Why Dromo?

Nearly every developer we know has been asked to build a CSV import feature at some point in their careers. The requirements always start out simple, but then the edge cases start popping up. Can you handle custom fields? What about tab-delimited files? How about conditional validation logic that varies by customer? You don't have enough time to build it exactly the way you want, and the requests for improvement never end.

Worse yet is when a developer inherits an importer that someone else built years ago. It is invariably full of hotfixes and poorly documented. With tech debt everywhere, new feature development is a nightmare.

We handle data file cleaning and automation, so developers can focus on the core features that make their product special and work experience meaningful.

The self-service data file importer is a hard feature to prioritize. For many organizations, it's only used once per customer (when they are migrating bulk data into the product). But it's also the first thing they use. And if it breaks, the customer can't use all the other features of the product. So it's an important feature, but it's not core. And fixing it is never urgent, compared to most other pain points.

This is why homegrown importers are frequently deprioritized and can stay stuck at the bottom of the to-do list forever.

Most product teams don't have extra cycles to obsess over data importing. We do. Dromo allows product managers to introduce first-class, AI-enhanced data importing capabilities this week instead of waiting until next quarter or next year.

It's a simple fact. Operations teams live in spreadsheets. Spinning up a new quality control process? Tracking registrations at a conference? Analyzing customer activity? Spreadsheet, spreadsheet, spreadsheet. Even if a team uses other software to manage a process, the data exported from that software always ends up in a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets are great because they are intuitive and infinitely flexible. This also makes them a pain to rely on, since you can never guarantee the shape of their data. But automating spreadsheet behavior with macros or Python scripts has a steep learning curve.

With Dromo, any member of the operations team can now guarantee that spreadsheet data meets the requirements of any downstream data task. And using our built-in integrations, they can automate the flow of cleaned data files to Google Drive, Dropbox, email, Slack, or any of 100s of other destinations.

When a homegrown importer breaks down, the customer success team is inevitably the one on the hook. Managing tedious exchanges with frustrated users, cleaning up spreadsheets by hand, getting yanked out of the queue to handle yet another fire drill – these common experiences drag down the productivity and morale of even the most determined support rep.

Whenever an organization implements Dromo, onboarding-related support requests plummet immediately afterwards.

The Dromo importer walks a user through the process of validating, cleaning, and transforming a data file, guaranteeing that the final output meets all your quality standards and is in the form you expect.

To configure Dromo, you simply define what the final data file should look like, along with any validation rules or constraints. You do this by creating a "schema" for each import, either in code (Dromo Pro only) or using the no-code Schema Studio.

To use Dromo, you or an end user must:

Dromo outputs the final cleaned data as a JSON object. You can now move the file to the next stage of your data pipeline (e.g., upsert it into a database, attach it to an email, save it in cloud storage) with confidence.

Dromo also provides access to metadata about the import and has an option to view final data as a CSV file.

Dromo handles CSV, XLS, XLSX, and TSV files out of the box. We can also support spreadsheets in all the legacy Excel formats (Excel 2007+, Excel 97-2004, Excel 2.0-5.0), Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Pro, Works, OpenDocument, Uniform Office Format, and Numbers, as well as DIF files, HTML tables, and RTF tables.

We also support JSON files in certain contexts. See this answer in the docs for technical details.

In many cases, no! Although we are SOC 2 certified and can securely process and store data, Dromo believes the very best way to protect your end user data is to never have access to it in the first place. To that end, we offer numerous private configurations that allow you to operate Dromo without the contents of your data files ever transiting our servers or networks.

You can also deploy Dromo yourself via Kubernetes and host it in your own cloud.

Yes, you can pass the final results of an import to services like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Slack, and hundreds of other out-of-the-box integrations via Zapier.

You can also write your own server-side integrations using webhooks and the Dromo API.