Episode 102
· 55:37
I was really lucky to have had like a really high growth experience at my last company. The next stage or like the next frontier really was trying to create that high growth environment myself. No customer tells you build me this. They come to you and they're like this is everything that's shit and why don't you go figure out how to solve it for me? Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:I flew from London actually. Oh, no way. Yeah. Well, I went home and I like I showered and everything but, we did a team off-site.
Jack Bridger:Oh, wow. Where did you go?
Sagar Batchu:We went to Lisbon.
Jack Bridger:No way. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:It was fun. It was our first, like, full team off-site. Really? It was super fun. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Elliot Elliot, the editors, grew up in Portugal. So Oh, okay. He's gonna be very happy with if you were assuming that you liked Lisbon.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. It was what a beautiful city. Yeah. It's it also reminds you of San Francisco because it's got that bridge.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. It's apparently designed by the same guy who did the Bay Bridge. Really? Chris Purcell, I think is his name. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Exactly. Yeah. And it's got the water. I mean, the food is so good and cheap. It's got kind of a the city feels very welcoming.
Sagar Batchu:Also, it's become quite popular for tech companies to do offsites there because there's now a nonstop flight from San Francisco to Lisbon. Very. Yeah. TAP Portugal flies a nonstop flight. So Wow.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Okay. Let's so maybe first question is, like, offsites.
Sagar Batchu:Right? Offsites.
Jack Bridger:How do we do a good off-site?
Sagar Batchu:You know, I think my view on offsites is that you should just get everyone in the same place. Like, create a super fun, collaborative atmosphere. Not try to do, like, too many events, like, you know, have the nice dinner, have have, like, a couple of team building activities, like, whatever special to the place you're in, but, just give people time to, like, be together, and then you see the ideas to flow and people get excited. And so we we did Lisbon because it's beautiful. It's sunny.
Sagar Batchu:It was, like, good midway point between San Francisco and London. And everyone was there by, like, day 2 or 3, everyone was just vibing together. Right? Like, you know, you wake up, you do breakfast together, you sit down, laptops come out, people start talking ideas, work hacking on things, some people present the stuff they're working on, and then usually, like, in the evenings, do some kind of activity, like, at least walk around the city, go to dinner. We did, like, a food tour of the city, which was super fun in, like, tuk tuks.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. And they were, like, kinda dangerous. Wow. And so it became a little bit of a bonding moment for everyone.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Because they got, like, the streets are,
Sagar Batchu:like, got the Cobblestone.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:So we were bouncing around, and it was it
Jack Bridger:was really funny. And what what kind of food did you get in Portugal?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. So we had like a local tour guide who showed us all the local Portuguese food, and a lot of restaurants like you wouldn't usually go to as a tourist.
Jack Bridger:Mhmm.
Sagar Batchu:And all of them were basically for us. Yeah. So that was that was really nice. Local wine, local drink, definitely felt like a little nice experience to everyone, you know, to go do that. I'd like I think we will all remember it for a long time.
Sagar Batchu:And so, yeah, just, you know, we're mostly in person team but we have some remote folks. Yeah. This is just really helpful for everyone to feel like very together, very much a team. I've been doing this for 2 years now so like it's long enough where I think these things really start to matter.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And how how many people are you guys right now?
Sagar Batchu:We're now, 17.
Jack Bridger:Okay. So you don't necessarily rent out a whole hotel, but you're just in the same
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. We're, like, you know, 17 rooms in a hotel. Okay. Yeah. Cool.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. It's fun. We all stay in the same hotel. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Okay. And, actually, who did you did someone else in the team organize it, or did were the founders, like, booking everything?
Sagar Batchu:Well, we were frantically booking stuff, but we did have a friend who, like, help who helps do operations for us at the company, do a lot of it. And I would highly recommend, like, making sure you're not on the hook to deal with every single thing, hotels, activities, food. But it ended up coming together.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Okay. That's There was,
Sagar Batchu:like, some dysfunction too, but a little bit of dysfunction was necessary to, like
Jack Bridger:Like a nice bit of
Sagar Batchu:dysfunction. Yeah. Yeah. Like, we went to this VR arcade, and nothing worked. And, like, I I think we're all gonna remember that.
Sagar Batchu:Okay. That was
Jack Bridger:actually a highlight.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. It was a highlight. Yeah. Where, like, we all put on our VR goggles, started walking around, and it kept crashing, and people started running into each other. So it's a little fun fun little dysfunctional experience.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Okay. Wow. That's very cool. Okay.
Jack Bridger:Quick announcement. WorkOS are hosting a one day conference dedicated to enterprise software. It's called the Enterprise Ready Conf, and it's taking place on October 30th in San Francisco. They have got the founder and CEO of Vanta, Christina speaking, as well as the head of product for Chat GPT. Yes.
Jack Bridger:Chat GPT, Brit. So if you've got questions for them, go along. And they've got the founder of my the founder of Work OS, of course, Michael Greenwich, who's been on the show twice, and you know how much he knows about enterprise software. So if you're kind of thinking about, you know, selling enterprise software or you already do it, you should definitely check out this conference. Go to enterprise hyphen ready.com or click the link in the show notes.
Jack Bridger:I should say, hi, everyone. You're listening to Scanning DevTools. I'm joined today by Sagar from Speakeasy, which is, actually, I know you do a lot of stuff, but one of the things you do is SDK generation. But do you wanna talk a bit more about the other stuff that you do as well?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Totally. Hi, everyone too. My name's Sagar, CEO, of Speakeasy. As Jack said, we do SDKs, but kind of our our vision is really to help teams build, test, and run their APIs.
Sagar Batchu:We started with SDKs because it's a kind of a core developer experience problem that a lot of us have either felt or have dealt with in the past and have realized the immense amounts of value we can help companies deliver by helping them ship these amazing interfaces. But, yeah, that's that's that's what we do.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's that's awesome. And so I first came across you through one of your incredible teammates, Nolan in London. Shout out, Nolan. And so I know I know I've seen the story for quite a while, but I love to kinda hear, like, how you got started in the early days with Speakeasy.
Sagar Batchu:Totally. Yeah. Shout definite shout out to Noel. He was first employee at the company, so he's really helped us build Speakeasy to where it is today. So we my cofounder, Simon, and I, we got started with the company in 2022.
Sagar Batchu:We we spent, like, almost 8 months, almost a year, it felt like, really working this problem from different angles. And, interestingly, the shape of what we've done over the last years has changed, and we've had, like, at least one pretty big pivot. But the overall vision has always, somewhat been the same, which is the API development life cycle is actually quite cumbersome, for teams that are trying to move fast and ship fast and ship high quality APIs. There are a lot of, like, I would say, v 0 or Gen 0 tools in the space that, you know, have worked really well for, like, really big enterprises kind of top down engineering styles of of work. But in, you know, in today's world where you have, like, microservices teams shipping their own APIs, you have, also team shipping APIs in the edge.
Sagar Batchu:You have LMs function calling. They're like both the API producers and the consumers have, like, a really interesting place today. Like, there's many more things an API producer has to worry about, the number of languages, the run times, the ways that APIs get consumed. And consumers, are basically you know, most most consumers are left with, like, a 3 pane API doc site. Mhmm.
Sagar Batchu:Right? And and they get that. Like, that's best in class for a lot of companies. And, like, they get that and, they're told, okay. Go integrate with the API.
Sagar Batchu:But the truth is, like, that is that is just discoverability. That's, like, that's not actually integration. Integration is when you actually pull that thing as a dependency into your app, into your product. And so we realize there's all this last mile tooling that is missing for an API consumer to have that amazing, you know, Stripe quality experience or any great API you've used like GitHub or Twilio. You get all this great tooling as a consumer.
Sagar Batchu:And so all you're focused on is just building. You're not worrying about versioning, deprecated fields, you know, how to actually go from the API endpoint to, you know, actually writing the code in different languages. Yeah. So that's that, like, broad vision of helping this ecosystem function better, has always been our focus. Has always been our focus.
Sagar Batchu:But, yeah, that's that's where we got started. We, previous company I worked at, we, actually built a whole API platform around this, and it was a really massive effort. It was, like, 12 developers for a year going after this, and we saw a similar thing in a
Jack Bridger:lot of other big companies. Twelve developers for a year?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Yeah. And then I think steady state it to, like, 4 later on. That's a lot. But it was a lot.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:So that's, like, probably over $1,000,000 of, like, steady steady state cost.
Sagar Batchu:Probably more. Like Yeah. The launches we did. At the beginning. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:But, no, it's it's a really big cost for teams. Yeah. And it's also not, like, a well defined cost either. Yeah. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's very interesting. When you first, like, kind of had like, you were like, this is a big problem, what was it like? Did you just, like, immediately quit your job and go try and solve this? Or like
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. I was, I was actually in London at the time. I was living in Shout out,
Jack Bridger:London. London.
Sagar Batchu:And it was still pretty deep in COVID. And so I was kind of hacking away at this problem from different angles for a while, and then I met Simon and I ended up moving back to San Francisco. And I yeah. Even before I quit my job, I think it was, like, 3 months before I quit. And then once I quit, it was another 8 to 9 months before we actually became a real company.
Sagar Batchu:And it I think it really speaks to how, you know, important those early days are when you're, like, exploring and, you're figuring out a lot of things. You're figuring out, like, the space you wanna work on. You're figuring out if you are the right person to be working on this. You've like, this kind of fit in both ways, and I think it just takes time to figure that out. Like, you need to kinda stew in the problem 1st problem space for, like, days weeks till, you know, until, like, it finally you finally build up a build up enough conviction that you wanna spend the next x years on this thing.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And what what those, like, kind of first 3 months and then 8 months, what what did that, like, look like on a day to day basis?
Sagar Batchu:I would say the 1st 3 months, I was still working a job. So, and Simon was as well. And so there was a lot of us actually talking to, potential users, potential customers one day about the problems that they have in their development life cycle at their company. And not just API development, like, almost more broadly.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. We would just try
Sagar Batchu:to find team leads and and pretty, like, senior developers at companies and talk to them about what what are the most painful points in the way that they ran their products, their teams. And then over time, kind of, you know, narrowed the scope to API development. Mhmm. And then, you know, once we had, like, a little little bit of conviction, started hacking out POCs, putting things out there for people to try. And it also became pretty clear to us at that point, like, you know, this is a problem that a lot of developers face, but it it's one that really is magnified at scale.
Sagar Batchu:So at like medium to large companies is where this has a pretty big impact. And so, you know, there there's always this, like, struggle as a start up. Do you go after enterprise? Do you go after start ups? Do you go in the in the middle?
Sagar Batchu:And we realized we're going to have to be very kinda thoughtful about what stage of company we're gonna find. And so we actually spent a lot of time, like, kind of figuring out who are the perfect targets
Jack Bridger:for us
Sagar Batchu:to work with. So, yeah, that that's what it was. It was a mix of, like, a lot of user discovery, customer discovery, definitely some POC building, putting it out there for people to try. I remember the first customer that tried our POC, the customer today, but it wasn't that product. Like, they churned out for that thing, and we had to come back with a completely different product.
Sagar Batchu:So, yeah, those, like, ups and downs all the way on is just how you learn and navigate the space. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And so it was it like a kind of a process of you had someone, you build something for them, you gave it to them? Like
Sagar Batchu:exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The moment we found someone who's, like, ready to Yeah. Who's hungry enough for a solution, we we just build something and we gave it to them.
Sagar Batchu:It wasn't great. It kinda worked.
Jack Bridger:Were they paying for the first versions?
Sagar Batchu:They were not. Okay.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Okay.
Sagar Batchu:In retrospect, we should have probably asked them to. That would have probably built a little bit more, like, accountability, but they were not.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Okay. But you felt like this is an important problem for them. They're willing to
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the way we realized it was an important problem for them, like, the the whole API development life cycle, was they had a pretty senior engineer over there who was tasked with figuring this out. Okay.
Sagar Batchu:And so even if we didn't exist, that person was gonna have to either build it themselves, look for vendors. Like, there was someone who already had, like, a KPI around this. And was that
Jack Bridger:the person that was the champion, or was it their boss?
Sagar Batchu:That person was the champion, but, yeah, they had a boss too. So there was, like, an economic buyer that was a Yeah. More on the ground champion.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That that makes sense. And how how did you meet your first kind of people? Was it just
Sagar Batchu:Goodwill of other founders and this amazing ecosystem we have here. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very thankful for that. Like, I think you you always need an in.
Sagar Batchu:You need some trust building that happens early on. Yeah. I think it can be a little different, you know, when you're doing like an open source product and you put it out there and hack and use and Yeah. There's a more organic build. But when you're building, I think, like, an enterprise product Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Or even something that's like SMB, you still need companies of of relative scale to, like, believe in you, which means there's a little bit of, like, relationship based introductions that you need. Yeah. And so, like, I've just a good founder friend introduced us to this company, and then it took off from there. So a lot lot of luck, a lot of appreciation for that. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That makes sense. And I guess you were always from day 1, you were kind of you you said you were thinking about whether you go enterprise or whether you go, like, start up. It sounded like you you did narrow in on bigger teams. Or
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Slightly bigger teams, like, you know, companies that are at least 50, a 100, and above.
Jack Bridger:Was it Engineers or total company?
Sagar Batchu:Total. Yeah. And over time, that's become more an engineering thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And it's not to say, like, you know, I don't think what we do is valuable to start ups. I think it is. We have a lot of great start up customers who have pushed us really fast, actually. But just in terms of, like, how we as a company can grow and expand our product, it's it's become clear. It's a more SMB and enterprise play.
Jack Bridger:And do you think that, because you were kind of going off to, like, teams that it was different to some of the, like, kinda classic developer tools like, I don't know, like conventional wisdom, like, you know, complete PLG or whatever.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. It's a good question. Early on, I was like, I I was like, oh my god. Are we going against conventional wisdom? Like, are we doing the wrong thing?
Sagar Batchu:But then I think we realized later that, like, going PLG and and being super developer friendly isn't at odds with what we wanted
Jack Bridger:to do. It was
Sagar Batchu:we we've fully adopted that now and, like, everything we do is PLG. Everything is obviously self-service. Everything is developer led. But how you choose, like, what products to prioritize and build is a little bit more driven by the market and, like, where you position yourself. So I I would say it's kind of almost a false dichotomy is where I am I've landed is that there are 2 different axes.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Like, one is about how to build a good product, and the other one is more about, your ICP. Right? And who are you who are you building for your public road map. Right?
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Is that who is that optimized for? Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And so the and and in the sense if you're to discover who you're building for yeah. Sorry. Could you say that part again actually, like, about, like, just wanna make sure I understood. So
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. So, like, conventional wisdom, we I think we hear a lot in the Valley is, like, either either PLG or enterprise. Yeah. Right? And I think those are actually 2 different axis.
Sagar Batchu:Like, you can be PLG and be enterprise as a product. Yeah. I think to me, PLG is more just about how you set your product product up for success. Yeah. Right?
Sagar Batchu:And how you set your your company and team up for success where the growth of the product is driving decisions, and it's all self-service. It's all driven through, like, customer interactions. And the enterprise side is really a question of, like, who your ICP is. Like, you could be PLG and selling to startups. You could be PLG and selling to enterprise.
Sagar Batchu:What we found is the largest enterprise we enterprises we work with, they still come inbound and, like, naturally discover the product and use it PLG and then talk to us when they get to, like, a certain amount of usage. Yeah. So I think, yeah, I think you could be PLG and enterprise is what we've learned.
Jack Bridger:And and so but it's useful to, like, figure out who to sell who to, like, target it to by going, like, directly and having these conversations. Exactly. I think,
Sagar Batchu:you know, you could be building a PLC product. You could be putting it out on Hacker News open source, but I think you still want to be talking to companies of different sizes and, like, forming an opinion over time of where is the willingness to pay. Right? Is it, like Yeah. A fast moving startup that has high willingness to pay for a product, or is it a bigger company with, like, organizational problems it's trying to solve?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Yeah. I think so. You you still have to, like, build a conviction of where where in the market you're focusing, separate of how you separate of being PLG itself.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That that makes sense. And then in your experience, have you found that there's a big difference between what the enterprises want and the start ups want?
Sagar Batchu:Day 0, no. For our product, luckily, it's the same. Yeah. But the day 2 and 3 starts to defer, and I think that's that's where to your earlier question, like, that's where you just start making decisions of, like, where are you gonna focus your time in the market? For us, because we're kind of this multi multi product platform, or at least that's what we're building towards, our day zero product of coming to Speakeasy and launching an SDK is useful for a startup or an enterprise.
Sagar Batchu:Mhmm. But then the things we do after that as we grow are going to probably be more or less useful for companies of different sizes. Mhmm. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That makes sense. And, I know that you did, South Park Commons, which we've been talking a lot about recently just
Sagar Batchu:because we had Colin as well. Well, what stage did you do South Park Commons? Yeah. We were there when Simon and I were just ideating, doing proof of concept. So it was it was that, like, minus 1 to 0 phase.
Sagar Batchu:I would say we had a general sense of the space, but we didn't really we hadn't narrowed in on the problem that we were trying to solve. We hadn't narrowed in on product or ICP or anything like that. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Okay. So that was, like, even before you quit your job, or was it like It
Sagar Batchu:was, like, right as I quit my job. It was when I joined South Park. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:And did you raise money from them immediately? Or was that
Sagar Batchu:We did not, but that is an option for people to do. Yeah. We end up being part of South Park for, many months before we did our pre seed.
Jack Bridger:Okay. Cool. Yeah. And I know you told me that that was a good experience for you.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. I think it was it's an amazing community. I think what I really like about South Park is most of the folks there are, have had a few experiences already. Like, they've had they've been part of a high growth start up or they've tried to do their own thing, and now they're like trying to do it again. And so I would say brings folks a little bit older, I think, on average than say the traditional YC community.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. And I'm not saying one's better or worse, but I think for me, I found this was a really good fit Yeah. Because I was in a similar similar place. I think it's also a smaller it's a small group. It's very high quality folks.
Sagar Batchu:It's, yeah, it's a diverse group of people. I think only when we were there, I think only about 50% of folks actually go through and found. The other 50% end up joining companies.
Jack Bridger:Really?
Sagar Batchu:Like, we even had, I think, 1 person are you do a nonprofit? One person became a professor or something like that. And the the point is really to emphasize that, like, minus 1 to 0. And so if you're doing minus 1 to 0, when you get to 0, the outcome may not be founding a company.
Jack Bridger:Yes. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And so that that's, I think, great because you should definitely not find a company unless you're, like, truly sure that is what you want
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Because it's obviously a big undertaking. Yeah. Why did you know it was what you wanted to do?
Sagar Batchu:That's a tough one. I think, you know, I've I've gone back and, like, tried to ask myself this. I think now where I am today, I'm like, I don't know how it could be anything else. Like, I find it hard to find the reasons and justify it. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:But I think in the moment, what I realized was, I was really lucky to have had, like, a really high growth experience, at my last company, LiveRamp. And, the next stage or, like, the next frontier really was trying to create that high growth environment myself. And, I think something about, like, navigating a problem space and working with customers, trying to, like you know, you you almost have to like figure out what they want Yeah. When you're founding. Like no one tells no customer tells you build me this.
Sagar Batchu:They just kind of dump a bunch of problems to you. Like it's kind of therapy. Right? They come to you and they're like this is everything that's shipped and why don't you go figure out how to solve it for me? Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And I found that really exciting. Right? Yeah. There's other parts of company building I I really enjoy, like recruiting and team building is is something that's just, like, I love love doing it. I try to do really well.
Sagar Batchu:So, yeah, I think you you have to want to do all the things.
Jack Bridger:Right? Yes.
Sagar Batchu:And I think it can be hard when you're joining a start up even if it's doing super well. Like, generally, you do have to have a focus area, but as a founder, you get to focus on 10 things at once. Yeah. And that's that's just super exhilarating.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's, yeah. That that's very interesting to hear. And do you remember when you got your first, customer paying customer?
Sagar Batchu:I do. Yeah. I'm a little excited.
Jack Bridger:Could you tell us about that?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Yeah. I think it was, like, the day before Thanksgiving or something that we got it. Okay.
Jack Bridger:And that would have been sorry. Thanksgiving for is
Sagar Batchu:This would be 2022 November. November 2022.
Jack Bridger:November 2022. And you started, like
Sagar Batchu:At the end of 2021. Okay. So, like, November, December, roughly. Yeah. Roughly a year.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. And that was a year of, like, ideating and changing directions. And we finally did our pre seed in the summer of 2022. So this was, like, a few months after the pre seed. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:We did have a bunch of users and design partners already, but we didn't have, like, a a true company paying serious money. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was a really exciting experience. We had been talking with this customer for, like, I'd say a few weeks. Mhmm.
Sagar Batchu:And the reason we really, you know, I think it worked was we realized we were not just, like, building them an SDK. Right? What they wanted was they they were about to launch an enterprise API for the first time, and so they wanted a partner that was going to kind of follow them in that journey. And when you're launching an enterprise API, you know, today you might need an SDK. Today tomorrow you might need like a product that helps you with authentication, and then you need rate limiting, and you need you know, all the things around an API.
Sagar Batchu:And so we realized we could learn a lot from them. And for them, we were this kind of expert on call. Right? Even though we don't do all those things for them, we're able to, like, help them navigate the space. So, yeah, that was why that was why we started working with them.
Jack Bridger:That's really cool. I think there's, like, a lot of startups that seem to kinda do that at the beginning where it's like you're to some extent, like, at the early stages, like, if it's a complex product, it's, like, hard for it to be, like, fully there in such a short space of time. And I I know, like, some startups, like, kind of almost selling themselves as, like, yeah.
Sagar Batchu:We are. Consulting themselves. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's very underrated, especially in dev tools because, there's a lot of conventional wisdom around PLG.
Sagar Batchu:Right? And I think the PLG wisdom can some sometimes, like, come across as, like, don't do consulting. Yeah. Don't do pro services. Like, have the product build and let everyone self-service.
Sagar Batchu:But but the truth is I think if you're trying to work with good sized companies, they they want the confidence. They're like getting a partner in you. Right? Yeah. And I think sometimes it comes down to doing some amount of consulting service, and I actually think it's great because it puts you, like, front and center with the company, and they feel, like, you know, they feel like they get a product and also a contractor within you.
Sagar Batchu:And I think any of us who have been contractors or worked with contractors, like, it's a very, like, intimate relationship. Right? Like, you're on Zoom calls with them. You're, like, kinda part of stand ups. You Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:So in that sense, being really stuck in is actually nice. Yeah. Whereas if you just ship a product, you know, you you kinda just have to wait for them to see what happens or you dig into logs and you're like, what are they doing on this thing? But if you're consulting, then you're actually helping them solve problems. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And so I I didn't know this beforehand, but it kinda for us, it just happened. And I look back at it. I'm like, I think we're very lucky to have taken that approach and not try to like productize too quickly. Instead like play that consulting role for many months before we really, you know, like tight harden the product. And I think our first like 5 or 6 customers, there was a lot of what people would call pro services.
Sagar Batchu:Right? Where there was a product, you know, of course you could go log in and do all the things, but to really get to the value they wanted, like, we would jump in on Slack and, like, help them through it. Right? Especially in our world of APIs, like, a lot of the focus for these companies around the API spec. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Right? It's this kind of sacred artifact that you need to get right, and all these things in your organization can be driven off of it if done correctly. And so for those companies, we were this expert that told them how to write a good open API spec, and how to, like, design this interface that then becomes core to the documentation, their SDKs, their auth, their gateway. And so they got, I think, got conference in us. Oh, they they had conference to, like, go forth and do this thing because we were we were right there with them.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's actually really, really interesting, isn't it? Because it's like they're giving they're saying, we want this thing, which kind of becomes your product's road map. And then even, like, the way you, you know, reassure them or, like, the fact that you're telling them, you know, how to do open API specs. It's almost like that's that's then your content strategy about, like
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. And this is why, actually, Nolan, who we've given a shout out to already, is our was our first employee, and he loves developer relations. So we hired him in before we had a founding engineer, technically, because, as you said, like, all that consulting work we're doing became content on API development. And that, I think, actually brings most of our leads today.
Jack Bridger:That's really, really cool. Yeah. That seems like actually a very overlooked thing to do. Would you have any advice for someone that is doing that? Like, the kind of do's and don'ts, because if it seems like one of those things that could be absolutely glorious, but, like, could also just drag you into this, like, tar pit of ongoing
Sagar Batchu:work. Absolutely agree. I think it's a fine line. Right? Because you go too far down the consulting route and, like, you have invested in building a repeatable product.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. What I would say to people doing it, maybe time myself looking back is definitely don't shy away from, running great support early on. Because one way to think about it is, like, not pro services or consulting is but it's just that you have an immature product Mhmm. And you're gonna have to run support. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And the support is going to be a lot more than you do support from it for, like, a mature product where you're you're not just, like, solving issues. You're actually kind of building at the same time. But I would say that's okay. I think it's something not to shy away from. Just be conscious of, obviously, like, the choices you make in the product, making sure it's repeatable, making sure you have more than more than one customer at a time using it.
Sagar Batchu:Like, if you can get a small cohort, like, 3 to 4 when you're really early in onboarding, like, that that does help Because then at least, you know, you're you know, you have a small cohort of customers who and you're not billing for 1, you're billing for 3. Right? Like, that that that's what you're trying to make sure of. But once you get to that number 3, 4, 5, 10, then you have some repeatability.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That makes sense. I guess, like, even 2 people wanting the same thing is probably, like, the odds of that being threshold. Yeah. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:It's like the odds of that being useful to more people is, like, really high compared to just one person wanting it.
Sagar Batchu:Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there are ways to kinda secure that. I mean, in dev tools, I think we're very lucky because there's a lot of, like, open protocols and standards you can kind of align yourself with, or, like, preexisting prior art that that Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:People build off of. Like, you know, if, like, if you're in streaming, you're probably thinking about Kafka, like, building off of that. Right? Or, for us and in rest APIs, you're thinking about open API and you're, like, building off of that. And so there's, like, preexisting ecosystems.
Sagar Batchu:And as long as you stay close to that, like, I think you can you can find users in those ecosystems who will be willing to try your product because you're not asking them to, like, adopt something new. You're actually just making their life better around what they have. Yeah. So I think in dev tools in particular, like, I think we do have most spaces do have a way to to do that.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And one of the questions I had, like, in that is, like, if you build something specifically for, like, you know, a cohort of customers, do does it end up becoming sometimes where the the product is, like, something very different for these Yeah. This cohort compared to, like, the kind of, like, main trunk of the product as it progresses, or is that something that you've actively managed to avoid?
Sagar Batchu:We've definitely had challenges there. I think you also have to remember, even with your earliest customers, like, they're buying your product, but they're also buying your road map. So you should definitely, where possible, lean on your road map. Right? I think when you're early and you're, like, worried about everything, you know, you're like, is this customer gonna churn?
Sagar Batchu:Are they unhappy? I think you deliver value and then you you you ask them. Right? Like, can we put like, what if we put this on the road map for 3 months from now? Mhmm.
Sagar Batchu:And it's it's funny because at startups, like, 3 months feels like a really long time. Yeah. But then a lot of the companies you're working with, 3 months is actually very reasonable Yeah. Timeline. I think to me, even as I said, 3 months feels really long.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, like, you can imagine that Totally.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Some of this would never get done, so 3 months is actually totally doable. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I mean, even, like Yeah. I definitely know T. E. That's totally fine.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Or even a month. Right? Like, that's for us, it feels long. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:But if you deliver if you can guarantee it for someone, that's actually, like, good certainty to have. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's actually a really good point. And then it's gonna be something that's actually, like, usable for other people and Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And they know and you can sell them on that. Look, it's gonna be more sustainable. Yeah. Yeah. That we won't end up as a start up, every every adopter worries about, like, is this gonna disappear?
Sagar Batchu:Yes. And so if you can, yeah, push push you the road map based on the fact that of, like, hey. We're gonna have 10 more people use it. It's gonna be better for you too. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Then I
Sagar Batchu:think a lot of people are actually quite understanding.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That that makes really actually, that is a really good point. Yeah. Okay.
Jack Bridger:And then so how like, I guess you carried on doing this kind of, like, you're doing this almost, like, prosumer stuff. Yeah. Did it I guess at some point, it, like, kind of that starts to fade away and you have, like, a clearer, like, you know, self serve stuff. Or
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. I think, like, 3 or 4 months, after that, we were at a point where it was, like, self serve. We had people coming on board and using it. And then I think by then, our content strategy had had to kick in a little bit. Mhmm.
Sagar Batchu:And so we were getting some decent hits off of things like open API tips. Right? Like, how to do x in open API. Yeah. It's still, like, highest ranked articles.
Sagar Batchu:Truly. Yes. That's awesome. And, it's just stuff we learned along the way working with customers. We just turned into content.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. And so we definitely switched to a lot more self-service PLG. We had, at that point, like, a good sense of, like, what our first product was, this managed SDK product Yeah. Became a lot more hardened, and then it became more about, like, prioritizing the next feature. Right?
Sagar Batchu:And so that's a little bit more easy to work with. Yeah. I think I think what really helped us, like, do that transition honestly was the content and and the, like, DevRel strategy because that brought in a lot of eyeballs. And when you have more eyeballs and more users, then you kind of, you know, you have this, like, distribution of users, and then you start to see where the mode is Yeah. Of usage.
Sagar Batchu:And you start to make a, you know, an opinion for yourself of, okay, this is what, like, the center of this market looks like. Or this is what, like, 90% of my future users are going to look like. Mhmm. And so it becomes more of a game of, like, data. Right?
Sagar Batchu:You have just more data points. Yeah. So I think it took a few months after that, but we we got there.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's really cool. And then, so after this, so you have, like, people coming, like, self serve. They're using it. You're getting content.
Jack Bridger:After that, is it kind of just, you know, do everything but more? Or is it was there was there another, like, phase?
Sagar Batchu:Good question. Yeah. I mean, through this too, there's, like, a bunch of team building stuff you're doing as well. Like, you realize at some point, it's not just you and, like, 2 other people can't handle this. You have to bring on amazing people to work with you.
Sagar Batchu:I think the next big thing was like figuring out how you can expand the product. Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of like, you don't wanna expand too quickly because you do wanna build a high quality focused product, especially in dev tools. Like Yeah. Our user base cares about quality, rightfully so.
Sagar Batchu:Right? Like we're asking people to take a risk of building on on us. Yeah. So I think there was there was a period of, like, polish and hardening and just, like, nice DX and UX filling it out. Right?
Sagar Batchu:Filling out the product with all the things you want. Like, we we invested quite a bit of time in, like, just a custom doc site Yeah. Because we were like, we want really nice docs. And so I remember there was like a month where we were just like tooling our own next door doc site. Right?
Sagar Batchu:And we used this awesome tool called CodeHike, which like helped us do scrolly code stuff. So yeah. Just like making sure the entire company experience was good for our customers. So the docs, the customer support. We invested in support tooling in Slack so we could, like, respond really quickly.
Sagar Batchu:We invested in also just like our GitHub services, our CLI, our GitHub action, like making sure these things were like Really nice. Really nice. And our core customer base was happy and was growing. And and doing that helped us has helped us, like, then get time back to focus on the next product or, like, the next growth path for the company. So, yeah, I would say that that phase was pretty long because there's, you know, I think for us, there was multiple axis of growth, those features, those languages too.
Sagar Batchu:Like, we're Yeah. Kind of this polyglot product. Yeah. We work across 7 languages. So there's also, like, the design decisions we had to make to, like, enable that too took some time.
Sagar Batchu:We got it wrong, and then we got it wrong. Yeah. That's pretty Then we finally, I think, have found something that works. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And so have you had to have that expertise within the team in terms of, like, 7 different languages?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. It's a hard one. I would say by no means are we experts in all 7. I would say we have a lot of folks who have worked in, like, different languages, but also different languages in, like, enterprise settings. So, like, they know what it means to ship, like, really high quality code in Java
Jack Bridger:or Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:C Sharp or Go or Python. But I think we we realized early early on we couldn't go it alone. So we ended up, like, reaching out and building relationships with some of the best developers in these spaces like Colin from Zod Right? He's been just an invaluable resource for us. So the Pydantic team in Python, we spent a lot of time with them, figuring out best practices, helping, like, understand where they are taking the ecosystem.
Sagar Batchu:So I would say we have good expertise in house today, but I think we have, like, Speakeasy as a company is actually Speakeasy and friends. Right? It's like Interesting. Us and everyone we've we interact with, we sponsor, we find ways of, like, taking their learnings and bringing it in. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And I I truly do hope over time, like, we're able to find those great influencers and and be beneficial to them in some way, but they're also super helpful to us in pushing our product forward.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Actually, on a call in from Zod, because I view Zod. It's it's great. It's amazing. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:And, yeah, could you talk a bit about what it was like, like, working with, like, any of the benefits or, like, you know, how you work with Colin from Zod?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. First of all, he's amazing. Just like what he's built with Zod is, I think, just vaulted the TypeScript community forward, which is amazing.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Actually, if anyone doesn't know what XOD is, maybe we should like, schema validation.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Sort of. Really simple way that I think about it is, yeah, like, you go to the site, it says schema data validation library for TypeScript. I think about it as the thing in your TypeScript code that ensures you're not passing the wrong data around. Right?
Sagar Batchu:Like, is is is a string actually a string? Is Yeah. An integer action, integers, a union of 2 types? Are you gonna handle those 2 types correctly. It gives you all that great type safety.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. And it does it in a library that's, like, super great to work with. Yeah. Has great integrations with things like open API and other frameworks. So, yeah, with with Colin, the way we work was that so the history for us is we we actually put out a TypeScript product, a TypeScript generation product for SDKs, and we were not using XOD.
Sagar Batchu:And because of that, we didn't have runtime validation in the SDKs, and we were missing a lot of the things that we felt like a best in class SDK could have. Yeah. And so we rebuilt it. And this time, instead of trying to, like, build our own validation library, we just we put XOD in. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And Colin's been amazing in terms of just also helping us understand not just support, but understand, like, where ZOD is going. Mhmm. Because by adopting it, we're also kind of saying we're we're investing in ZOD for the long term. We're also making a choice for all our future users.
Jack Bridger:Right?
Sagar Batchu:And so we wanted to be really sure about that. So, yeah, it's been amazing working with him. Just his his support, insight into the road map, and also, yeah, just I think being there for us whenever we have questions and, like, you know, deep design discussions. He's he's been super helpful. And same is true for all, honestly, all the influencers we work with.
Sagar Batchu:I think the the dev community is so lucky to have these people who are so passionate about what they do. They're willing to, like,
Jack Bridger:you know,
Sagar Batchu:give you their time.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. Actually, on influencers, I feel like it can be sometimes it was, like, very hard to know, like, like, is well, I guess, like, that is basically the question is, like, when you work with someone who's an influencer and I feel like Colin, it's with Colin, it's, like, kind of more of a gray area where it's, like, it's also like an expert.
Sagar Batchu:He's still humble to call himself in a sense. Yeah. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I mean Yeah. Like, how do you kind of assess, like, if this is a good thing to invest in, good relationship to invest in?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. It's a great question. I think it it feels similar to hiring in many ways, in that we try to work with the person for several weeks in some capacity where, you know, obviously their time is super valuable too. So we kind of treat it as a paid contracting engagement of maybe they help us, solve an issue in the library that we use or they help us write a blog post or they help, like, review code decisions for the language that they're an expert in. So I think making sure that it's, like, a concrete, you know, task that you collaborate on, helps you understand, like, are you gonna get along with this person?
Sagar Batchu:Do they kinda share the same, you know, values around, like, what you're doing? Yeah. So I would say I'd say that's that's the case. I would also say you kinda know in that in it's it's similar to hiring, right, where, like, you once you start working with someone and there's this amazing chemistry of working together and great understanding and and respect and and collaboration, then it becomes obvious. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And and I think the space we were we work in, like, this is high mission alignment. Yeah. It can be very obvious. Like, we started work with the Pydantic team a few months ago and, just super high alignment and, like, what they're trying to achieve and what we're trying to do. We're excited and glad to be pushing Pydantic forward, like, promoting it with our customers while they push it forward as a library.
Sagar Batchu:And so there's just, like, a very, you know, mutually beneficial relationship there.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. It's really interesting because I feel like the way, like, I think you said the word influencer, but it's almost like what you're describing is, like, you know, when I think of influencers, like, I'm thinking of, you know, someone that makes, like,
Sagar Batchu:you know Videos and content. Very much, like,
Jack Bridger:kind of, like, big personality to, like, do, like, shout out or something or, like, build a project with your tool. Yeah. But it sounds like it's more like these are the kind of, like, leading people within the industry of, like, the the that you're doing. I mean, like, for Zod, it's like if you're validating, you know, the the data coming into your request is, like, is correct, like, that probably is is Zod. And if he if Colin were to, like, talk about you know, people would take his opinion very seriously on these sorts of things.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:And you also would not expect that he would ever endorse something that was, like, not, you know, great, basically. Yeah. It seems like it's kind of a much more, like, subtle expert driven approach to kind of influencers in a sense?
Sagar Batchu:Sure. Yeah. I think that's that's that's a good good way to put it. Yeah. I think the the maybe the side or the flavor of influencer that's more interesting to me is is, like, these folks who who have done the 10000 hours.
Sagar Batchu:Honestly, they've done the freaking 10000 hours. Right? And Yeah. Like, so much depth of knowledge Yeah. That they have, like, true taste in this space.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. And the libraries they're working on are often open source, and they just become the kind of key decision makers that push push a space forward. Right? And so, like, that is the, like, truly influencing and that they're making decisions for everyone. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And, like, we all trust their decisions almost implicitly
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Because their work is so core to what we do or what everyone uses. So those are, yeah, kind of influences we try to work with.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And it kind of I guess, I it almost feels silly to ask you, like, you're not, like, looking at spreadsheets and saying, okay. We invested this. Yeah. Here's how many leads we got from, like No.
Jack Bridger:This relationship.
Sagar Batchu:I'm sure that's there somewhere in our product analytics stack, but I think that's not the only way to measure the value. I would say that's, like, one part of it and and maybe more a little bit more downstream or, like, later on in the relationship when you're trying to when you're maybe when you're doing, like, an open source sponsorship and you're gonna justify the spend. But I think the the relationship really starts with much more of the, like, a, is this mutually beneficial? And then also, is is this person the right person Yeah. To to follow down this?
Sagar Batchu:Because they're taking you down a path on all the decisions they're gonna make. Yeah. You're kind of following that. So, there's a lot of thought that goes into, like, is this the right thing for our users and our ecosystem? And I wouldn't say there isn't I don't think I have a great rubric.
Sagar Batchu:I think it's a lot of, like, working on the problem, talking with them, seeing what the other, you know, options are, and, like, really making a call, like, this is the this is the right person to Yeah. Put your time and investment in. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. No. It to me, though, it sounds like really smart way to do it and that, like yeah. It makes so much sense. It's like you're kind of investing in people that can help make your product better.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. The people that are genuinely the leading lights in the space. Absolutely. That it seems like so obvious that whatever you're spending on this relationship is like
Sagar Batchu:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:It's a lot more gonna pay off in the long run. Absolutely. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:This has been so many great influencers. We've been super lucky to work with so many great another influencer comes to mind, Dave Shanley. He's a, he's a amazing Golang developer who has built these, like, just beautiful and super fast Golang libraries to parse and and work with open API. He also does some amazingly fun content to watch, but, like, those libraries are amazing. And just watching him respond to GitHub issues and and be so attentive, was was amazing.
Sagar Batchu:Right? And that those kind of things, like, I think are also the kind of folks you wanna, like, align yourself with because, yeah. I think this our whole industry is built around open source and and not just open source, but, like, the goodwill of of some just truly amazing developers. Yeah. So, yeah, there's been tons tons of amazing people to work with.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's really cool. It's really, really cool. And I think that's the sort of, like, influencer marketing that developers want to see. Totally.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That's very, very cool. So you've done you've been doing content that people that that you found your clients were interested in, and you picked up the tips and things you learned. You're working with people like Colin.
Jack Bridger:Are there any other ways that you're kind of driving growth with Speakeasy?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Good question. I think, you know, integrations, obviously. Mhmm. We have great partners in the ecosystem, and the API space has, like, kind of adjacent to us, for example, documentation
Jack Bridger:vendors. Alright. Minnify.
Sagar Batchu:Minnify is close. The Scalar team, also a great product. There's like our space is definitely seeing a bit of, like, a resurgence, I think. Lots of interesting stuff going on. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:I think another really interesting one content for us has been something we like to call, like, engineering as marketing, where, you know, all the engineering design decisions we make, the the things that we talk about internally, some of it gets turned out into block content. And it turns out a lot of other people are thinking about the same stuff. So I'll give you an example. Like, we recently did a lot of upgrades for our Python generation, and there was a lot of there was a big debate around, like, data classes versus Pydantic. Mhmm.
Sagar Batchu:And 2 pretty, like, key libraries in the space on, like, how to how to manage your schemas and validate data. That's a blog article on the site and Yeah. It's it's based off like internal conversations, other things we read, and that's getting a lot of hits. Right? Really.
Sagar Batchu:Because like I'm sure a lot of other teams when they start the Python stacks and products are thinking of the same thing. Right? Like, how do you choose between the 2?
Jack Bridger:What title did you go for?
Sagar Batchu:Oh, that one was probably a little bit more SEO driven. Like, I think it was, like, getting started in Python data classes versus Pydantic. Like, that was, like, a very Yeah. Key. I think I chose something sillier, and then someone on my marketing team was
Jack Bridger:like, oh, you actually need an SEO title. You're just
Sagar Batchu:having a good SEO title. Everything else can be, like, perfect Yeah. Copy of, like, what you actually talk about, but, the title has to be.
Jack Bridger:Okay. I guess. Yeah. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Makes sense. Yeah. No. I've appreciated the, like, I think low hanging fruit that you can fix to, like, have good SEO.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. I'd also say another thing, honestly. You know, I'm sure other startup founders are the same will say the same thing, but just making your early customers happy, and making them, like, really happy and being trying to be there for them all the time. You know? Like, I I always try to make sure when the customer messages us, like, we message back, like, in a minute.
Sagar Batchu:Really? Like, a minute or 2 even if we don't solve the problem, sometimes it takes us more time. But just, like, I want them to know that we are there for them. Yeah. Right?
Sagar Batchu:Like, we're not gonna leave them hanging whatever happens. And so, like, I think that kind of trust you build up, like, people talk about it. Right? Yeah. And, yeah.
Sagar Batchu:And, I'm grateful that our customers have spoken on our behalf, but I think, yeah, just investing time with them. They will go and speak on your behalf for you.
Jack Bridger:That's very cool.
Sagar Batchu:And I don't mean just like retweets and and LinkedIn posts, which which are also awesome. You know, I love that too.
Jack Bridger:Please do it. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:So please do it. You know who you are. You you do a great job with it. But I'll yeah. I also like the word-of-mouth, the, you know, especially when you're early and you're selling to, like, a lot of companies of the same size, in in the valley, in the tech world, like, it's actually a pretty small world of of people who talk.
Sagar Batchu:Right? Yeah.
Jack Bridger:True. Yeah. Very small world.
Sagar Batchu:Nice small world indeed.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's amazing. I think we're probably at about time. Okay. Is there anything that you really wanted to kind of, like, you would want to tell, like, DevTools founders from your experience?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. Good question. I think I think as DevTools founders, like, most lot of us are developers or have been developers in the past life, and I think we all trust our gut and our instinct. I think that's absolutely fantastic. But I would say, like, don't forget to also hear your customers and, like, hear what they say.
Sagar Batchu:I think as as, you know, developers, it's easy for us to, like, say, oh, I have an intuition around something. Yeah. And I think that's that's true, but you're building for the 99% developer, not the 1% developer. Yeah. And eventually you're gonna have to start selling to, like, developers outside the valley and outside Hacker News and Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Developers at Fortune 500 who, you know, have very different kind of day to day experiences. And so, yeah, I think you you definitely, like, have to back your intuition up with with a very wide range of, like, other developer perspectives.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good one. Yeah. And where can people learn more about Speakeasy and about Saga?
Sagar Batchu:Yeah. We actually just launched a new site, so speak easy.com. Paying a nice bit of money for that domain. Oh. Yes.
Sagar Batchu:So learn about it there. We yeah. And, we have a we have a Slack community too. All of us, at the company are always there ready to chat with you about stuff. Yeah.
Sagar Batchu:Amazing. Always happy to talk about it.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Well, thanks so much for joining. And thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back again soon. Thanks.
Jack Bridger:Thanks, everyone.
Sagar Batchu:Cool.
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