebooks, but we have different approaches to building them.
I answered a question about Hex below, and the general outline applies here. To summarize:
1. We want to go beyond just notebooks. We want to centralize all data tasks in Briefer, including traditional BI so we’re building specific features for that, like dashboarding and everything that comes with it.
2. We’ll enable people to use their own compute for the notebooks.
3. We want to allow people to manage notebooks, dashboards, and apps “as code” so they can version it whenever necessary.
We unfortunately didn’t finish items 2 and 3 yet because we’ve only started working on Briefer six months ago, but we’re fast and we’ll get there soon.
Also, we’re working on something new that will make the distinction clearer, but I can’t talk about that yet.
Hey there, CEO of Deepnote here. It looks like we are thinking about this very similarly, as all 3 points are something that we are already doing or will be shipping in the coming weeks. Either way, good luck with Briefer and happy to chat about our learnings building all of these things.
For 2, is there something done already?
Nice explanation and execution. Looks super Pro ! Congrrats !
One question : how do you manage database credentials ? That's a question I've had a lot working on my project so I'm pretty sure customers will have the same for you.
Especially given the latest Snowflake security issues.
Yes, that's a great question.
We do a lot of things to keep the credentials safe that go beyond just putting everything behind a VPN and setting pods' SECCOMP profiles. That obviously includes encrypting credentials and putting in place tight access controls both to the credentials themselves and the encryption keys.
Also, even though we're not SOC2 compliant (yet) we do run pen tests.
Looks amazing - congrats on the launch!
Would you consider Briefer to be a competitor to https://count.co/ ?
(Certainly, if you do, your pricing is a helluva lot more appealing...)
Thanks for the positive feedback.
It's not as much of a direct competitor because Count's approach seems more like "Miro for Data" while ours is more like "Notion for Data".
Still, I do think people could end up comparing both our tool and theirs when evaluating a few types use cases.
If that is the case, have you considered adding tables or a sql-engine directly to the product.
For some replace LoB use cases just storing the data directly and letting users query it would be an advantage.
This looks very promising. All the best growing it.
From my brief look at the site, the product seems to allow users to query and display data only. Can we edit the data at all?
It looks like this product targets teams and not well-suited to individuals (ie private note taking app with database like Notion). I did not see any way to create new data or edit existing data, or if you even have a mobile app.
The first 2 problems you mentioned did not apply to me at all, while the 3rd problem has been my wishlist for Notion for a long time
Having built workflows myself like this, using a patchwork DAG of notebooks and cron jobs and state saving, I’m really glad someone is tackling the problem holistically!
I'm glad you're excited about Briefer!
We've already seen hacky solutions starting to be replaced and that makes me quite happy.
On pricing page for annual pricing, there's a dot in the free plan "Free." There's no dot anywhere on the plans including on the monthly "Free" plan. What does the dot give you if you "pay" annually on the free plan? :D
https://briefer.cloud/pricing/
Also, the "Get started" button on the free plan goes to book a call instead of signing up.
Thanks for reporting these issues! I just fixed them.
Would you say this is an alternative to https://hex.tech/, or does this fill a different niche?
> The first problem with notebooks is that they're difficult to share.
I share github links to my notebooks with my PMs
Is your PM technical?
some of them are. But I have markdown and graphs in my notebook that they read.
I think he specifically mentions non technical folks.
yeah github renders markdown, graphs and data tables in notebooks which non technical PMs read.
See also https://notebooksharing.space/
Awesome!
Question: I am in charge of financials for our condo building. The other people in charge are older than me and only know excel. How do you suggest I think about wanting to use better tools to present analysis while also making sure that everyone else can understand the work and modify?
Hey Jay, thanks for the question!
In Briefer you can hide the blocks you don't want others to see, like the ones in which you're just manipulating data. Instead, you can show only the results so that your analysis is really easy to understand.
You can also display your analyses as dashboards or build small data apps with inputs and dropdowns for them to use.
Still, I wouldn't recommend completely non-technical users to create content within Briefer - only to read it and interact with the apps/dashboards there.
This looks really cool.
Just minor bug; on /auth/signup the zebra background pattern is not on the entire page on my vertical display (1080x1920). You might want to fix this before release.
Thanks for reporting this issue. I’ll look into that right now.
I've been using briefer for the past few weeks and have a few questions:
1. Do you intend Briefer to be a jupyter replacement or a metabase replacement?
2. Do you have any plans to open source briefer?
Hey Suchintan! Great to see you here - we're happy that you've been using Briefer!
Regarding your questions:
1. Briefer is definitely a Jupyter replacement and it can be a Metabase replacement. Most of our users with BI use cases start using Briefer for more advanced types of dashboards and analyses, and they eventually end up slowly replacing their traditional BI with Briefer.
2. That's indeed something that's crossed our minds before. We're not open-sourcing it right now though.
Will you be offering a Schrems II compatible alternative?
I'll stick to Livebook for the most part but know some companies that might be interested.
Will there be the ability to call an API and parse the JSON (e.g., to flatten) to use as a data source?
Congratulations on the launch, the product looks very appealing.
Would you consider an option for self-hosting?
I really appreciate the positive feedback, I'm glad you like the launch.
Regarding self-hosting: Yes, we have discussed that with other potential customers.
If you're interested in a self-hosted offering, please reach out to me at lucas.costa [at] briefer [dot] cloud and I'll help you out there and walk you through what that would look like.
Very interesting problem to solve. Congratulations on the launch!
Cool product! How have sales been?
How do you do your AI? Is it just a local model?
At this stage, we're putting a lot of effort into "selling" the (free) community tier because (1) that leads to great feedback and (2) the vast majority of paying customers come from the free tier anyway.
We want the free tier to be so good it becomes the new notebook standard - and then we'll only charge for features that companies need, like Slack integrations or a large number of seats.
Regarding AI, we currently go with GPT-4o by default, but you can change it on the settings panel. Currently, we have only enabled GPT-4o and Mistral though, but we want to add more - it's just not our priority right now because the OpenAI model is just incredibly good.
Parabéns!! Go Briefer
will give this a try for our analytics, looks v smooth
Same as Deepnote?
Thanks for asking. I answered that question below.
You can see the response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41055495
for some reason I absolutely love the name
enjoying it! but can't figure out how to share dashboards (publicly)?
Unfortunately, that's not possible yet. We want to fix that, but very few people use public pages, and even fewer use public dashboards, so we didn't prioritize it.
Thanks for reporting it, it helps us understand what people want!
With built-in AI, we shouldn't be writing SQL queries directly right?
It's up to you.
So far, there seems to be an even split between the people that always go for the AI and the people that write everything themselves.
Personally, I use the AI whenever I need to write anything other than `SELECT * FROM xyz WHERE`. It just saves me so much time.
dark mode?
That's a feature request we get every now and then. It's coming soon!
I haven't yet had time to implement it because I was working on the core pieces of functionality, but as a dark mode user I want to get to that soon.
that's great. enjoying the ux so far.
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