NoCode Tool: Acho

What you need to know about data management and analytics is that it’s time consuming, difficult, and expensive. It can be difficult for a company to find the right talent with the right skillset. While there are always exceptions, most businesses lack these three crucial things: money, people, and time. Acho changes all of this by providing companies with a way to connect their data sources from different platforms in one place without coding required. Acho is a NoCode cloud data platform for connecting, transforming, and analyzing business data. As we spoke to Vincent Jiang, CEO and Co-founder of Acho, the team believes that companies who are able to do this will have an advantage over competitors in the marketplace. This blog post introduces you to what Acho does and how it can help your every team improve and accelerate their decision making in the era of big data analytics.

In this day and age, with software being so powerful nowadays, we can essentially, turn on, data connection, data transformation, and, data platform into like a local platform. So this way people can build, for example, like their customized CRM application, their analytics dashboards, or their email campaigns, all without coding.   

History

The company was founded in August last year. The Team Acho went through Y Combinator, which provides seed funding for startups. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It pays your expenses while you’re getting started. Vincent and his team graduated last summer and since then they raised our seed round of $2.4M. From finding the next customer and market opportunity to identifying risks and anomalies, Acho’s products teams all over the world advance analytics through cloud computing. “Big data” is more of a buzzword than a practical technology that helps accelerate businesses and industries. Thus, big data is a gift to our generation’s decision makers though it’s been largely restricted to those with more computational resources and technical expertise.

The company is doing reasonably well, Acho has been growing pretty fast. Acho started commercializing last August. They only started with 2 people in the team and now they have 10 people right now. Team Acho is a group of data geeks, and software engineers. Despite the different backgrounds and experiences, they all believe in the same value of building and sharing. As builders, they are eager to share and hope to deliver lasting value to their customers.

Product Use

A lot of light data tools on the on the market already, but many of them require just technical proficiency, to understand which tool to use, at least understand like Python, or some of the server side languages, in order to kind of transform data, connect data, and read a kind of turn data into API and support the applications, and the ideas that you need essentially. Acho’s mission is to connect people with data is to build that collaborative, data platform that supports like, as many different, you know, valuable, valuable production goes without needing to deal a single code. You can build your first project with Acho because they all have the features that  you need for every data project, from connecting data, applying transformations, to building dashboards and data automation. 

If you’re running a Shopify store, you might use many different tools like Zendesk for customer support, Shopify, some payment system, and you might be using my CSV files or some other, and also inventory control system. Acho can help you bring the data together in one place. In this way, you can sort of holistically manage your data from different operations. Once you have the data, all put in, you can first do analytics on it as easy as a spreadsheet. And then, you can even support applications such as email campaigns, a dashboard that tracks KPIs, your monthly gross merchandise value, monthly recurring revenue, or turn rates. And other things such as analytics, essentially supporting applications.

In digital marketing, Acho can help you bring your campaigns together, and designing your own customized metric is mattresses, to kind of track the performance of our campaign. It kind of distributes the insights among your team. There’s a certain level of collaboration that goes into it. So even a small team of like 5 to 10 people, it’s actually pretty helpful because this way, you don’t really have to again connect to some database, export the files, use Excel to kind of transform the file, share it with your teammates, or create a lot of duplicate copies, and different versions. 

Acho VS Zapier and other database tools

You might be wondering, how is Acho different from Zapier and other database tools? 

Vincent thinks the core problem that Zapier has is essentially the lack of a data interface for smaller teams,  but the larger enterprises have internal IT and engineering teams that can manage, maintain and administer data through their own tools.  Whereas smaller teams, they don’t have a lot of IT resources. AlthoughZapier is filling the gap somewhere. It’s actually not much of a database management tool. 

Acho is more of a data platform, where a data warehouse that brings your data together, regardless of the size or formats, or complexity. For example, you can essentially build a dashboard with IDs, or share the data with other people with the other clients, or even turn it into an application, or for a couple like, clients constantly, they want to send the data after transformation after connection. They want the data to be sent back to Salesforce, or just want to be sent back to some other places. So, it’s not really like 20 integrations or talking to each other. 

Similarly, Acho is the same space as Snowflake in terms of the use case, but not really directly competing with each other.. As of the moment, Acho’s team is focused on helping as many clients or customers as they can. Which is a great thing for them because all businesses nowadays need a data infrastructure for their team.

Key Features

Consumer

Acho is mainly focused on enterprises who don’t have don’t want to spend a  fortune on IT resources. A lot of consultants use Acho because it emphasizes the problem when building tools for their clients and teammates. So they want knowledge that offers as minimum work as possible, they don’t want to use something like an Oracle or SAP, which, once they have built it out, they’re essentially locked in by the providers, and it will be really hard to transfer knowledge to their clients and teammates.

They also have startup clients: one of the primary things that they do is helping small startups, they typically have one person performing different functions. With a larger team, they typically have several people for the same function. Startups find Acho useful to them because they can essentially bring all the business processes into one. This is also a very high mountain for smaller teams because some of the apps nowadays are more and more enclosed. 

100 and more businesses are using Acho to manage data assets on cloud. Currently, the company works directly with their customers.

Case Study

Request a free Demo to see how Acho can fulfill your use case.

Onboard data files of all sizes and formats 

• Combine multiple data files into one database
• Update data files in database automatically
• Bulk edit and clean files  
• Keep an organized collection of records (organize data by project, metadata, project descriptions, annotation)

Build a searchable database with CSV files

• Open any large data files, such as CSV, Excel, TXT, TSV
• Index and create a data dictionary data from different sources
• Search for specific records with powerful filters blazingly fast
• Transform tables to any schema, size and format 

Support analytic dashboard directly with any data source 

• Connect to any data sources (databases, apps, APIs, spreadsheets)
• Support various BI tools, such as Tableau, PowerBI, and Metabase
• Create data pipelines (metric layer)
• Sync data automatically

Share and distribute data resources 

• Share resources/projects within an organization with identity management
• Provision security accesses for each teammate
• Share resources through Embed Table 

Customer Testimonials 

These customer testimonials are from G2: Users answer the questions, what do you like best? what problems are you solving with the product? and what benefits have you realized?

‍
From Robby

“Acho is a top-notch up-and-coming data warehousing vendor with a slick UI and excellent support. Acho’s product is top notch with a very user-friendly user interface. Their support team is very helpful and responsive. They really go the extra mile to support their clients, even if it means custom functionality. The pricing is also reasonable. I have been able to house and process large datasets with ease. Additionally, I have been able to unlock large gains in our ability to analyze and report on our data.”

‍
From Qi 
“Data processing was blazing fast, I was shocked because I had more than 3 million records in a table which was not even possible to open in Excel. Every action I made including find and replace took just a few seconds, much much faster than I can do with almost any other tool. The no coding environment definitely helped as well, although I can do SQL but in data discovering the simple click and show interface is just so much better. It takes time to google SQL syntax and get the query in the right format so I was very appreciative of the easy UI. Data discovering and cleaning for myself on large datasets, creating different versions with different process flows. For each base database table I need to create many different processed tables, some are similar in structure and just different in filtering/processing. Having too many different views in SQL gets out of hand because I lose track of the operations I did on each one, with Acho I am able to know exactly what I have done with the virtual tracking log. For the next step I am looking to do data publishing to my peer colleagues, they can build on top of the processed data I have for them in a self-serve format using Acho so I don’t have to take care of their requests individually.”

Pricing

Acho has a 14 day FREE trial. No credit card required. There’s no salespeople involved, you can just sign up and use the tool. You can set everything up within probably, like 10  to15 minutes.

Also, Acho’s plan works for businesses of all sizes. Price starts at $149 per month. See the full price list here 

Message to the NoCode community

Vincent’s advice is to extrapolate as much value from your data as you can regardless of your technical resources. If you have databases from an app, API, flat file or any other places, you really don’t need an engineer to essentially turn it into applications. With Acho and other NoCode tools alike, you can practically do it yourself at a fraction of the cost of building a data engineering team. 

Summary 

Acho is a cloud data platform for connecting, transforming, and analyzing business data. It’s designed to be easy to use with no coding required, so you can explore your data through intuitive visualizations or powerful queries. Acho simplifies the process of understanding your business by giving you insights into what drives revenue and profitability. With this information, businesses can make more informed decisions about where they want their company to go whether it’s maximizing margins on products or cutting costs in order to grow faster.

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