Pivot Series ‒ Part 1: Why we moved away from the no-code reverse ETL space

Lago was initially founded in 2021 as a no-code data tool for growth teams, inspired by the founders’ experience at Qonto, where they had relied on costly, engineering-intensive systems to segment customer data and sync it with marketing and business tools. After joining Y Combinator and launching within four months, the company gained early users by offering a spreadsheet-like interface intended to let nontechnical teams extract, transform, and synchronize product data without SQL or custom pipelines. However, customer use revealed that its main users were technical professionals rather than growth marketers, while the product’s value was limited because most work continued to occur in data warehouses or downstream business tools. The founders also found that marketers often lacked the organizational knowledge, confidence, access, and engineering trust needed to independently manage company data, making the no-code approach less effective than expected. They concluded that their Qonto experience reflected an unusually data-oriented growth organization with dedicated engineering support, rather than a broad market need. Rather than compete as a reverse ETL product against emerging leaders or expand into a full marketing platform, the team chose a hard pivot, eventually moving toward an open-source billing API for product-led SaaS.

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