SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 628: RapidAPI w/ 19 YO Founder Raises $3.5M, Helping You Connect to API's Faster with CEO Iddo Gino
13 Apr 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: What is RapidAPI and how does it help developers?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Many of you who I've met in person have seen my unbelievable dashboards that I built.
You know, I'm an analytics-like crazy person. I love the data, and I love presenting the data in beautiful dashboards that my team can use on their mobile devices, their phones, and TVs throughout the office. Now, the way I do this without having to hire a big development team is at nathanlacka.com forward slash analytics.
It's using a company called Clipfolio, and I'll tell you more later on in the show how I use them.
Chapter 3: What is the business model of RapidAPI?
It's nathanlacka.com forward slash analytics. Nathan Lockett here coming up tomorrow morning. You guys are going to learn from Jennifer Raina. She is from Mexico and her company is called Gas Zen. They are just starting.
Chapter 4: How did Iddo Gino come up with the idea for RapidAPI?
They just raised $700,000 and they have a roof meter, which basically tells Mexican households when gas is almost empty and the way they're growing is unbelievable. Good morning, everybody. Nathan Latka here.
Chapter 5: What challenges did Iddo face while building RapidAPI?
Our guest this morning is Edo Gino, and he is the CEO and co-founder of Rapid API, which he founded when he was 16 years old. He's listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 list, and previously he was the co-organizer of Hacking Gen Y. Originally from Israel, Edo currently resides in San Francisco, California, where he runs Rapid API and writes JavaScript projects on the side.
Edo, are you ready to take us to the top? Hi, Nahan, how are you doing? I'm doing good. Thanks for being here. I appreciate it.
Chapter 6: How much funding has RapidAPI raised and from whom?
All right, so jump in with me here. Tell us what RapidAPI does and what's your business model? How do you generate revenue?
So Rapid API lets developers find APIs online, test them straight in their browser, and connect to them, generally making the entire API connection process a lot easier. And we also have a marketplace model on top of that, so you can actually pay for those APIs through Rapid, where we make a certain processing fee in the middle.
Chapter 7: What is the transaction process for APIs on RapidAPI?
Got it, and what's that processing fee typically?
It's typically from 10 to 25%.
Okay, are you negotiating those kind of one-off with your partners like Slack, Foursquare, Eventbrite? Yeah, it's dependent on the API vendor. Okay, and that's it. So it's just a trade. Really, you can almost get it like a marketplace. You're connecting the vendors with APIs to people that want to connect those APIs. You're taking a cut in the middle.
Yeah, it is instead of every developer having to talk to every other API vendor and them having to connect independently. You kind of get a one-point connection to any API in the world.
Chapter 8: What is the future growth plan for RapidAPI?
So take me back here, kind of give us some history. So what year did you launch this business in?
So as you read before in the bio, I was actually part of Hacking Generation Y before that, where we did a bunch of hackathons all over the world and kind of helped teenagers hack and learn about programming. And what we discovered is that A, APIs are really powerful and they can make apps really strong, but B, connecting to them is really difficult.
And at that point, we created the first iteration of Rapid, or the first version, which was pretty much a GitHub repository with a bunch of API wrappers. And we started noticing that a lot of people were using those wrappers to connect to APIs, and we got a few thousand stars on GitHub.
And at that point, we realized that people need that one-off connection to APIs, and we went on and we built Rapid as it is today.
And who is we?
So it's me and then Miki Haslavsky, who's my co-founder and runs our dev team back in Israel.
Oh, very cool. And so what's your total team size today?
So we actually just passed 20 people last week.
Very good. And are you guys based in Israel or San Francisco? Where's the team split up?
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