On our final day of the launch, I want to reflect on all that we’ve done in such a short amount of time and talk to you about what we will be launching in the coming months, years, and ideally decades.
There were days this week that could have spanned an entire launch week themselves, and they probably should have. We just saved up so much of the big releases and instead we should be releasing more frequently and more publicly, and they will be going forward. As a small startup it’s so easy to be heads down building, you have a hard time lifting your head up to talk about it. Which leads me into my next point.
We raised a seed round, actually we raised it a year ago. I just have not found the time or place to talk about it. Again I want to make sure that it gets its own moment of glory, not because raising money is something to celebrate, but I want to talk about why we raised the money, who we took money from, and why that’s so important.
Like I said earlier, we want to build a lasting company, not a flash in the pan, or a get rich quick scheme, but a core essential to teams now and in the future. When you think of a database, I want you to think about Outerbase. Over the past year, we have successfully built the core foundation to build a lasting Outerbase on top of. Now it’s on to the more exciting and innovative features, and what a time to be building a company focused on innovation.
Innovating Space
The most popular databases have been around for almost 30 years, and the tooling for them is almost as old. That being said, we are seeing a renaissance in innovative companies rethinking how to engage with these databases. Neon, Supabase, Turso, PlanetScale are all doing incredible things on the database front, and we want to do the same for the tooling on top of them.
Even as we built out our core components we built them with innovation in mind, cutting-edge database partnerships, scalable web components, AI-first experiences, and so much more. We’ve already innovated a ton on the basic necessities and there’s still so much more innovation to be done.
We are doubling down on our core principle of making data accessible and giving everyone access to the data they need, here’s how we are going to do it.
More database integrations. We’ve already cast a wide net on database type support ranging from the classics like MySQL and Postgres to the latest in ClickHouse and Mongo. We know there is work we need to do to further improve some of our current integrations, and we also want to keep innovating here and being at the forefront of database support. There are a few more upcoming partnerships that I can’t tell you about now, but they are nothing to quack at.
More ways to interact with your data. We already allow you to view your data in a table, query it with SQL or natural language, and even provide a pretty robust data visualization and dashboarding suite. It’s not enough though, not for us at least. We want to provide more robust, beautiful, and customizable charts. Richer table experiences with custom data type views, we already support JSON and others but that’s just the beginning.
More AI integrations. I know everyone is talking about AI these days, and I know everyone says they were one of the early adopters, the truth is we were. AI has been at the heart of our work since we started Outerbase and it continues to be as we scale. We have been hard at work improving our EZQL offering, building custom private models for our enterprise users, and partnering with some of the most impressive companies in the space.
More open source contributions. Part of building a lasting legacy is building a community that others can look up to and believe in. To do that we want to give back and encourage others to do the same. Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens in the open where we all can collaborate and build something truly meaningful. I am a strong believer in saying that open-source is the future and we will continue steering this ship with that in mind.
What’s Next?
This is all just a brief look into the future, there’s a ton more to say and even more to do. Needless to say we will be incredibly busy for a while. Over the next few years I hope you will continue to follow our journey, contribute to our repos, become a user or even join our team. As always please reach out if I can help out in any way.
Until next time...
Brandon Strittmatter
CEO & Co-Founder, Outerbase