SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Codat Competitor ApiDeck Hits $600k ARR, 100% YoY Growth
30 Mar 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of API Deck and how does it help developers?
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or hr tools or crm tools they're burning net burn 30 000 per month right now but they have plenty of cashers sitting on a million dollar seed round raised last year the cap between 10 and 15 million and looking at raising more later this year as it goes and aims to build a deca corn Hey, folks. My guest today is G.J. DeWilde.
He's a builder of directories, a second-time founder, and today co-founder and CEO of API Deck. He's interested in APIs, PLG network effects, open source, and the developer experience. Again, you can follow along at apideck.com. They help developers build integrations faster. G.J., you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, definitely. Thanks for inviting me. You bet.
Chapter 2: How does API Deck differentiate itself from competitors like Codat?
So when you say help developers build integrations faster, it sounds like Zapier a bit. Is that the right way to think about you?
Yeah, that's what many companies think, where we go actually one layer beneath that to really deliver the APIs bare metal, where you're able to tap into multiple API categories, where we actually take that standardization
for us and where we try to build a developer experience similar like you used to from Stripe, Twilio and other API first companies and try to bring that to every SaaS API integration you're building.
So are you helping like if FounderPath wants to launch our own API, you'd help us launch that or you'd help my engineers work with other APIs?
We help your engineers connect to other APIs.
That would be the setup. I see. So like Kodak, for example, does this in the fintech space or Plaid and Teller do this for financial data and bank transactions. This is what you're doing, but to connect to any SaaS platform.
Exactly. And Kodak is one of our competitors.
Ah, okay.
Are you better than them? Definitely.
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Chapter 3: What pricing model does API Deck use for its services?
We have another approach. I think they're trying to target the different segments. We are working really towards SaaS companies to handle different integration needs, not only to commerce data and accounting data. We go beyond that. So we try to be the illicit provider to solve your integration needs with one unified API player.
And what are customers paying you on average per month?
It's around 10K. Per month? Per month. No, sorry. That's per year. So it would be around 800, 900 in MRR.
Okay. And what do you upsell against? Is it number of API connections launched, number of API calls per month?
Chapter 4: How many customers does API Deck currently serve?
How do you price?
Number of API calls is an important lever for us, but also the amount of unified APIs customers are using is an important one. And also why customers love us is the fact that we don't try to cap it based on the amount of customers that they're linking to integration.
So they're able to use our building blocks to build any integration workflow, and that really helps them solve a lot of different use cases.
And how many customers do you have today?
Currently, we have around 75 paying customers globally, and that ranges from pre-revenue companies to public companies even.
That's amazing. So can I take 75 customers at $850 a month? You're doing about $63,000, $64,000 a month in revenue?
We are getting there, yeah. When can you hit... Start with another product, which is lower in ACV size. So it's a bit of a blend of the two. So what's MRR today? Like 50,000?
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Chapter 5: What funding has API Deck secured and what are its future plans?
Around 50,000. Then we're going to be at 1 million ARR very soon.
That's amazing. Can you hit 1 million ARR this year, you think? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And if you're at $50,000 a month today, where are you exactly one year ago?
We were at... One year ago, we were at like 25K.
Wow. So you've doubled over the past year. Have you done this bootstrapped or have you raised capital, GJ?
We actually raised some funding from angels. We have a lot of VC interest, but we're actually trying to hit the right metrics first before actually putting the pedal to the metal and really putting rocket fuel and to get like the most market share. So at this point, we didn't raise VC money yet.
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Chapter 6: How does API Deck manage and update its API integrations?
How much did you raise from angels in what year?
More than 1 million that I can say.
And you did that last year? Uh, yeah, most of it we did last year. And was that on a safe and uncapped safe or did it have a cap? Uh, it was kept to a certain amount. Yeah. How do you negotiate the cap? 5 million, 10 million?
It's actually larger than that. So we're really trying to build a high growth company. So we put it high enough to also make it worth for the rest of the team and make sure that we can hit the right metrics and also can convert it at an advantage for us as the team.
When you say high, you mean something like $15 million? It's a little bit between 10 and 15, let us say. That's perfect.
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Chapter 7: What challenges does API Deck face in the current market?
How were you able to get that cap considering you were only doing at the time $25,000 a month in revenue?
Good question. I think what charms are... Angels was mostly the amount of customers that are coming in Bounce, discovering API as a platform. Also the amount of connectors and APIs we already shipped with a very small team. How many? Also the TAM. How many APIs have you shipped? Now around nine. We just shipped an e-commerce API and issue tracking API last month. So it's going fast.
How many, so like when you say API shipped, do you mean like the HubSpot API you now connect with? The sales, like what do you mean by that?
APIs are really the unified APIs that we have. Like accounting data is one of those, e-commerce data, CRM data, HRS data.
Chapter 8: What insights does the guest share about the importance of patience in business?
So just to be clear, like you have CRM API, and then you list Zoho, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and then you have HRIS API, file storage API. So when you say nine APIs, you have nine categories of APIs launched, like CRM, file storage, accounting. But under each of those, there's a bunch more integrations. How many do you have under each of those altogether?
Now, a little bit more than 100 recently. So we're shipping a lot of new connectors. I think we added like 15 in the last four weeks. So it's going pretty fast.
How do you keep these all up to date? I mean, we integrate at FounderPath maybe like six or seven APIs, and they're always changing. I mean, it takes two full-time engineers just to keep them up to date every week. How do you keep 100 of them up to date?
Good question. We initially invested a lot of resources in trying to automate as much as we can of the magic internally by looking at how others' APIs behave, creating specs around those APIs to have a real contract, how they should behave. And then we built our own API monitoring solution, which is open source called Portman. And that enables us to monitor those APIs for changes.
And that can also help us with scaling and making sure that the integrations that our customers are relying on, that they don't break and that we can also easily scale now from the 100 connectors in the coming years to 1000 or maybe 2000 different connectors for our customers.
Very cool.
When did you launch the company?
What year?
We launched it in 2018 with our first product and actually launched only our first unified APIs one and a half year ago.
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