TableFlow

TL;DR

TableFlow is an open source data import platform for companies to collect and transform customer data. Instead of building an in-house file upload and processing service, businesses can embed or link to TableFlow’s customizable importer to manage their data onboarding needs.

Hi everyone, we’re Eric and Mitch from TableFlow! 👋

Problem

Companies often rely on spreadsheets to import customer data or share data between internal systems. This usually occurs in one of two ways: manually through email or programmatically through a built-in experience.

Sharing spreadsheets via email and manually parsing the data presents clear opportunities for improvements; however, building a native CSV import experience isn’t trivial. (We know because we’ve done it multiple times at different companies.) What always sounds like a quick “feature” often ends up becoming a completely separate service. Each import surface has its own schema definition. File encoding errors for different types of Excel files never end. One bad record in thousands of lines of good data can fail the entire import. Providing clear feedback for users to resolve the issues becomes a completely new “feature” to build and support. The list goes on and on.

Solution

Our goal is to help teams avoid this decision between manual, tedious effort and large engineering investment. We want engineering teams to be able to drop in our pre-built importer in minutes and forget about the hassles associated with customer data imports.

How it works:

1. Create an Importer and define the columns your users can import
2. Embed the TableFlow Importer in your app
3. Your users can upload CSV files and set the column mapping through the Importer modal
4. Download the clean, mapped data from TableFlow via the API or from the admin app

Open Source

We are open source and aim to be the most developer-friendly option for customer data import. Developers can get started quickly with our fully hosted version that includes a generous free tier, or they can deploy the open source version in their own infrastructure.

Team

We met when we were both working at Heymarket, a Series-A startup in SF. Mitch was the first product hire, and Eric was the first full-stack engineer. During our two years there we co-owned many projects and defined many of the engineering & product processes to help the company scale. We became friends outside of the office through tennis, pickleball, mountain biking, and skiing.

Mitch started his career as an engineer before moving to the dark side (product 😛). He previously worked at GE Digital, Bolt, and founded a company focused on B2B payments.

Eric is a software engineer that previously worked at Facebook, myMatrixx, and co-founded a company that provided a search engine for car shopping online.

Asks

📋 Try out TableFlow and let us know your feedback

⭐️ Star our open source repo

📰 Read our Introducing TableFlow blog post