Challenge
At Constrafor, we're building cutting-edge construction tech and financial tools to strengthen Subcontractor-GC relationships. This ambitious goal demands complex internal tooling. In our early days, with limited resources, we faced a critical challenge: how to create sophisticated internal tools without distracting our small team from core product development.
Our Credit Ops team needed robust interfaces for underwriting, customer data, and financial transactions. But as Douglas Reed, co-founder and CTO, explained, "We realized that being a small team, we didn't have a lot of resources at first to build our own internal tooling from scratch." We needed a quick solution to build adaptable tools that could streamline processes and integrate seamlessly with our tech stack.
Douglas added, "Especially with the high probability that our needs would evolve and change from version to version, we knew that investing a lot of time designing and building these tools in a specific way wouldn’t pay off in the long term.”
Solution
Enter Retool: a game-changing platform that addresses our internal tooling needs head-on. With Retool, we could rapidly build and deploy powerful internal tools without diverting precious engineering resources from our core products. "It allowed us to add simple interfaces that work upfront and get something up really rapidly," Douglas explained. This approach gave us the flexibility to iterate quickly, adapting our tools as our needs evolved without being bogged down by extensive custom development.
Retool seamlessly integrated with our existing tech stack, including Stripe for payments and our custom APIs. It empowered our Credit Ops team with intuitive interfaces for managing underwriting, monitoring ledger activity, viewing customer data, and handling complex financial transactions. As Douglas noted, "Retool has saved us months of front-end development work at this point."
Results
The impact of Retool on Constrafor's operations has been transformative. By partnering with Retool, we've significantly accelerated our internal tool development while maintaining our focus on core product innovation. This time-saving translates to tangible benefits: we estimate that Retool has offset the need for at least 40-50% of a full-time front-end developer's workload over the past two years.
Our Credit Ops team now operates with unprecedented efficiency, thanks to custom-built Retool applications like our ledgers app and Stripe treasury wire transfer tool. These interfaces have streamlined our underwriting processes, enhanced our ability to manage customer data, and simplified complex financial transactions.
And with the flexibility of Retool, Constrafor has been able to quickly iterate on these tools as our business needs evolve, without incurring significant development costs. As Douglas put it, "We don't have to wrestle with updating interfaces or fixing bugs." This agility has been crucial in our fast-paced industry, allowing us to adapt quickly to market changes and customer needs while maintaining our competitive edge in construction finance technology.