✂️ What's the first thing you cut when you're moving too slow?
When I notice a project dragging, my reflex is always to cut scope. Trim the feature down, ship the smaller version, get something out the door instead of polishing the grand plan forever. And usually that's the right call. Most of the time I was building more than the problem actually needed, and cutting it loose feels great. But every so often scope isn't the real problem. The thing slowing...
📬 Introducing new ways to share your data
Side note: We're live on Product Hunt today with our Slack Data Agent! 🎉 Export to Excel You can now export to Excel (.xlsx) anywhere you could already export data. Charts, tables, markdown tables, and in-browser record views all get a native Excel option right alongside CSV, so the data you pull out of Basedash lands in a real spreadsheet—formatted columns and all—instead of a raw text file...
💬 AI data access shouldn’t require leaving Slack
We’re live on Product Hunt today with our Slack Data Agent. Basedash started as a way for teams to explore, query, and visualize their data in a shared workspace. Now we’re bringing that experience directly into Slack, so teams can ask questions about their real data where the conversation is already happening. Mention @Basedash in any channel and it can query your connected data sources, think...
How much of your roadmap should customers actually get to decide?
I try really hard to be the kind of founder that listens to users. The whole idea of building something people want is that you're supposed to be paying attention to them, not building in a vacuum. But every time I've followed the loudest requests, I've ended up building things almost nobody else wanted. One vocal customer asks for a feature, it feels urgent because they're right in front of...
✂️ How we cut our client bundle by 30%
Someone on the team finally looked at our production client bundle, which we hadn't checked in a while, and it was 25.67 MB. We got it down to 18.34 MB without removing a single feature. Most of the wins were stuff we were shipping to customers that had no business being there. Bundle size is the metric that drifts up one dependency at a time until somebody notices. We noticed, turned on...
How do you know if an idea is worth years of your life?
I spent nearly four years on one idea before I finally pivoted to what I'm building now (@Basedash: AI data analyst). What mostly bothers me isn't that I was wrong, it's that I still can't tell you the exact signal that should've made me quit two years earlier. At the time everything felt like progress. We had users, we had encouraging conversations, we had the occasional good week that...
📄 How we paginate queries across every SQL dialect
We had a comment in our codebase that said SQL Server doesn't handle pagination well, so we should just avoid pagination for now. And it did exactly that: shipped the entire result set to the browser and let it sort itself out. Same deal for Spanner. A lot of Basedash is just "run the SQL the user wrote, show the rows." We support 10+ dialects (Postgres, MySQL, BigQuery, Snowflake, Athena, SQL...
Do you ship the ugly version now, or hold it until it's something you're proud of?
My instinct is always to polish. I want the first thing someone sees to be good, because I figure you only get one first impression and an embarrassing v1 sticks to you. But almost every product I actually respect started out rough. The early versions were janky and half-broken, and the founders shipped anyway because real users teach you things a year of polishing never will. So I go back and...
New in Basedash: SQL definitions 📘
SQL definitions: reusable snippets across your queries You can now create SQL definitions scoped to a database connection—versioned, named SQL snippets that you can reference inline in any query with {{ definition("name") }}. Definitions get their own home in the Data page sidebar where you can create, edit, describe, and preview them, and the expansion is applied both for human-run queries and...
How do you introduce AI into a product without making it feel like a gimmick?
Most AI features feel like gimmicks because they're a button looking for a reason to exist. Someone in a meeting said "we need AI" and three weeks later (or maybe hours now with Claude Code) there's a sparkle icon in the corner that summarizes things nobody asked to have summarized. The test I use: if you stripped the word "AI" off it entirely, would people still want it? If the answer is no,...
Do users actually want simple products, or products that hide complexity well?
People always say they want simple products. Bloat is a big reason people dislike products and migrate away from existing tools. But I don't think that bloat comes from having too many features. Instead, it's mostly a UI/IA problem. This is something we think about a lot at @Basedash. Analytics and BI can get complicated quickly: permissions, SQL, charts, dashboards, filters, joins, data...
How do you make a "boring" category feel exciting?
Some product categories are naturally fun to talk about (AI video, dev tools, design tools, consumer apps). People understand the product and get excited pretty quickly. But then there are categories that are important, useful, and valuable, but historically kind of boring. Things like analytics, internal tools, compliance, finance, HR software, etc. I think about this a lot while building...
What was killing our healthy Kubernetes pods
Last week one of our web pods restarted 11 times in 24 hours, and another restarted 9 times. The app worked, users were happy, and latency was fine. Our application logs had nothing to say about it, just gaps where a process used to be. We spent a couple of days chasing the wrong thing. Then we found a Kubernetes default we’d never thought to override, and the crash loop stopped. Here’s the...
