Bencheng (u/Bencheng)

Bencheng commented on Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? · Posted by u/meander_water

nopcode · 9 months ago

cloud reps get commission for services sold via their marketplace. Often they even have a bigger financial incentive to sell third party products over native GCP/Azure stuff.

Bencheng · 9 months ago

Yeah, but a few years down the road, I learnt that the incentives are often misaligned. For example, the Account Manager wants all their client's consumption in their client's account, so they push the client for a dedicated Cloud deployment, while the other sales rep wants it on the other reseller account, etc.

It also sometimes conflicts with the incentives of us.

Bencheng commented on Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? · Posted by u/meander_water

its_down_again · 9 months ago

Curious how you landed on the idea to partner with local GCP/Azure reps. That’s a smart move, I didn’t realize they’d be open to helping. Did you pitch it as a way to help them close deals by offering custom solutions?

Bencheng · 9 months ago

Saw some other products partners with a Cloud vendor for marketing exposure, so we look into it.

It turns out that the most effective and easy way for their sales rep to pitch your products to their client is if you have something complementary. For us, this is because they have similar products, so they can propose it to the client if they don't like the native one.

Bencheng commented on Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? · Posted by u/meander_water

Bencheng · 9 months ago

I started as a dev shop and built 2 API products based on user demand.

1 is an OCR and document extraction service [0]. We started with three customers asking for the same services and found none that were really useful (and supported Chinese characters) on the market at that time. Lately the product pivoted to based on (fine-tuned) LLM/VLMs and focus on adding various features that LLM out of the box are missing (fine tune based on specific customers data, prompt tune for particular type of elements e.g. Checkboxes, split 100s pages of PDF into dozens of documents with a few pages)

We're at around 55k MRR, the price model is per page, and we sign annual contracts with most clients (with some discounts)

2nd is an open-source CIAM [1]; Around 35k MRR.

We knew nothing about marketing when we started, so we partnered with local GCP/Azure as an ISV to get our first paying customers, which drove us to the more "Corporate" segment of the market.

A huge challenge is obviously how to market the product, but customer support for developers is tough as well -- you have to be developers to provide support for other developers, and sometimes it feels like you're troubleshooting for another dev team.

For example, one time we had a client email us saying they were getting incorrect results from our API suddenly, after many back-and-forth emails, we finally asked if we could do troubleshooting with a video call and share screen -- turns out they were interestingly calling our API via a proxy with cache enabled.

[0] https://formx.ai

[1] https://authgear.com

Bencheng commented on Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative github.com/stack-auth/sta... · Posted by u/n2d4

Bencheng · 2 years ago

Congrats for the launch! We also launched an open sources (Apache 2 licensed) auth0 alternatives with paid hosting / enterprise support as revenue few years ago. Glad to see more efforts to help make software more secure for consumers!

https://github.com/authgear/authgear-server

Bencheng commented on Launch HN: SSOReady (YC W24) – Making SAML SSO painless and open source github.com/ssoready/ssore... · Posted by u/ucarion

ned_at_codomain · 2 years ago

Candidly, we were working on other projects when accepted to YC. We wanted to build data cleaning software with LLMs, before we realized no one really cared about messy data.

Part of the reason we're comfortable with a generous free offering is the basic truth that helping SaaS companies support SAML logins ... just isn't an enormous market. We need to make money on other products anyway.

*Monetizing extra features* pertains to the SAML product that we offer now, but we'll also roll out other products.

The long-term ambition here is that we build a company resembling Auth0, but open source and more developer-friendly.

Bencheng · 2 years ago

> The long-term ambition here is that we build a company resembling Auth0, but open source and more developer-friendly.

I have been working on this for a few years at github.com/authgear, and last few weeks were busy rolling out SAML support for a few Enterprise customers want it by Sep…

Magically feels connected here :)