Untouched Creators, Data, and announcing Houseware as the winner of Snowflake Startup Challenge 2022

Today, we are super kicked to announce that Houseware is the winner of the Snowflake Startup Challenge 2022. (Read about it on the Snowflake Blog here.)

Our small team of 9 is oozing with energy to come out of stealth with a bang. We emerged as the winners after competing with over 250 contenders from over 70+ countries and facing a live pitch-off with two other capable teams judged by Snowflake founders, board members, and the leadership team.

How did this happen?

Shubhankar and I started Houseware in October 2021 with a straightforward question: What would it take to flip the value of the warehouse from data and engineering teams to the revenue function? Houseware is the Warehouse flipped backward.

Since the evolution of the database in 1970, the data ecosystem has evolved massively, with capabilities helping data and development teams emerge at the forefront. However, the rise in tooling has left the business as the consumer of insights with a frustrating experience of data requests and BI dashboards.

Our mission is to build a data apps ecosystem by empowering a new category of data users - putting the data warehouse in their hands, in the language they speak. These users form the modern revenue function spanning sales, customer success, marketing, product, and finance. We call these the Untouched Creators.

Snowflake ($SNOW) has a special place in my heart for several reasons.

Firstly, It was my first data warehouse experience on the cloud as an analyst in the revenue function. Second, during my first stint in the world of data ecosystem tools as the #1 hire at Atlan, I got the chance to kick off the Atlan-Snowflake alliance. I got an opportunity to see our customers' journeys and the value they were driving with Snowflake to create a better together story for Atlan and Snowflake. And third, as a lover of all things sassy SaaS has to offer, Snowflake is one of the fastest companies to reach $1 Billion in revenue. What is not to love?

But more importantly, Snowflake is why I quit my job to start Houseware to serve the untouched creators.

In Jan 2021, I came across Snowflake External Functions while working with a customer at Atlan, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what the data cloud could become. It meant that the walled garden of enterprise data could now be open for collaboration and building applications. All the new and powerful features were just the beginning of what was coming from Snowflake.

It was also when Reverse ETL was all the hype, and product-led growth was the most sought-after growth strategy in SaaS. All of which led us to believe in a future full of creators. These creators cannot wait for data access and don’t want to talk about the language of tables, columns, and schemas. These were the Untouched Creators.

In March 2021, I quit Atlan, the leading data catalog in the market, soon after their Series A. Atlan is a half-a-billion-dollar company scaling at a tremendous growth rate. It wasn’t an easy decision, but that is for another post.

I wrote a problem statement brief that has remained as is since then, and I am glad it does. As one of our customers recently said, Houseware is solving a lindy problem. We are in it for the long run; we want to play this market out, not just today or for the next few years, but for decades to come.

Fast forward to January 2022, when Shubhankar and I had this brief conversation on our # talk-imagine Slack channel (here’s where our team dreams and these dreams come true, as you now know), and we took it quite seriously.

And just last week, we won the challenge. But, of course, none of this would have been possible without our incredible and sturdy team that is irrationally optimistic about the future of the data ecosystem.

Why does Snowflake win?

At Houseware, our team is bullish on Snowflake. With the increasing SaaS applications inside organizations and the rising need for cross-tool analytics to empower use-cases like Product-led growth, the data warehouse will be the world wide web of data for any modern organization.

They say it takes a village, and I say that it takes an ecosystem to build a successful data company. Snowflake’s lego block-like capabilities, coupled with the network effects around data sharing, marketplace, etc., make it a practitioner’s dream.

But could it support building applications to extend this vision and truly make it the data cloud? If you’d had asked me three months ago, I would have had to think, but not anymore.

Without a doubt, Snowflake Summit 2022 was a flurry of announcements. But, as several industry analysts and veterans of the data twitter would say, it was the unveiling of a bold new vision by Snowflake.

The critical focus on powering applications for our untouched creators is core to how we build Houseware. Snowflake makes it super easy by allowing us to leverage a bunch of exciting announcements:

• Unistore: The most recent announcement allows Houseware to combine the beauty of Snowflake’s architecture with the power and depth of a transactional database. The Unistore allows for single-row lookups and data activation use cases that need high query-per-second performance.
• Snowpark: Houseware uses several pre-packaged machine learning models for growth, built directly on top of Snowpark, enabling the value of a data scientist, passed down to the untouched creators.
• Native application framework: Publishing apps directly built on top of the data cloud allows the flourishing data warehouse market to become the app store equivalent.

What does this all mean, and what is the road ahead...

Winning the Snowflake Startup Challenge for our team is the start of a foundational partnership with the Snowflake team:

• Our customers can experience the tightest bundled modern data experience for untouched creators on top of the Snowflake data cloud.
• $SNOW would be investing up to $500,000 into Houseware, and we are excited to be bringing Snowflake Ventures onto our cap table.
• The Startup Challenge gives us inroads into the Snowflake data cloud ecosystem and private preview access to multiple new technologies and GTM initiatives.

We are fresh off steam with a bunch of new product announcements to come and cannot wait to build for the future of data applications for the world.

If you are a Snowflake customer looking for an early preview of why we do what we do and Houseware’s modern data experience, reach me directly at divyansh@houseware.io. I can’t wait to personally take you through the fastest experience in building data apps.