SaaS for Developers
By Gwen
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SaaS for DevelopersJul 22, 2022
Optimizing Cloud Costs for SaaS Startups
You can't manage what you don't measure, and this includes your cloud costs. But how detailed should this measurement be? And how will the data translate into impact? I sat down with Adam Shugar, co-founder and CTO of Dashdive, to discuss his approach to cloud costs. He shared his advice, not only on cost cutting but also technology, growing a startup, the importance of community and more.
SaaS: More than just a business model
Bill Tarr has the most interesting job in the world. He and his team of SaaS Evangelists at the AWS SaaS Factory work with companies large and small to help them build SaaS on AWS.
In this conversation, we discuss the different ways technology and business interact when building SaaS - from cool technical options available only to SaaS companies to the importance of knowing the cost of a tenant. This hour is packed with advice for both the technical and the business side of building a viable SaaS.
Links mentioned in the show:
Prime Day team on observability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOYOvp6X10g
Bill Tarr on SaaS Architecture Pitfalls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOYOvp6X10g
WrapStream's architecture: https://youtu.be/ceWOw8rxDOM?si=uECCtW0SJ1Sffqn_
Alcion's zero cost multi-region architecture: https://youtu.be/kJECSpVwM7Q?si=_j9LZWdoA5xpFC3g
Building Streaming on S3
Ryan Worl, co-founder and CTO of WarpStream, is on a mission to re-engineer fundamental infrastructure on top of S3. Starting with metrics at Uber, continuing with Husky - DataDog's platform for events, logs and everything except metrics and then... Ryan thought "it will be cool to re-build Kafka on S3", reached out to other developers to hear their thoughts... and ended up building WarpStream.
In this episode we talk about Ryan's journey, how S3 can fundamentally change the way we design our infrastructure, and why it is a good idea to go in that direction. We talk about S3 vs S3 express. What will be the perfect serverless experience for streams. And finally, tune in at minute 50:00 to get excellent advice on how a SaaS provider should use logs.
Kora: Cloud Native Platform for Kafka
We invited Anna Povzner, director of engineering at Confluent, to the show to discuss Kora. Kora is a Cloud Native platform based on Apache Kafka, which her team at Confluent built. Anna and her team recently published a paper about Kora in VLDB 2023, and it won the industry's best paper award. Kora VLDB paper: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3822-povzner.pdf In our conversation, we discussed: - Capacity abstractions for serverless Kafka - Reconciling design constraints into a cohesive architecture - Key components of the architecture: Rebalances, quotas, cells. - How to drive deep technical innovation at a fast-growing company - Delivering low and predictable latency with Apache Kafka
Cell Based Architecture for Early Stage SaaS
In the last year or two I started hearing a lot about cell-based architectures. Usually in the form of “We had a lot of issues scaling our infrastructure, but then we moved to cell-based architectures” and “I wish I’ve learned about cell based architectures earlier, it would have saved me a lot of pain”. As a result, I’ve wanted to share knowledge about cell-based architectures with this community for a while now. I was lucky that Eno Thereska called me and suggested to do just that! Eno, currently at Alcion, is one of the most impressive technical leaders I’ve head the pleasure of working with. He has deep theoretical knowledge that he knows how to use for very practical technical solutions. And in this presentation and discussion, he shares both theory and practical advice. We discussed everything from the basics of cell based architectures, their benefits all the way to different heuristics for assigning tenants to cells. Papers and talks we discussed: AWS Fargate under the hood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr-zOaBGyEA Doordash - Journey to cell-based micro services architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRrhU-yRjg Slack’s Migration to Cellular Architecture: https://slack.engineering/slacks-migration-to-a-cellular-architecture/ Kora: A cloud-native event streaming platform for Kafka: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3822-povzner.pdf
Building a Serverless Streaming Platform
Krishna Raman has many years of experience building platforms for developers. Now he's applying this experience at Delta Streams to build a serverless platform for stream processing in SQL. In our conversation, we discussed the serverless developer experience, some of the secret sauce behind Delta Stream's Flink Operator, how to deliver a bring-your-own-account SaaS, K8s network policies and why they matter and when you shouldn't use K8s at all.
Never Rewrite! And other advice for SaaS Developers
You are a founding engineer at a SaaS startup. You built the MVP, and to everyone's great delight - usage is picking up. What's next?
In this episode, Jeffrey shares how a messy MVP can gradually evolve into a scalable SaaS product. We discuss the critical design decisions engineers have to make in the early days of building the product: Tabs or spaces, pooled tenants or siloed, Micro-services or monolith... And who makes these decisions.
Jeffrey Sherman is a staff engineer, scalability, and performance lead at Active Campaign - and was recently recognized as SaaS Developer Hero for his contributions to this community.
Jeffery has his own podcast, @NeverRewrite , where you can find him with more good advice and funny stories every single week.
P.S. I had a bit of construction going on while recording. I tried my best, but you'll hear hammers in the background. So sorry!
The Wonders of Postgres Logical Decoding Messages
Did you know that Postgres that lets you write data that you can’t query? Events that will show up in the write-ahead log (WAL) of the database but not in any table. Gunnar Morling, senior staff engineer at Decodable and world expert on change data capture, walks us through data capture basics, this not-new but little-known feature, and dives into three key use cases (my favorite is the audit log) plus a bonus example that goes deeper into Postgres internals. We discuss these blogs and examples in the video: - https://www.infoq.com/articles/wonder... - https://www.morling.dev/blog/insatiab... - https://github.com/decodableco/exampl...
Postgres, Performance and Rails
Andrew Atkinson took a Rails web application that was struggling with load, and optimized it to handle over 9000 HTTP requests per second with an average latency of 35ms end to end. Handling a much higher load, on a smaller RDS instance, with lower latencies. He then shared his expertise by writing a book: "High-Performance Postgres with Rails." Andrew and I discussed Postgres performance, scalability, design patterns, valuable tools, his career, and some Rails. I tackled Andrew with many of the biggest challenges SaaS developers encounter with Postgres, and Andrew had an answer to everything. For me, the highlights were his explanation of the N+1 problem, sharding patterns, the use of pgcopydb project to move a noisy neighbor to another DB, and the secret for scaling on a single instance. Useful links: - The book: https://pgrailsbook.com - SaaS Developer Slack - where Andrew answers Postgres questions and will share a discount for his book: http://launchpass.com/all-about-saas
Tools we mentioned: - Easier multi-tenancy for Rails: https://github.com/ErwinM/acts_as_tenant - For read replicas prior to Rails 6.0: https://github.com/OutOfOrder/multidb - The fastest way to copy a DB or part of: https://github.com/dimitri/pgcopydb
Trends in Observability and Alerting
Ensuring your production system is well-behaved is table stakes for any SaaS. The space around monitoring and alerting is complex and moving fast, so it is too easy to end up with results that are worse than useless. Alert fatigue is real, and developers must learn to avoid this. Shahar and Tal, founders of Keep and active SaaS Developer community members, joined me to discuss - why observability is so complicated, how alerts fit in, and many best practices for alerting. If you feel like you have a good handle on your alerts today, you should skip to minute 23:40, where we talk about the future. CI/CD for alerts, semantic layer for alerts, and how AI will recommend alerts + ways to resolve them.
Cloudflare: Performance isolation in multi-tenant DB
Cloudflare is no longer "just" a CDN serving 55M HTTP requests/sec; they now offer a wide range of cloud services on the edge. These services run on a data layer with 15 Postgres clusters running hundreds of databases.
Vignesh Ravichandran, engineering manager of Cloudflare's database team, joined us to discuss the challenges of running this large-scale multi-tenant environment - dealing with network partitions, noisy neighbors, floods of connections, and even global warming.
We talk about the importance of having a good toolset, of practicing incidents, and of internally advocating database best practices to a large engineering organization.
The blog: https://blog.cloudflare.com/performan...
The Scale presentation: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/...
Real-time Data Infrastructure - At Uber and Beyond
Pinot team at Uber wrote an excellent paper about the real-time analytics platform they built. Chinmay, formerly a principal engineer at Uber and now head of product at StarTree, joined me for a conversation. We discussed the challenges they encountered at Uber, the solutions they came up with, the platform they built, and how to best apply their experience to companies much smaller than Uber. The paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00087.pdf
Scalable Multi-tenant Platforms at Loom and at Times
Shayon wrote a great blog post on the guiding principles he and his team at Loom used to guide them as they evolved Loom's data platform through a period of hypergrowth. I invited Shayon to the show to discuss the challenges he encountered and how he solved them - and I learned that he is now at Tines - solving an entirely new set of challenges with a very different set of solutions. We discuss the fundamental principles that help Shayon make critical decisions when building and scaling his platforms. We also discuss what happens when JSON columns become too large, how to prioritize performance improvement projects, what to do when a tenant gets noisy, and how his team performs zero downtime upgrades. Shayon's blog: https://www.loom.com/blog/scale-engin... Shayon's personal site: https://www.shayon.dev/about/
Building SaaS on Kafka Streams
Colt McNealy is re-imagining the future of microservices orchestration and he decided to build it entirely on Kafka Streams. In this conversation we discuss how Kafka Streams provides the low latency, reliability, availability and elasticity that is needed for the next generation of microservices orchestration. Colt also shares the most exciting up and coming improvements in Kafka Streams community and the roadmap he'd dictate if he was the benevolent dictator of Kafka Streams.
Transaction Isolation - Demystified!
If you used a relational database at all, you probably heard of transaction isolation levels. Transaction isolation levels have a massive impact on the behavior of your application - correctness, performance, and error rates. Your database may be distributed these days, so you may have to reason about distributed transactions too. In this video, I explain transaction isolation levels with simple examples and why these levels barely make any sense. I conclude with a few examples of the complications involved in distributed transactions - and bad news about 2 phase commits. ---- For more in-depth reading: Transaction isolation in a few popular DBs: https://asktom.oracle.com/Misc/oramag...https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/...https://www.postgresql.org/docs/curre... The paper where Microsoft Research absolutely burns ANSI SQL 92 transaction isolation: https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0701157.pdf Why transactions matter: http://www.bailis.org/blog/understand... Super clear explanation of serialization anomalies: https://justinjaffray.com/what-does-w... Daniel Abadi on distributed transaction anomalies (I borrowed heavily from this in the second part of the video): https://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2019... Jepsen putting together isolation and distributed consistency: https://jepsen.io/consistency
Giving and Receiving Actually Useful Advice
YouTube and Twitter are full of “things developers should never do”. There's an endless demand for simple advice that applies in all situations. And that's not a bad thing. If there's a simple solution that works 80% of the time, this is valuable information. More practical than just "it depends." But advice-givers and advice-getters can do better. The best advice doesn't just solve an immediate problem. It tells you when to ignore this advice, and what to do if the problem isn't solved. I share a very old story about when I needed help sizing a connection pool, the advice I got, and the advice I now wish someone had given me. P.S Sorry about the audio quality. I had to record outside, and my lav mic wasn't as good as my desk mic.
The Promise of Serverless
When developers talk about Serverless, they often focus on FaaS. But the best Serverless experience, by far, is delivered by a data store. S3.
Why? Because it "just works" and lets developers focus on their code.
Serverless databases help you focus on your queries and workload. They abstract the compute. Which also means - usage based pricing.
In this video, Ram Subramanian, Nile's CEO, joins us to discuss his vision of the perfect Serverless database experience.
We talk about: - What makes S3 so amazing? - What would the S3 experience look like if we apply it to RDBMS? - Development cycle: Serverless requirements when coding, testing and finally in production. - Performance of Serverless databases, and what will make performance tuning a better experience - Elasticity and scalability. We agreed that "scale to zero" doesn't mean what everyone thinks it means. - Cost of Serverless. Is it actually worth it? - Architectures: Compute-storage separation, disaggregation, sharding and gateways. - Multi-regions concerns And of course: Do Serverless DBs make sense for SaaS developers?
Airtable - Migrating a Multitenant Architecture to MySQL 8.0
The storage team at Airtable published a blog post describing, in detail, the migration of their petabyte-scale storage layer from MySQL 5.6 to MySQL 8.0.
Andrew Wang, the lead of Airtable's storage team, joined us to discuss the migration, Airtable's storage architecture, data isolation levels, engineering culture, and more.
The blog: https://medium.com/airtable-eng/migrating-airtable-to-mysql-8-0-809f0398a493
Github's gh-ost, recommended by Andrew: https://github.com/github/gh-ost
Andrew's LinkedIn (he's hiring): https://www.linkedin.com/in/aawang/
The Multitenant journey - From 0 to 500M ARR
SaaS applications are multi-tenant, so whether you are writing the first line of code in a new app or worried about scaling your successful SaaS fast enough - you need to be aware of multi-tenant requirements. Isolation, access control, perfornance, operations, scale and compliance
In this video, Ram Subramanian, Nile CEO and SaaS Community founder, shares what he learned about building multi-tenant applications, based on 20+ years of experience and 100+ customer conversations. Starting from the first decision about the data model all the way to operating large scale deployments across multiple geographies.
Blogs we refer to in this video:
https://www.notion.so/blog/sharding-postgres-at-notion
https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/scaling-rearchitecting-and-decomposing-confluence-cloud
https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/april-2022-outage-update https://slack.engineering/scaling-datastores-at-slack-with-vitess/
And few other good blogs:
https://blog.gotenzo.com/tech/database-sharding-solving-performance-in-a-multi-tenant-restaurant-data-analytics-system
https://blog.sentry.io/2015/07/23/transaction-id-wraparound-in-postgres/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/performance-isolation-in-a-multi-tenant-database-environment/
https://www.lighttag.io/blog/database-multi-tenancy/
Compute-Storage Separation Explained
Gunnar Morling asked a great querstion on Twitter: ""Separating storage and compute" vs. "Predicate push-down" -- I can't quite square these two with each other. Is there a world where they co-exist, or is it just two opposing patterns/trends in DB tech. ?"
Those are complimentary patterns and you definitely want them together. They appear contradictory because "separating storage and compute" can mean different things to different people.
In this episode, I explain the various meanings of compute-storage separation, the problems it solves, the new problem it can create, and how predicate pushdown saves the day.
Gunnar's tweet: https://twitter.com/gunnarmorling/status/1610203324963516417
Aurora paper: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs245/readings/aurora.pdf
SaaS Developer Trends - 2022 and 2023
The last SaaS Developer video for 2022! Gwen talks about trends in the SaaS development space, and celebrates the growth of this community. Enjoy the holidays and we'll see you back with more SaaSy content in 2023!
https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas
Data Contracts for SaaS Developers with Benn Stancil
When you want to introduce new "Premium" pricing for your SaaS, it may look easy to add a field in the product. But are you sure it won't break the billing system? what about business reports? The last few weeks, my twitter feed was all about data contracts, and it was hard to see the real value behind the hype.
Benn Stancil, Chief Analytics Officer at Mode and one of my favorite thought leaders in the data space, agreed to join us and explain what are data contracts and how to use them for good rather than evil when building SaaS products. He highlighted what data contracts can actually achieve for an organization vs what we'd like them to achieve.
Benn's blog with interesting opinions on data, culture, businesses and the world: https://benn.substack.com/
Our community newsletter: https://hackingsaas.substack.com/
Our community slack: https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas
SLO - Best Practices for Reliable SaaS
A common challenge for SaaS products that got user adoption is balancing operational investments with a high speed of shipping new features. In the B2B world, moving fast and breaking things isn't an option. We need to move deliberately and reliably. SLO, service level objectives, is a way to align the product requirements for availability with the engineering investment in operations.
Ken Finnigan is a senior principal engineer at Workday, where he leads the SLO practice and aligns their engineering organization around the industry's best practices. He joined us to share these best practices.
Shifting Left of API Security
SaaS applications typically have public APIs, and must be concerned with securing these APIs. Buchi Reddy answered many security questions on the SaaS Developer slack community, and we invited him to chat about his approach to API Security and how he sees the future of secure SaaS products.
Buchi and Gwen followed up and shared resources on the SaaS Developer Slack - secure container images and opinions on JWT tokens. Join us in the community to continue the discussion: https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas
And maybe you'll want to take Buchi on his offer to find all your API security issues in 5 minutes?
Access Control: a customer-centric approach
Access control is a vast and complex space. Dan Norwood will be our expert guide and take us from first steps all the way to advanced scenarios.
We start with overview of the popular approaches, match them with customer requirements, learned how to integrate access control in existing architectures and then explore how a good product design can take access control from "must have" to a delightful customer experience.
My Job is to Predict the Future
Sam Ramji is an odd duck. He is full of curiosity, insights and ideas. He is also is the Chief Strategy Officer of Datastax.
In the most wide-ranging conversation I've ever recorded, we discussed the most interesting ideas in computing. From the 1980s - all the way to 2032. Along the way you'll learn how to craft a career as an odd duck with talent for strategy, how to transform an organization, how to create a strategy, and you'll hear 3 future predictions and 3 big data trends that are happening right now.
Related links:
- The data architecture video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovWiOD6AG78
- Sam's Podcast: https://www.datastax.com/resources/podcast/open-source-data
- Hacking SaaS, the latest and greatest of everything developers need to know when building SaaS: https://hackingsaas.substack.com/
- SaaS Community Slack, join the conversation! https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas
00:00 - Intro: Ducks and curiosity
2:43 - Brief history of computing
6:00 - Career as an odd duck
8:00 - Product Management
12:20 - Microsoft, you have a SaaS problem
20:00 - Clouds, APIs and scale
28:45 - How do we think together
29:53 - APIs are eating the world
33:00 - Advice for engineers in a transforming company
43:40 - The Developer Experience Architect
45:00 - How to Strategy
56:10 - 3 Futuristic Predictions
01:02:47 - 3 Trends in Data
1:14:37 - D&D 5th Edition
Infra SaaS Architecture - the hard parts
In a recent blog post (https://docs.thenile.dev/blog/saas-is...) we gave a long list of reasons why building a control plane for Infra SaaS is tricky. In this video, we walk through an example - from requirements to design, and illustrate why things are always harder than they first appear.
Building Data Products in 9 Minutes
Building Infra SaaS? Love control planes? - Ping me by email: gwen@thenile.dev or join the community and continue the conversation https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas.
Data Products are trendy, and all tech trends lead to a mess around what it even means and how different products fit in. This is a "highlights" version of my YOW! Data 2022 keynote. I included some of the key insights here, and the longer version includes all the details on the data architectures you need for each type of data product.
Reverse ETL - Why is it a big deal?
Reverse ETL is a bit of a buzzword these days. But why?
In this video Gwen Shapira discusses the new capabilities that reverse ETL introduces to businesses, and especially B2B SaaS with product-lead growth strategy. She also discusses why reverse ETL is more challenging to implement than you may imagine and why stream processing platforms may be a key part of solving these challenges.
Reverse ETL is not for everyone - but after watching this video, you'll know why everyone is talking about it.
SaaS Growth Teams - Hack Your Way to Success
Growth teams are cross-functional teams that have a clear goal - help customers get value from a SaaS service by improving the product itself. Great growth teams are metrics-driven and obsessed with the user experience. They optimize to experiment, learn and iterate fast.
In this episode, I interviewed Laura Brouckman, the engineering leader of Confluent Cloud's growth team - about the value that growth teams bring to the right companies, the team culture that leads to success and the hardest challenges that they are facing (hint: data is the problem, and the solution).
Growth engineering sounds fun? Laura is hiring: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-brouckman-792a41aa/
Want more SaaS engineering conversations? Join our Slack: https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas
Elasticity Matters - Designing a Serverless SaaS
The best cloud experience is a serverless experience. Billing is usage-based, and services scale automatically based on demand - reducing costs and the operational burden for most use-cases. Building a great user experience for serverless platforms is not easy - you need a great architecture and a bit of magic to pull it off.
Tune in for API design tips, architecture patterns, and Kubernetes gotchas that the Elasticity team at Confluent Cloud Control Plane learned while building a serverless user experience. Straight talk from Prachetaa, technical leader of the Elasticity team, and Ajit, staff engineer on the team. Interested in more SaaS? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
Speed of Apache Pinot - Cost of Cloud Storage
Companies that take existing software and manage it in the cloud have the opportunity to rethink their architecture and use cloud services appropriately. The resulting system is often cheaper, simpler, more elastic, and more manageable.
Neha Pawar, a founding engineer at StarTree Data and a PMC member of Apache Pinot, recently published a blog post about her experiments with tiered storage for Pinot. We had an in-depth conversation about how they approached the architecture change and the challenges of achieving reasonable latencies with cloud object storage like S3.
And the big question: Why did otherwise reasonable engineers decide to tackle this project's prototype over a weekend?
Interested in more SaaS? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
The blog post: https://www.startree.ai/blogs/introducing-tiered-storage
Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/KishoreBytes/status/1503075370240659462
Wix on Wix - Story of Scale, Efficiency and Extreme Dogfooding
Can you use your product while you are building it? What is one architecture trick that makes serverless easy? How do you build a call center in two weeks? And what is the right number of managers for a team?
I invited Yoav Abrahami, chief architect at Wix, to tell the SaaS Developer Community how Wix uses Wix products to build other Wix products. We've ended up covering a lot of great topics:
- How large Wix really is
- The benefits of running on 3 clouds
- Key insight that allowed Wix to build a cheap and resilient serverless backend
- The right way to dogfood your product
- Building a callcenter in 2 weeks
- and even few leadership tips
Interested in more SaaS? Join our Slack:
Get Metering Right - Stories of Usage Based Billing
Puneet and Lior from Amberflo share the story how and why AWS decided to price S3 with usage based billing. We also learn what is metering, how it is different from monitoring and why it matters. And finally, practical tips on how to implement metering and apply a usage-based pricing strategy.
Migrating to Kubernetes - reasons and lessons
Migrating from a simple, working, homegrown orchestration to Kubernetes. Why would you do that? And what will you learn once you do? Gianluca, now engineer at Aerosearch, shares stories from his time at InfluxDB, when they migrated their cloud to K8s. He tells the story, and shares important advice on learning, advocating, making tradeoffs and even the secret to hiring great engineers.
Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
SaaS Stories: User Experience for Metrics and Notifications
Users of Infrastructure SaaS expect to see metrics and receive notifications about the state of the system. But what metrics to expose? Who do you notify? And how to avoid oversharing? This videos are packed with useful tips by Dustin Cote, product manager at Confluent who spent 3 years figuring this out. We start by talking about metrics, and then switch to notifications at around minute 18:00. Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
What is a High Quality Product?
We know quality when we see it, but what makes a product truly great? And what does it take to build a great product?
In this video, Gwen shares her view of what makes products great, gives examples of great products, and shares some tips on how to build one.
Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
Quality links:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0063HC7EQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Creating unique user experiences: https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019
Control charts, like SLO, but more flexible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_chart
Statistical tools for quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_basic_tools_of_quality
SaaS Stories: The road to self-serve provisioning
You log in to Confluent Cloud, you click on "create cluster" and soon after the cluster shows up, the UI shows a nice message, an email arrives in your mailbox with details about the cluster and the usage of the cluster shows up in your next credit card statement. It is a nice and smooth experience.
In this video, our guest, Ram Subramanian, former VP of Eng at Confluent discussed what actually happens behind the scenes and what it took to build this great user experience.
This is the first video in our new "SaaS Stories" series. Let me know if you want to share your story on our channel.
Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
Willing to help my product discovery efforts? https://forms.gle/k3Rai3af1BN6D8c2A
It is an API Economy and SaaS products can join
API Economy is booming and provides many services that make SaaS development easier. Adding great public APIs to your product is also easier than ever.
In this episode, Gwen Shapira, usually the host of the channel, shared everything she learned about APIs, API Economy, and building great public APIs in the last week.
Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
Willing to help my product discovery efforts? https://forms.gle/k3Rai3af1BN6D8c2A
Great links I found in my API research:
Very detailed writeup from a business perspective: https://www.notboring.co/p/apis-all-the-way-down
A great podcast episode about SaaS in general with good insights about API economy: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0kEiIDcv1i2OzIEi2xuRI7?si=nnPEE4fURTidQy0NNnrwdw&nd=1
The contrarian take: https://www.swyx.io/api-economy/
Jamstack - using the API economy to get away with no backend: https://jamstack.org/
World of APIs: https://www.postman.com/explore
Swagger example of generating docs and examples from a spec: https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/AnaMCD-lab/my-petstore/1.0.0#/pet/addPet
Why and How of Consumption Based Billing
Modern SaaS applications increasingly turn to consumption-based billing - a payment scheme in which customers pay based on resources used. This flexible billing is very popular with users but can be challenging to implement. Metronome CTO, Scott Woody, joined us to explain why usage-based billing is so crucial for the SaaS business model - and what it takes to get it right.
Highlights include:
- The essential requirements that billing engineers must always support for consumption-based billing - and why they make the implementation so challenging.
- The ideal user experience for the two types of users who receive the bill.
- What billing and observability have in common, and why it matters.
- Why consumption-based billing is almost a must-have for product-led growth.
Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
Pricing & Packaging - What the best SaaS companies get right about them? with Adil Aijaz
In the three years spanning 2018–2020, at least thirty-nine SaaS companies filed for IPO. These companies are the top 1% of SaaS companies. In this talk, I will cover the common GTM, pricing, and packaging strategies used by these companies, emphasizing developer-focused SaaS IPOs. If you are an entrepreneur or an executive at an early-stage startup (seed - Series B), this talk will be valuable for you.
About Adil Aijaz, in his own words:
I am a data scientist by education, engineering by training. After building data products at Yahoo!, LinkedIn, and RelateIQ, I founded Split Software, a feature flagging and experimentation company that helps engineering teams iterate faster and safer. I served as Split’s CEO for five years, taking it from zero to hundreds of customers. This transition from engineer to entrepreneur taught me a lot about business and SaaS. I write about building SaaS businesses at Medium. https://adilaijaz.medium.com/
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SaaS Trends with Eva Nahari
Customer expectations in the SaaS world are constantly changing - and the bar for "great customer experience" is getting higher. Eva Nahari, from DNX Ventures, shares her view on what the best SaaS companies do and what everyone else is missing.