What problem are we solving?
Every software product needs data to start providing value. The most common way to import customer data is with CSV files. While CSV files can be an easy way for customers to retrieve existing data, importing them into a new platform is not so trivial.
To import a CSV file, developers need to consider:
- File uploading
- Backend processing
- Unique character encoding
- Data validation
- Column mapping
- Error resolution
- Intuitive user interface
Teams spend a lot of time building, supporting, and troubleshooting seemingly endless edge cases that occur with these data imports. What initially seems like a “quick feature” can turn into a deluge of support tickets that span numerous teams, including engineering, product, support, implementations, and sales.
What’s our solution?
Our CSV importer helps teams avoid building this functionality themselves. By being open-source, we hope to take the buy-vs-build discussion out the equation. Any team can deploy our CSV importer in their own infrastructure. For teams who want a managed solution, we offer a cloud version with a generous free tier.
Why are we working on this?
While Eric and I were at Heymarket, our contact import service seemed to always have new edge cases reported. Our small engineering team was pulled away from strategic projects to troubleshoot invalid files and build new functionality for our CSV importer.
Earlier in my career, I supported an operations team focused on retrieving and analyzing sales data from a network of disparate systems. We had a team of over a dozen people who spent half of their day manually cleaning and validating this data.
Our goal with TableFlow is to enable teams like these to focus on their core product or service, not data import.
What’s next?
We plan to become a data exchange platform that supports far more than CSV files. TableFlow will intelligently map, transform, and validate incoming data sources without the need for manual intervention.
Join us!
Check out our Github repo and try out TableFlow cloud.
Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas (mitch@tableflow.com)!
