I tend to feel a little intimidated by companies that offer fantastic experiences like this, but then I keep trying to remember this:
Algolia looked like shit when it started. There was none of this shine and polish. IIRC it was some text styled with Bootstrap 2. Or might have been 1.
Stripe also looked like shit when it started. No shine or polish, no developer website based developer experience to speak of, no world leading 60fps animations, no fantastically versioned docs, nothing.
Build something people want / something that solves a hard problem and makes people powerful and more enabled. Companies that do this can afford to build fantastic developer experiences after 10 years of doing it, but companies that try hard to build excellent developer experiences will not necessarily be successful.
I was a very inexperienced developer with tutorial-level experience of Rails, and I learned javascript from Algolia client tutorial. I have a 50-emails support thread with their CEO and CTO when they were doing YC.
This level of patience and care at onboarding a new dev was incredible and I always rooted for them. I came to know them better a few years later (small world) and they are absolutely adorable, very down to earth and modest despite their tremendous growth
But one thing has not changed : when you implement Algolia in a project, it feels like magic. The speed + convenience combo is unbeatable
Selling to developers is a bit harder then that.
You need to offer something they already know they want. (or you will need a good sales team, and or sell to their boss). And something that can't easily build themselves. And something they can't already get for free (or you will have to also give it away for free).
If someone starts a Algolia or a Stripe competitor today, they have to have good user experience to even compete, isn't it? Because Stripe and Algolia have already shown what is possible.
If you plan to compete using their feature set, then yes. But that's a terrible idea.
Find something that Algolia or Stripe won't or cannot do (for deep reasons) and offer that. Stripe has a list of "Restricted Businesses" each of which is a market that would be delighted to be served at all, let alone with some polish. Of course there are complicating factors... but you don't expect this to be easy, do you?
Even if you match their level of polish (which is nearly impossible due to manpower), why would someone use an unknown service over theirs?
I think this follows the other reply: you should offer something different that's attractive enough for a client to pick your service over theirs. Something you enable or focus on that Stripe can't.
Usually this happens because they'd have to sacrifice the experience of a much larger group of clients or your niche is too small to be worth it for a team at a bigger company.
The bet is that serving this new group/need will help you a)end up with a profitable group of customers that grows and/or b)end up developing a user-base/feature-set that makes it easy for you to expand to other users/products and steal market from the bigger competitor.
Except its right there in the transcript. It used to be a self-service SaaS application, to enterprise sales.
Nearly all features are gated behind an enterprise-sales "contact us" box with no transparency in pricing.
They're not selling to developers, they're selling to business executives, they give a nod to the fact developers are the end-user of this product, but all the material on the site is as executive-oriented as it gets. Listing other brands they've sold the product to, big stats about ROI and increased sales and revenue and "white-papers" which are really just fluff-pieces to hype up the product.
As a developer, I need to see transparent pricing up-front.
It's no good telling me about features, APIs without a way to figure out what it'll cost because that cost might easily be orders-of-magnitude out of range. Look at the pricing for Algolia - $499/mo and you don't actually get any of the features that separate it from products like ElasticSearch which are available as open-source downloads or as a much cheaper hosted service. You get tooling to make integrating search easier than the open-source alternatives, but now you're bound to the tooling provided by that service and its capabilities, or writing your own tooling anyway.
Either give me a monthly cost I can use to determine if its worth suggesting a product, or give me usage-based pricing that lets me start out cheaply, and lets my bill grow as the value I gain from your product grows.
(Sylvain from Algolia speaking) Thanks for sharing, our pricing & its transparency is actually something we are working on right now to address this perception. We've been iterating a few times already over the past 7 years, but this is one more signal for us to act!
The reality is that based on the number of objects you want to search in, your search traffic, your searches' complexity and your index/relevance configuration; the underlying resources can vary soo much, it's hard to have a single pricing that fits all use-case.
This has always been a major deterrent to me wanting to use Algolia. It's basically impossible for me to know whether for x number of users doing y number of searches Algolia will cost $100/month or $1,000/month or $10,000/month. It amazes me that anyone commits to investing development effort in using Algolia (with lock-in, to boot) when you have no idea whether it's something you can even afford.
Btw, part of this pricing rework is also about removing some of the feature gating. It's an approach we've taken to really get the feature right, first releasing it to a smaller set of (larger) customers before opening it up to the whole mass.
Search is fast, relevancy is awesome, it's hosted and I have analytics. So for that use case it's a clear and major win against installing, configuring and adding search analytics to Elastic.
I recommend Algolia to my friends who are working on side projects or want to implement search for small datasets (less than 100k documents to index). Algolia is indeed an amazing service / api!
But I don't use Algolia for my project (and my full-time job now) Listen Notes (a podcast search engine). I did some back of envelope calculation on pricing, and figured that I had to pay $50k ~ $100k/month (at least) to Algolia, which is like I have to raise a pre-seed round every month :) I run a podcast API
myself. I understand that it's impossible for an api (and its pricing) to fit every use cases in the world.
– Be up front about pricing and terms (depends on target business size though)
– Easy to understand but detailed feature lists, tier comparisons, screenshots, videos
– Public, well organized documentation that goes in depth and is easy to search/navigate, also acts as good SEO
– Plenty of samples in documentation so you can paste and
go
– Quick support that can get technical enough
– Offer yearly and monthly subscriptions
Developers usually spend a few minutes scanning each solution they're comparing, so within very short time and clicks, they should be able to decide why you should be a pick and not the next one. There's usually a hard criteria. They need to solve a problem. Investigate what kinds of features your users picked you for.
Also, trials: If you don't offer trials, you'll get higher quality customers. (But still offer refunds just in case.) They'll be the type who can spend the first monthly fee to check out your site, and have realistic expectations.
Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund.
But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well.
Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience.
I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.
> Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.
You didn't answer OP's question, which was:
> This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?
Reflecting on your answer, you appear to be advertising for Algolia as well. It's a nice product, but the impression I get is that OP is right -- this post is an advertisement.
Yes, though it definitely raises some valid points. If I'm picking between a few services, I'm usually going to go for the one with the best docs and onboarding experience. That seems like a given, but a lot of companies are severely lacking in those departments.
Hosted by Garry Tan, Cofounder of Posthaven where the Masterclass is hosted and Managing Partner at Initialized Capital, who also just happens to have Algolia in their portfolio. Go figure.
As a VC, marketing is part of the job. Perhaps the most important part of the job.
Getting LPs to invest in your fund encourages strong personal brand building.
Getting startups to want _you_ to invest versus others—and for many "great looking" deals (the ones you want), the company has options—requires strong personal brand building.
In the medium term incentives are less towards being good at helping companies.
You have to do enough good marketing to get founders to sign on the dotted line. After that, if they don't like you or are "bleh" on you, there's nothing they can do about it. What's done is done.
By the time you've fully deployed the capital in your fund (2–3 years, excluding reserves for follow-on), you're raising your next fund. That's _far_ too short of a time span to know what the results will be for Fund I.
What does it take?
Good marketing.
It's not a coincidence, then, that successful funds revolve around good, or at the very least incessant, self-marketers.
Garry has appeared numerous times on @VCBrags (and has, funnily enough, blocked them.)
It's not cynical, it's open and clear if you track HN story positions that a large part of rankings are not organic. In the past HN were more open about that fact than they are now.
I think this is one of the fundamental quandaries of many services that sell to developers. There's always a way to roll it yourself such that the cost in money is low but the cost in time is high.
For me, I just don't have enough time in the day (parenthood + day job as an investor) so when I do code, I am looking for a lot of leverage, and I'm willing to trade off a monthly fee for it since it's like licensing software that lets me get something done a lot faster.
Most cloud services are like this: You could do it yourself, but when you compare it to hiring more people on your team, you should use a cloud service.
The upside to this is that a lot of startups are going to be able to get a lot more leverage through building on top of services like Algolia. I mean, this is really the AWS strategy in a nutshell, isn't it?
I would agree on your point here, in some ways. Algolia is a limited search; there's a lot of things you can't do on the fly (that you can in, say, SOLR). However, the onboarding (as noted) is pretty good. It's really easy to get started using it. The learning curve is much lower and so, too, are the capabilities. If you don't need those extra capabilities, you just need to get search available, it might be the right thing.
I see a lot of comments here deriding this as an ad for Algolia. With all the conflicts of interest, that may well be true.
However, automatically dismissing an entire piece of content because of a conflict of interest, which actually may not be that big (e.g. what percentage of their portfolio is Algolia, that it'd be worth pushing), seems closed-minded.
Investors are people, and like anyone, being excited about a company/product and using their platform to share it, is a pretty benign thing to do.
Meta question: @garry - Do you have a post on the your video making process and what equipment you're using? Would be curious to know if you're mostly making these videos all yourself or if you hired a video production agency to help with the recording, editing, etc. Thanks!
Readit News
Algolia looked like shit when it started. There was none of this shine and polish. IIRC it was some text styled with Bootstrap 2. Or might have been 1.
Stripe also looked like shit when it started. No shine or polish, no developer website based developer experience to speak of, no world leading 60fps animations, no fantastically versioned docs, nothing.
Build something people want / something that solves a hard problem and makes people powerful and more enabled. Companies that do this can afford to build fantastic developer experiences after 10 years of doing it, but companies that try hard to build excellent developer experiences will not necessarily be successful.
I was a very inexperienced developer with tutorial-level experience of Rails, and I learned javascript from Algolia client tutorial. I have a 50-emails support thread with their CEO and CTO when they were doing YC.
This level of patience and care at onboarding a new dev was incredible and I always rooted for them. I came to know them better a few years later (small world) and they are absolutely adorable, very down to earth and modest despite their tremendous growth
But one thing has not changed : when you implement Algolia in a project, it feels like magic. The speed + convenience combo is unbeatable
Selling to developers is a bit harder then that. You need to offer something they already know they want. (or you will need a good sales team, and or sell to their boss). And something that can't easily build themselves. And something they can't already get for free (or you will have to also give it away for free).
Find something that Algolia or Stripe won't or cannot do (for deep reasons) and offer that. Stripe has a list of "Restricted Businesses" each of which is a market that would be delighted to be served at all, let alone with some polish. Of course there are complicating factors... but you don't expect this to be easy, do you?
I think this follows the other reply: you should offer something different that's attractive enough for a client to pick your service over theirs. Something you enable or focus on that Stripe can't.
Usually this happens because they'd have to sacrifice the experience of a much larger group of clients or your niche is too small to be worth it for a team at a bigger company.
The bet is that serving this new group/need will help you a)end up with a profitable group of customers that grows and/or b)end up developing a user-base/feature-set that makes it easy for you to expand to other users/products and steal market from the bigger competitor.
They're not selling to developers, they're selling to business executives, they give a nod to the fact developers are the end-user of this product, but all the material on the site is as executive-oriented as it gets. Listing other brands they've sold the product to, big stats about ROI and increased sales and revenue and "white-papers" which are really just fluff-pieces to hype up the product.
As a developer, I need to see transparent pricing up-front. It's no good telling me about features, APIs without a way to figure out what it'll cost because that cost might easily be orders-of-magnitude out of range. Look at the pricing for Algolia - $499/mo and you don't actually get any of the features that separate it from products like ElasticSearch which are available as open-source downloads or as a much cheaper hosted service. You get tooling to make integrating search easier than the open-source alternatives, but now you're bound to the tooling provided by that service and its capabilities, or writing your own tooling anyway.
Either give me a monthly cost I can use to determine if its worth suggesting a product, or give me usage-based pricing that lets me start out cheaply, and lets my bill grow as the value I gain from your product grows.
The reality is that based on the number of objects you want to search in, your search traffic, your searches' complexity and your index/relevance configuration; the underlying resources can vary soo much, it's hard to have a single pricing that fits all use-case.
What is my cost with a million objects, an average computational complexity of 3 compute units per search, etc.
If you can't do that, at least give some example scenarios (small, medium, big, huge, etc) with total pricing.
Just... something. Anything would be better than a "contact us" link.
I absolutely refuse to use or recommend anything that looks like a black box enterprise solution if it lacks transparency.
It's impossible to use due to bugs.
Search is fast, relevancy is awesome, it's hosted and I have analytics. So for that use case it's a clear and major win against installing, configuring and adding search analytics to Elastic.
But I don't use Algolia for my project (and my full-time job now) Listen Notes (a podcast search engine). I did some back of envelope calculation on pricing, and figured that I had to pay $50k ~ $100k/month (at least) to Algolia, which is like I have to raise a pre-seed round every month :) I run a podcast API myself. I understand that it's impossible for an api (and its pricing) to fit every use cases in the world.
– Be up front about pricing and terms (depends on target business size though)
– Easy to understand but detailed feature lists, tier comparisons, screenshots, videos
– Public, well organized documentation that goes in depth and is easy to search/navigate, also acts as good SEO
– Plenty of samples in documentation so you can paste and go
– Quick support that can get technical enough
– Offer yearly and monthly subscriptions
Developers usually spend a few minutes scanning each solution they're comparing, so within very short time and clicks, they should be able to decide why you should be a pick and not the next one. There's usually a hard criteria. They need to solve a problem. Investigate what kinds of features your users picked you for.
Also, trials: If you don't offer trials, you'll get higher quality customers. (But still offer refunds just in case.) They'll be the type who can spend the first monthly fee to check out your site, and have realistic expectations.
You have to click on one of the other links that actually shows a correct hover icon and THEN click on the "Developers" link to get there.
Maybe their docs are great, but a bunch of links on the main site are broken...
But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well.
Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience.
I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.
You didn't answer OP's question, which was:
> This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?
Reflecting on your answer, you appear to be advertising for Algolia as well. It's a nice product, but the impression I get is that OP is right -- this post is an advertisement.
Getting LPs to invest in your fund encourages strong personal brand building.
Getting startups to want _you_ to invest versus others—and for many "great looking" deals (the ones you want), the company has options—requires strong personal brand building.
In the medium term incentives are less towards being good at helping companies.
You have to do enough good marketing to get founders to sign on the dotted line. After that, if they don't like you or are "bleh" on you, there's nothing they can do about it. What's done is done.
By the time you've fully deployed the capital in your fund (2–3 years, excluding reserves for follow-on), you're raising your next fund. That's _far_ too short of a time span to know what the results will be for Fund I.
What does it take?
Good marketing.
It's not a coincidence, then, that successful funds revolve around good, or at the very least incessant, self-marketers.
Garry has appeared numerous times on @VCBrags (and has, funnily enough, blocked them.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(Launch HNs are an exception. Those are one of the things that HN formally gives back to YC in exchange for funding it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
For me, I just don't have enough time in the day (parenthood + day job as an investor) so when I do code, I am looking for a lot of leverage, and I'm willing to trade off a monthly fee for it since it's like licensing software that lets me get something done a lot faster.
Most cloud services are like this: You could do it yourself, but when you compare it to hiring more people on your team, you should use a cloud service.
The upside to this is that a lot of startups are going to be able to get a lot more leverage through building on top of services like Algolia. I mean, this is really the AWS strategy in a nutshell, isn't it?
However, automatically dismissing an entire piece of content because of a conflict of interest, which actually may not be that big (e.g. what percentage of their portfolio is Algolia, that it'd be worth pushing), seems closed-minded.
Investors are people, and like anyone, being excited about a company/product and using their platform to share it, is a pretty benign thing to do.
The over-the-top cynicism seems unnecessary.