April Fool’s Day, our Hackathon and a Veezoo API?

Is Veezoo getting rid of its visualizations and becoming a Command-Line Interface? Not really. But we did implement one for real during our internal hackathon at Veezoo on April Fool's Day.

JP Monteiro

April 21, 2022

We believe in Hackathons

When we started Veezoo back in 2015, we wrote down some of the things we really believed to be important as part of our culture. Since the first prototype of Veezoo – a hacky Django/Python application built in 24h – was created during a hackathon, we’ve always been big fans of the idea of gathering people together to create something innovative in a short period of time. Hackathons are a safe environment for innovation, where you can experiment, learn new things and build something that creates value. It teaches you the importance of prioritizing. You always start with an amazing list of ideas and quickly realize you need to boil it down to the essence for that final presentation that will create the wow-effect.

We don’t usually share publicly any of the results of these hackathons, but eventually some of the ideas (not the code, thank god) reach our live product and improve the experience for thousands of our users. But, since it was April Fool’s Day, we decided to share our Veezoo CLI as our BIG announcement. Check out our video:

👩‍💻 Veezoo CLI and API

Like every good hackathon, our internal ones are about writing code. So we did implement the Veezoo CLI you saw in the video by working first on a public REST API that we’ve long dreamed about… and may soon become available for our users.

With this Veezoo API in hands, we tried a couple of things we thought would be cool. Check out our Sublime Plugin:

Also, what about Veezoo inside your Google Sheets?

👀 Veezoo Everywhere

Data is everywhere. It’s in your CRM, in your marketing automation software, in your ticketing system. But all these tools have their own ways of displaying your data and usually don’t allow you to quickly get to the information you are looking for. Well, what if you could have Veezoo right there with you every time you are browsing inside one of these tools and need quickly an answer.

One of our team members developed a browser plugin that allows you to easily ask your question to Veezoo without any context switch wherever you are. Check it out:

🕸️ Extending with Excel

We all know this problem. You are doing an analysis and you realize that the data in the data warehouse is not complete. There is a categorization for products missing, maybe an assignment between sales people and their teams or you’ve got some extra demographics data at hand for your customer’s zip codes. This data is in no existing source system yet. But it’s in your Excel right there. Should you bother someone to upload this to the data warehouse somehow just for your analysis? Maybe just export the data from your BI and do the analysis in Excel? And that’s how you end up with stale data.

Ad-hoc analysis many times require ad-hoc data. What if you could easily combine this ad-hoc data with the data from your data warehouse, the source of truth inside your company, so you could avoid always having to export this data?

Now, all your problems are solved:

With this new Knowledge Graph extension feature, you can just drop a file and Veezoo will magically connect it to the right concepts you already have in your Knowledge Graph. Now just ask away freely, like: “show me the number of customers vs population per zip code”.

We believe such a functionality would bring more transparency to data teams over which siloed spreadsheets business users are using for their analysis on Excel. This data would be marked as “ungoverned” for the data team and could be easily added to the official ELT process with a click of a button, if deemed important. If you think this sounds interesting, let’s talk!

🐢 Go with the Flow

If you have important processes in place, you need to understand the bottlenecks and how the progress between steps happen. If you are a product manager, you need to get a good grip on how users use certain features and achieve the main milestones in their journey. If you are in sales & marketing, you need to understand where you have issues in your funnel. The world is full of flows, funnels and processes to be analyzed.

How cool would it be if you could analyze this data using natural language? During our hackathon, our colleague here at Veezoo implemented a new feature to help you analyze this kind of data:

🛣️ The Road Ahead

Hope you enjoyed our hackathon ideas. We certainly had a lot of fun hacking them. Now, this is the moment for us to look into them, talk to people like you – yeah, you! – and plan what should come next to Veezoo. Are you creative? Do you have real pain points in your work with data? Would you want to give some of these features a try? Let’s have a virtual coffee together and talk!

❤️ Try out our Free Community Version

Did you know we have a free version for up to 5 users and a new Slack community?

Give Veezoo a try and say hi to us on Slack!

We look forward to answering your questions.

See yourself how Veezoo can simplify the access to insights from your data.

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