Parabola 2.0 — Automate manual processes without spreadsheets or code

Congrats on the launch @alexyaseen :) How would you differentiate Parabola from your competitors and what makes you better?

Curious as to what makes this different from Zapier other than sources like GDAX (which is pretty neat!).

We've been using Parabola for a few years and it's changed the way we do business. Parabola has allowed us to streamline and automate our manual sales operations processes, and do more with the free time that was created. We've been able to build automation flows without any coding experience and without borrowing engineering time. It's super easy. Whenever anything comes up internally, we often first ask, "I wonder if we can do this in Parabola?" Most of the time, the answer is yes. Definitely worth checking out if you're spending a lot of your day in spreadsheets. The potential is really left up to your imagination. Great product, great team.

Pros:

Simple UI, infinite use cases

Cons:

None

@alexyaseen What do you guys do with regards to security? The kind of data I would want to run through Parabola is pretty sensitive.

This tool looks so good I'm trying to come up with a reason to use it. Maybe I'll give this recipe a try during our launch. https://parabola.io/recipes/trac...

Hi Product Hunt! Co-Founder/CEO here at Parabola. We’re really excited to show you what we’ve been up to and hear what you think! Parabola 2.0 has some incredible new features, including: - Huge amount of new sources (like Product Hunt and GDAX) as well as new transforms (like sentiment analysis and Google Maps) - A new category of objects called destinations that let you take action and send data to other tools (like Salesforce and Geckoboard) - The ability to schedule flows to run on our servers - A fantastic new design - Improved performance, stability, keyboard shortcuts, and so much more If you could use help getting started, we have some templates to get you off to the races. Since this is Product Hunt, you may be particularly interested in this one: https://parabola.io/recipes/trac... Please let us know what you think, and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Great work guys. Is this API based or can I manipulate/transfer data anywhere? Seems this is heavily focused on Excel or is that not the case. Also is logic based on what I need in terms of my specific process or is it predetermined set of logical work algorithms I can choose from. Thank you

How am I learn how usefull this app can be, when most of the functionality is locked?

Pros:

rich functionality

Cons:

most objects unavailable in the free tier

Once everything is connected, the application is incredibly powerful.

Highly recommended for anyone with many data sources who needs to run analysis & share it with people who should not have access to the underlaying data, but the aggregate results/analysis.

Pros:

super useful once it is set up

Cons:

none

Alex & Mike have the right background, know-how and drive to build the future of data flows.

Pros:

Strong team with a solid vision!

Cons:

crowded space

Sounds like a great product. The issue I run into with products like this is security, I wish there was an embeddable on-prem version of this that I could incorporate into my product- or an open source version. Anyone have any ideas?

Congrats @alexyaseen @mrmikelang. on the launch. I've seen parabola's evolution over the past year and I truly believe it is one of the best data manipulation tool out there. It does take a little effort to setup, but any excel wiz-kid is going to see the value immediately.

This looks absolutely amazing! I love the graphical editor. I've been fiddling with scripts at our company of late to automate a few manual processes, I'm going to try to move them to Parabola! What an awesome product, you should be really proud!

I have found this really really helpful ! I have had a spreadsheet for 6 month with so much data that needed separating out into different cells would take me days, weeks if i did it manually or or getting very messy with excel formulas that I really didn't understand. I just uploaded my file, clicked on a few of the icons processes, told it what i wanted in the criteria, then bam! done. I'd like to see a process for organising Files and folders. file structures can get preting messy after a few years, a process to reorganise would be great. Some extra Excel formulas in a box to make it even more powerful Love it, please keep adding to its library of functions

Pros:

I Love this program! Seriously this has saved me a huge amount of time trying to workout what formulas would be able to do in excel. ++++++

Cons:

Would like a client install rather than all web based so you can process files locally.

I just tried it and it don't work with Google Analytics (init alert error).

I tried to kill my account and I can't find a way to do it.

The first step price is to high.

Pros:

Simple

Cons:

Bugs, expansive, can't kill account

We've been using for 3+ months and can not yet recommend, but believe Parabola has created a compelling, if not fully realized reporting and data automation platform. Though it shows great promise, our implementation of the tool (incorporating 3 to 5 "flows" from various data sources) proved maddeningly frustrating, owing to its wobbly integration with Salesforce, the connection to which breaks each time it attempts to run a report. (All of our Parabola "flows" incorporate data from Salesforce; so in fairness, non-Salesforce users' experience may be far rosier.) Reestablishing the connection is simple enough, but takes 3-4 minutes each time. For a daily report, this becomes tiresome pretty quickly, and greatly diminishes the tool's value as an automation solution for sales ops (or at least Salesforce) intensive applications. That said, it does have an engaging interface - and if you enjoy building reports and setting up data flows, you'll enjoy using the product. This is especially true if you enjoy the sheer Groundhog Day repetitiveness of re-architecting a report each time you need it run. The product isn't supposed to work this way, as Parabola has pointed out to us over the course of a multi-month support thread, during which they've been responsive but admittedly stumped in fixing this basic issue: the platform can not sustain a connection to Salesforce. Parabola could have volunteered to adjust our bill after acknowledging the issue, which we think would have been best, but to their credit, did agree with us when we suggested some adjustment would be appropriate. (They offered a $50 reduction of our ~$150 monthly tab on *future* invoices - but not those corresponding to our time of suffering.) Which brings up another point - Parabola isn't cheap. Based on our experience, the price outruns the value; that said, Parabola's pride in their solution isn't misplaced. While we can't yet recommend Parabola to our sales ops audience, we're also not cancelling our account, given how tantalizingly close they seem to putting all the pieces together. Solving for the integration issue might not be trivial (given the troubleshooting time invested in our account alone), but once solved, this otherwise solid platform and knockout UI will turn some heads. Getting Parabola from here to there is a path we wish were less parabolic, but for now, our interest is outstripping our impatience. We'll have a more comprehensive review later this month at salesmanagement.org.

How much time does it take to build such a platform ?

I use daily for my reporting, now with scheduled runs, once I build my data flow, it will run how ever often I set it.

Pros:

Speeds up repetitive excel tasks and combine data from many sources

Cons:

Requires a few workarounds sometimes for something that is simple in excel to do

Daily user, super easy to get set up and integrate into your daily work

Pros:

Extremely easy to use even for novices

Cons:

None

Very useful! How quickly will you be adding new tools?