How Harmonic rebuilt a $20K SaaS tool without waiting for engineering resources
Impact
- 33 internal apps built
- $20,000+ saved by replacing an existing SaaS tool
- 5 AI-generated tickets filed to every human ticket
- Y million companies in their database
“Retool is an excellent canvas, both for technical and non-technical people. It allows us to take something from concept, to prototype, to fully built-out so quickly…
Now if someone on the team wants to buy a cool new piece of software, the default is to ask, ‘Why can’t we just build this in Retool?’”
—Miles Konstantin, Head of Automation and Tooling, Harmonic
Harmonic↗ is democratizing access to venture capital through its startup discovery engine, helping thousands of investors worldwide discover and evaluate startups.
But investors aren’t the only interested party: GTM teams and recruiters also benefit from Harmonic’s intelligence platform. Harmonic built an internal operating system with Retool to keep its lean team focused on the most business-critical work.
Company overview
- Industry: Technology & software
- Regions: Global
- Retool capabilities used: Agents, Retool Database, Workflows, Apps
- Use cases: Automated support and feature request ticket generation, contract validation, daily meeting prep for sales reps, customer research and relationship management
- Data sources: Salesforce, Slack, Gong, Notion, Google Drive, and email client
Scaling impact without adding overhead
Harmonic faces pressure every startup knows well: to do more with less. For a company competing against players many times its size, efficiency is existential. Harmonic’s journey with Retool started about three and a half years ago, when custom software needs far outstripped engineering’s capacity.
“We have to manage onboarding, offboarding, and permissions for all our customers,” Miles Konstantin↗, Harmonic’s Head of Automation and Tooling, explains. “We’d built a custom interface into our application, but anytime we needed to change something, we’d have to bother engineering. It slowed things down tremendously and diverted resources that were critical in the early days.”
What started as a customer management tool became a company operating system
Looking for a solution that would take the burden off of engineering, Miles connected Harmonic’s data sources, Salesforce, and internal APIs to create a customer management interface in Retool. That single app freed engineering to focus on product development, and has evolved into what the team now calls Harmonic OS: a central gateway to 33 internal applications that power everything from customer onboarding to data operations.
Workflows automate ticket generation and contract validation
When Retool Workflows↗ launched, Harmonic automated key operational processes that had previously required manual work or expensive third-party tools. The team built a ticket generator workflow that integrates with Gong to automatically process sales calls, generating transcripts, creating AI-generated summaries for Slack, and routing information based on content: different workflows are triggered for competitor mentions, bug reports, or feature requests.
“The tool we were using previously cost us something like $20,000 a year, and I was running into so many issues with it. Their support was so slow that it got to a point where it was faster for me to rebuild the product inside Retool Workflows than wait for support to get back to me.”
—Miles Konstantin, Head of Automation and Tooling, Harmonic
The system suggests pre-formatted Linear tickets with the relevant clip from the call embedded. Reps can then choose to file the ticket with a single emoji reaction. Early results show a 5:1 ratio of AI-generated versus human-filed tickets, significantly reducing the manual burden on sales teams.
Harmonic also automated contract validation through a contract validator workflow that compares closed deals against seats provisioned and other contract terms, flagging discrepancies the moment a deal closes.
“Workflows are so easy to spin up because they already connect to the Retool database and all our different resources,” Miles says, “If someone on the team says to me, ‘Hey, I wish we could do xyz,’ Retool has become the default place where I will build it.”
A retention agent delivers proactive customer intelligence
Now with Retool Agents↗, Harmonic is automating even more nuanced tasks. To facilitate smooth renewals of annual contracts, Harmonic previously had a Retool workflow that sent automated reminders to a Slack channel to check in with a customer at regular intervals. The message would tag the account manager and provide some basic usage information about the customer.
The new retention agent conducts extensive customer research, automatically assessing customer health by analyzing multiple data sources: usage patterns per user, whether the Harmonic champion still works at the company (verified through external checks), email and support ticket sentiment, and even company health research, including layoffs, growth trends based on company headcount, and industry news.
“The agent allows account managers to focus on the human tasks of building relationships and interacting with people, offloading the research process to the tool instead.”
—Miles Konstantin, Head of Automation and Tooling, Harmonic
The agent generates a risk score from 1 to 5, along with detailed findings that would have taken account managers hours to compile manually.
“[Account managers] don’t have to spend time researching all these customers proactively,” Miles explains. “They get a sense of where things are, and when customers stray into higher risk, they know they need to be more attentive.”
The system stores every risk report in Retool’s database, enabling trend analysis over time to identify whether a customer’s position is improving or deteriorating.
The sales team’s brief agent does the call prep for them
The Harmonic team also built an agent that acts as an executive assistant for each sales rep. Every day, the agent compiles context on upcoming calls: customer history, their role at the company, and past interactions. It collates this information and sends an email summary with the day’s schedule to the rep, eliminating manual research and allowing reps to have detailed conversations with more prospects.
A new culture of building in-house
Retool has fundamentally shifted how Harmonic approaches operational challenges. Darri Atlason↗, Head of Growth, describes the cultural effect: “When you run into issues with your workflow, your default is to go, ‘This can probably be fixed. Let me talk to Miles and figure out how to do it.’ And that’s extremely valuable.”
This mindset shift extends across the company. As Miles puts it: “Now the question is, ‘why can’t we just build in Retool?’ That is the default because we already have everything set up and hooked up. My bet is that most of these tools we can just build faster than the sales cycle would happen with another tool.”
Scaling to outputs of a company twice its size
Harmonic processes thousands of transactions daily—Gong calls, customer alerts, API requests. It’s competing against exponentially larger companies. Operating at this scale and competing at this level is only possible by pulling the right levers.
Miles describes the shift in his work: “Before, I was doing customer implementations, which is one-to-one—my hours were directly proportional to customer time. Now I can build tools through Retool that scale. If I have to do data imports for 10 customers, I can just build one tool that allows someone on our team to do them all.”
Harmonic also uses Retool apps to seamlessly onboard contractors for their data team operations—scaling their workforce without the overhead of traditional hiring. This evolution from linear to leveraged work allows Harmonic to punch above its weight. Account managers focus on relationships, automated systems handle research, data preparation, and routine tasks, and engineers are free to focus on developing the core product.
When asked what losing Retool would mean, Miles is clear: “It would be very painful. Of all the tools that I use, I would essentially rather keep Retool than any of the others. It’s just so core and fundamental to what we build.”
With Retool, Harmonic’s lean team competes against industry giants. The team can also rapidly experiment with AI without waiting for engineering resources. “The speed from idea to something tangible that we can test and iterate on is so, so fast,” says Miles.
Ready to see Retool in action? Get a demo↗ with a Retool expert or start building for free↗ today.