Giving developers what they want with Deepak Prabhakara

Jack: Hi everyone. You are listening to Scaling Dev Tools, the show that investigates how dev tools go from zero to one. I'm joined today by Deepak Prabhakara from BoxyHQ, which is an enterprise readiness for B2B SaaS and Deepak is the founder.

Thanks so much for joining Deepak.

Deepak: Thanks, Jack. Super excited to be here and looking forward to the chat.

Jack: Could you tell us a little bit about BoxyHQ and about yourself?

Deepak: Absolutely, so I'm Deepak, co-founder and CEO of BoxyHQ. So my background is, you know, I've always been a technologist, love technology, love the intersection of, you know, technology, product and commercialization. Uh, and that's why, you know, always love startups and been through a lot of startups and, started BoxyHQ last year. Where, you know, we took this problem of, a developer having res a lot of responsibility, all the way, you know, from infrastructure to actually building the product. And of course with the growing cybersecurity attacks, they need to start thinking about security as well, fairly early on. So we went back and, you know, we thought about what does security in the box look like for develop. And that's what we do at BoxyHQ. We have building blocks that developers can pull into their, you know, code, make it more robust, compliant, and secure. So in many ways, you know, we're like the stripe for developer security.

Jack: That's really cool. And I, I can totally imagine a situation where, like, you're a startup, you finally get like an enterprise client. It's going through all the horrible legal work and stuff, and then you get these questions about security and suddenly, it's all out of, out of your depth. So, and then, and then BoxyHQ can come in and, solve all that.

Deepak: Absolutely. It's obviously a very complex process, but you know, we can, we can simplify the technical aspects of that. We've been through this before, so, you know, we, we understand the playbook. The enterprise is not buying your product for the enterprise features.

They're basically buying you for especially the commoditized , features. They're buying you for your core product. The core. Workflow or problem you're solving. So everything else is kind of, you know, fairly undifferentiated. So if you think about their common as it's, enterprise, single sign on, that's a preferred way to get into your, application.

So it typically starts from there. That's why we started that as our first. and what we realized very quickly is, you know, startups want a more horizontal approach to it because they usually have two, three of these sort of features that are asked for. , some of them are quite, mandatory to get into even like, a pilot or, you know, just for the enterprise to start using.

Thinking about that, our journey is also sort of positioned around that we decided to start with startups that sell into the enterprises, because that's really the first inflection point where startups start to think about security. Until then it's usually an afterthought, but as soon as an enterprise comes into the, picture, because they usually come with, you know, a set of security questionnaire.

They will question your compliance posture. What are you doing about, security and compliance as a company? So when you start to, think about those things, , you can get those things out of the box from us, not have to worry about those com commoditized pieces, just get your team back onto working on your core.

And that's sort of our vision as well, starting with startups, but then slowly growing it into, developer security needs for companies of all stages.

Jack: I can see you've got big plans on that. And one of the interesting things is that your model to kind of get your product out there is not like a SaaS where people sign up and they can log in on your website or an api. you are actually kind of giving them access to like a, a repo pretty much. Is that kind of how it works?

Deepak: A Absolutely, you know, we we're, we're open source, , fully open source and Apache 2.0 as well. You know, when we looked at, , when we looked at the landscape and we looked at, you know, some of the stats vendors in the space, what we quickly realized is because we are so close to infrastructure, there's this classic build versus buy debate , with every developer, do I build this on my own because it's so close, so critical to what I do, or do I go and, you know, buy something that's out there?

So for us, you know, open source was a very natural model there because that's how I, as a developer have been evaluating software all my life as well. And even as a, engineering leader, that was kind of pretty much how my team went about it as well. You go out there, you know, developers don't want to talk to sales people.

That's the last thing they want to do. That was the same with me. you wanna go there, you have a specific problem in mind and you know, very quickly because you can try it out, uh, whether this tool, you know, solves your problem. So that's kind of the, you know, the first mindset we want to get into.

So, you know, how does it developer go about discovering solutions to that problems? So that's why an open source for us was a very natural. And the second, the second key thing there is, which is probably quite unique to us. Uh, we very quickly realized that, you know, developers will use this in very different ways in their tech stack.

Uh, and that's why the open source model was, very natural here. For example, you know, we fit into the cloud native world. You know, if you're deployed on es, uh, we fit into, you know, a natural, client server architecture, you know, monolith because you can basically embed our, uh, you can embed us as a library, not just run us as a standalone service.

So, thinking about, you know, the, the diverse ways in which developers build and deploy things. For us, you know, open source was, was a key way to help them on this journey.

Jack: You've kind of gone for what developers actually want, and you've kind of delivered it in the approach that works for developers.

Deepak: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my background is, pretty much hands on development as well. So I think some of the lessons from my own journey kind of helped there. Uh, and of course also, you know, talking to a lot of people in this space who have to deal with this, uh, you know, Firstly enterprise readiness problem, and then, you know, later on, how do you kind of maintain that security and compliance, in a continuous form.

We're very sort of, tic about ensuring that the workflows match what, you know, the developers, who use our products are, looking.

Jack: And it sounds like you are talking to a lot of developers. Could you talk a little bit about how you've been growing, and the stage that you're at?

Deepak: Absolutely. We are doing, I think, three things in parallel. One is of course, we have this exotic situation where we started the company even before we had the open source projects out there. Which is quite unusual of course, but you know, the, validation of the strategy kind of added up, quite nicely there.

So because we were doing that, challenges are on three fronts. One is, because everything starts with a project first, right before it turns into a product. So finding that sort of project community fit, you know, who are the people out there who will use it? How do they discover us? how do we want to build this community? Where do we find them? What do they come in for and why will they stick around? So that was kind of, the first, sort of the challenge and the explorations around that. The second thing was, of course, building the product and in parallel finding product market fit cuz you know, unless we had people on the other side who, uh, had the problem resonated.

and kind of, you know, our solution, basically fills that hole for them. And the third one is of course, you know, what kind of developers do we start with? Because you, you of course don't want to go and boil the ocean, , even thinking about this developers, it's a big crowd out there. So who amongst those, you know, did we want to serve, , to begin with and then kind of, map out our journey from.

That's kind of the three, I would say the three main challenges we started with and we are still dealing with, , because we, we started last year, so last August, we raised a seed round in October and really started building out the production team from earlier this year, Jan. Uh, so that's meant, you know, we've spent about close to a year.

in the market on the problem. So still very early days, but those are kind of their, you know, our top challenges.

Jack: And you mentioned, in our previous conversation that you've been doing a lot of content recently. Has that been the main way that you've been getting people into, into the funnel essentially?

Deepak: Yes, absolutely. So yeah, very early on we realized that, you know, we we're not gonna have the same kind of ad budgets that, you know, SaaS companies would, because for us, commercialization is intentionally delayed because, you know, we're looking for adoption first. Looking to, you know, truly create, , add value before we know, add and create value before we try to extract any value from, you know, both community and product.

So we've been building a lot of content, a lot of guides targeted towards, developers, using various frameworks and looking for this problem of, , how do I, as an example, how do I add enterprise single sign-on to, to this specific framework. So, we've published, extensive guides.

We've looked at, we've looked at a lot of, complimentary open source solutions out there and then integrated with those because that, you know, kind of gives us that initial audience that, already has a framework, you know, an authentication framework. But does, is missing that enterprise single sign all piece.

Authentication is already such a big challenge, right? You know, even with Alt Zero and the big players, there's a lot of, opportunity that's been left behind and we've seen, like, , a lot of these companies come up. So one challenge we had was, do we go deep into authentication, and compete with that crowd as well?

But then we quickly realized that, you know, there's a. , there's a lot of good solutions out there, and by the time our customers come to us, they already have something in [00:10:00] place. You don't want to very early on try and displace anything. It's, it's very challenging. It's challenging enough to get them to adopt your product.

If you're trying to displace something that's, you know, it's even bigger challenge and it's so, you know, something not worth. So that meant, you know, for us content, the long-term strategy, , we of course had to understand, you know, where our competitors are and what kind of keywords they're good at so that, you know, instead of directly going and competing with them on those terms, we could look for, you know, auxiliary pieces where, our content kind of, brings us , to the.

So we've done a lot of that work. That's been extremely challenging as well. You know, you are, you're trying to figure out, where they are. Today we can see that, the SEO challenges are huge because it's so expensive to get to get out there. And then organically, that means you'll be extremely good about your content.

You know, it can't be about your. , it's got to really be about the problem, because Google is extremely good at, noticing those sort of, cheeky pieces of, you try to competitor comparison or, you try to be, exactly where your competitor is. So that's been a lot of trial and error there around content and what works well and what doesn't.

Jack: Did you do it all in-house to your content?

Deepak: Yes, absolutely. So we're very specific about that because, the problem with outsourcing is you, if you know specifically what to write about, and you know how it's very easy to outsource, but we, because we are targeting developers, it's very hard to find people who, you know, have that mindset.

they really need to know what, what is being done there. So that, mix of extremely technical articles, but at the same time, you know, kind of being, , mixing that up with, you know, the, the SEO pieces is very tricky. So we have to kind of rely on our own expertise around this. So all of the content we do is in-house, um, directly related to a lot of the.

That, you know, code walkthroughs that we do. We haven't tried videos yet that's on the pipeline. you know, YouTube is really the second largest search engine after Google. So, we do know that there's, there's a lot of opportunity there, but that's something we haven't been able to try because of time.

Jack: YouTube is a very exciting place.

Deepak: Absolutely.

Jack: How have you been distributing the content that you've produced?

Deepak: Places where developers usually get together, popular ones are hack News. Uh, hack News actually has worked really well for us, because it lets you engage with, the audience there. Of course trying to promote your brand, but you're trying to kind of lead that discussion around.

what is useful out of that, either that quantum piece that you've produced or a question you're asking there. So hacking use has been extremely good because it's not just about, distribution, but you're also trying to get some insights. And they're quite engaged because, you know, they'll, they'll come in and talk to you about it.

Uh, it's good to get the opinions as well because they're quite opinionated. You can sort of push the boundaries of, the kind of controversies you want to create, uh, which then, of course, with the intention being to, you know, lead into interesting discussions around it.

So how can you, dev do two has been great. Uh, it's quite new, but lot of, you know, long form content there that works very well. Guides, especially, we, uh, Reddit has been fantastic as well. of course, the tricker thing with all this is how do you seed your own profile, because, typically will get blocked if you're trying to too many promotional things.

Uh, so it's a healthy mix of, you know, going out there with content that is not yours. Using the discussions, in all these channels quite nicely. You just ask a question and. As long as you quite, you are structuring the questions well, you get a lot of engagement on the back of it. Uh, so that's kind of been our strategy around this.

A bit of social media, but not so much. Twitter's been good because of the hashtags that you can kind of target. And we've also been using Twitter for sort of a bit of, you know, gorilla marketing. We, we have some keyword. Alerts and when they pop up, we kind of, go in and, and try to be useful there first.

But sometimes, you know, we are just throwing out BoxyHQ out there. Uh, we use a lot of memes as well. They work out quite well. Our product is called SAML Jackson. You know, SAML because of the protocol and then it's a nice play on Sam l Jackson.

We use a lot of his memes from Pulp Fiction.

we're obviously big Pulp Fiction fans internally, so giving it a humorous way of getting your message out there.

Jack: What kind of, terms are you monitoring on Twitter to kind of pop up in.

Deepak: Very specific technical terms, like, you know, Samuel Single Signon Samuels is so, open. Id connect. , which, which is quite broad. And then we kind of look at the, and look at the tweet and what they're talking about. Uh, sometimes it's not relevant so you have to kind of look through it before it's, you know, it might be talking about something that's not related to you.

Single sign on itself is quite a broad term and because we only do enterprise single sign-on, there's a lot of confusion with, you know, what we do a lot of, lot of times cus uh, prospects have approached to us. , it turns out they were looking for a more generic single channel solution. Whereas, you know, we are very specific about what we do there, which is connect to providers like Okta, Azure, Azure Active, et cetera.

So those kind of keywords, we're trying a few tools now that, promise to do this monitoring across wide range of channels. Cuz now we do it separately on each channel. So Reddit, Hacken News and, , Hacken News is more of, you know, going out there and searching for it. And of course Twitter has been good with, we use tweet deck, so it's quite nice to, to get those alerts.

Jack: So, and it's like you personally kind of would just be like, Hey, I can help you on this, or,

Deepak: E Exactly. So me and my co-founder we're kind of, you know, out there. And then we, we post as ourselves, of course. Not from the company account or anything. , so the company account is more just the presence as opposed to doing too much around it, offline, we've been trying some of those, the controversial thread like discussions. You know, we wanna be seen as people before, before BoxyHQ the. brand, so it's predominantly been, , me and my co-founder kind of going out there and, starting discussions or, you know, trying to get into those threads that are interesting.

Jack: It's such an interesting topic and it's like something I'm always on the podcast kind of searching for is these like, you know, mythical kind of growth hacks where you can just do all this stuff, but it's like all, everything you're doing just sounds like you have to have a lot of expertise and a lot of Willingness to put in a lot of effort and kind of grind and just going out there and like really engaging with people.

Deepak: Uh, and you know, we are on that quest as well, right? Like, what is that viral, this one, is there a formula to it? But the reality I think is just consistency. So we try to do, you know, on a weekly basis, because for us, really product and distribution, everything else is noise.

And because we're far away from having a brand, not many people know about Box HQ yet. Of course, it's, for us, it's like just reversing it, right? Wherever we are, people will see us Maybe, you know, we'll grab their attention. on the back of that, you know, it comes back to BoxyHQ. So that's kind of been our, this one, right? It's a grind to kind of go there, find out, are they talking about you? Can you plug yourself in? But in, in what form? It's pretty much like this, , the classical email outreach that you do, right? It's very tricky in the beginning, but you kind of start getting a hang of it.

Um, so yeah, I, I would say it's more consistency and grind than anything else.

You slowly start to realize what resonates and you can, you know, double upon those sort of things. But basically a lot of experimentation, and being in these, you know, specific places.

Oh, I did forget Stack Overflow as well.

Great for, you know, this sort of dev tool. people are searching for those questions. Just all those things. So, you know, you can kind of be very useful there without, , trying to, , worry about your, your brand or product.

Jack: Yeah, I always think like that would be an incredible way to just grow is just sit on stack overflow and help people, but it's, it's such a hard

Deepak: it

Jack: thing to do.

Deepak: absolutely. It's very time consuming as well. But I think it's, it's super useful because. I mean, the, the reality is that it's not your solution that's important, right? It's the problem. So for people out there, it's the problem is the key thing. So if you focus on that, then you know, you can slowly, and you get those insights as well, right?

We've made so many changes to our products on the back of, even people who have not used it, who just come in or used it in the past and, you know, say, look at it and suggest that, oh, did you think about this? Or, you know, did you think. this way to look at it. So that way it's, even though these things are time consuming, it, it basically is a lot of customer discovery and customer insights as well, and not just , the distribution.

So in many ways you're kind of, getting to interact with your potential customer base, on these forums. So that's the way we look at it. Long. Not just about, you know, getting your content or getting your product out there, but also understanding what they're looking for, how they're looking to solve this.

Helps you streamline your developer experience around, around your product.

Jack: That's really cool. Thanks so much for joining. It was really interesting, exciting to like kind of listen in on your journey and I think there's very bright things ahead for BoxyHQ. Where can people learn more about Deepak and about BoxyHQ?

Deepak: Thank you so much, Jack. It's been a pleasure. We are on box C hq.com, you know, come and then have a look at, at our offerings. , we've got, great guides around, these topics as well. , we're also on Twitter at BoxyHQ. And of course you'll find us on LinkedIn as. And of course our, you know, the most important thing are GitHub Repository is also at Box hq, where you can find all our, you know, products for on an Apache tool license.

Jack: Amazing. Thanks Deepak, and thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back again next week.