OUR JOURNEY, SO FAR...

Hello World 👋

Hello, I am Andrew Apell, the creator of Flookup Data Wrangler. With a background in Statistics and over 18 years of experience in Data Analytics, I have consistently sought innovative solutions for cleaning complex data efficiently. Flookup emerged as one such solution.

I designed Flookup to be a lean yet powerful tool for your data cleaning needs. Having personally utilized it for 8 years, I am confident that it will prove to be a valuable asset for both you and your organization.

How Flookup Came to Be

Flookup was born out of necessity. I was part of a team engaged in a project that required cleaning and standardizing thousands of rows of data. This data was exceptionally challenging, and the manual cleaning process typically consumed about a week for each team member..

To enhance our results, I introduced my team to the Levenshtein and Damerau-Levenshtein algorithms, which I had adapted for our specific project. While this significantly improved the overall accuracy of our data cleaning tasks, the process remained quite slow.

Subsequently, we explored the Jaro-Winkler algorithm, but quickly determined that the improvement over the previous algorithms was not substantial enough to warrant its continued use.

Ultimately, I decided to develop the initial version of Flookup, basing it on the n-gram algorithm. Upon its release as an add-on, Flookup reduced our task time to just 30 minutes, and our error rate consistently remained below 1 percent thereafter. The significant benefits Flookup brought to our team's performance compelled me to share it with the world as our first public product, thus marking the birth of Flookup for Google Sheets.

Throughout Flookup's development, I drew inspiration from various fuzzy string-matching algorithms and strengthened its core with insights gained from our practical experiences with them.

Flookup for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

We operate as a fiercely independent, debt-free, and entirely bootstrapped company. We maintain a strict policy of never selling or utilizing client information for any form of profit, financial or otherwise. As a fully funded team of two, our profitability stems from our subscription-based model. This financial independence allows us to prioritize building solutions that genuinely serve our clients' best interests, without compromise.

Our immediate focus is to expand Flookup's data processing capabilities by ethically extending processing beyond Google's timeout policy. Building upon this, we have successfully integrated Artificial Intelligence systems to further enhance the Flookup core algorithm. We anticipate a very exciting journey ahead and hope you will join us every step of the way. In the interim, please connect with me on Twitter. Let us journey along together.