Mike Bifulco: Hi friends.
Welcome back to API.
As you won't hate, this is Mike, your co.
For this episode, I'm chatting with Gil , who is the co-founder of merge.
Him and I had a great time talking about what he's been building with his team
at merge, what it's like to grow an API centric product to the challenges
inherent in that some of the really cool learnings that his team has come
across when they've been building their product and what it's like to
grow an API centric product especially one that was born during the pandemic.
I know it was a great discussion.
I hope you enjoy it.
Please check out the interview, send me any feedback you've got at Reverend Mike
on Twitter or at API and you won't hate.
For our next episode, I believe we'll be back with Phil and Matt
and myself, chatting about APIs and catching up on some of the news
and latest goings on in the world
in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this interview with Gil.
It was a fantastic discussion and really think he's on something exciting there.
Love to see people in the API universe, building interesting
products and sort of pushing the limits of what's been done before.
And especially when it makes all of our lives easier products like that,
really trying to sing their own tune.
Yeah.
And so before we get off to the interview here's a quick message from our sponsors.
Thanks so much for listening and I hope you enjoyed the interview.
All right.
And I'm here with Gil five from merge, Gail.
How are you doing today?
Gil Feig: I'm great.
How are you doing?
Mike Bifulco: I'm doing really good.
Thanks.
Yeah.
So I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us or wanted to talk a little
bit about you and merging your story and how all that applies to API APIs and
the, the world you're kind of living in.
And so maybe we can start with, a bit about yourself your background, perhaps,
and how you got to where you are today.
Gil Feig: Yeah, absolutely.
So I'm Gil.
I am a software engineer through and through.
I've been been, so since I was pretty young, I had a computer in my room
and started coding, but got serious about it in college, made her majored
in computer science and graduated and went straight into software.
So I worked at LinkedIn for a few years.
Then Wealthfront.
And then finally I joined a startup called canvas now called
untapped, which is recruiting.
And while I was there had to build a ton of integrations with
different applicant tracking systems.
And it was one after the next, it was an insane amount of work.
We first built greenhouse then lever.
Then we had to build Workday and in order to close new customers, we had to build
the ATS is that they were using because we needed to be able to interact with
whatever data they had on their end.
And my co-founder who I, who I actually met way back in college.
At the same time she had gone into finance for a while, ended
up at a startup as chief of staff.
And there, she was building out a lot of different integrations
with ticketing systems and they ran into the exact same problem.
They had to build it every single integration with every single
ticketing system, depending on what their customer was on.
So we noticed this, this very joint problem.
B2B companies when they want to integrate with other platforms,
they have to integrate with all the competitors that that space.
And that's ultimately how we came upon the idea of merge, where we build unified
API APIs or one API to integrate with all the competitors in, in each vertical.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, Got it.
Okay.
So it sounds like you were living through the pain of something like
many startup founders do and kind of saw that pain as an opportunity.
So how long ago was that?
When, when did you found merge?
Gil Feig: Yeah, we started murders right at the beginning of the pandemic.
So it was around June of 2020.
Wow.
Yeah, dove right into the deep end.
Huh?
Mike Bifulco: We did we, I mean, what better time?
The opportunity costs of starting a company then was you either
sit there in your room and do nothing or you start a company.
So.
Gil Feig: Yeah.
Okay.
So.
That, that's how you got to merge.
And you kind of said it already, but what's maybe the value proposition
or the elevator pitch for why someone would want to use merge.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, absolutely.
So when, when you're starting a company and you know, you, you know that you
need to be data rich, I would say most startups, these days have some sort of
data that they need to interact with.
And, and even existing companies, large companies we sell to as.
Basically come up with these product ideas.
Like we want to build X, Y, and Z, but we need to pull in our
customer's data from their HR system.
Let's say we need to pull up all of their employees and we need to
pull in all of their job titles.
For example, the, the current approach is all right, well, we need to go ask
our customers, which HR platforms.
We're going to stack rank them based on maybe contract value, maybe which
one the most customers are using.
And we'll just start tackling them one by one in that order.
But building them out is not just a simple fee, right?
It could take three to six months to build out one integration.
Then you have three to six months of long tail follow-ups and fixes, as
your devs are finding edge cases or things you just couldn't have predicted
because you have customers who have set up their HR system in some custom way
that affects how the API returns data.
So you're basically assigning, you know, multiple.
Six months or more, plus you have your support teams involved.
It's just a whole company, problem, partnerships, everything.
So instead you can either do that go one by one or instead you can choose
marriage integrate just once with us, we offer for one of our categories, HR
and payroll, we offer 35 integrations and we're constantly adding new ones.
Once you build that out, once you don't have to do any extra work,
ask, merge to build one out, if one's missing and we'll do it.
And it's just available to your.
Gil Feig: Sure.
Yeah.
So that, that seems like a pretty easy call, right?
When the alternative is go ask one of your developers to become an expert
on someone else's product for a little while or long enough to be dangerous,
or maybe not even an expert, but to just go try their best to figure it out.
And then maybe not have the time later on to go keep up with changes.
Oh, when things break to go and update the, the implementation and
have to worry about those details.
So you mentioned one of your, your.
verticals and it sounds like you've got a few verticals that merged focuses on.
Can you, can you talk a little bit about those and maybe how you chose them?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
Sure.
So we first started with recruiting, which is ATS or applicant tracking
systems and HR and payroll.
Those were our two categories that, that kind of launched HR and
payroll kind of being one joint one.
So it's HR payroll, and then ATS, the reason we chose those.
We were familiar with ATS.
It's something I had built out extensively before ATS also comes
with a lot of customizability and a lot of variation between platforms.
So it was a good way for us to just start out building a really robust
system that we knew would extend to simpler verticals in the future.
So it was I would say it was a bit bold to start with, but ultimately it's proven
to be really great because we've been able to expand very quickly after that.
So after that we launched accounting.
So those are ERP systems, things like.
NetSuite and QuickBooks.
And then after that we did ticketing.
So JIRA sauna, that's a mix of ticketing system.
So JIRA, sauna, Trello, those sorts of things, but then also help desk.
And then we also have a new one.
We just launched was just CRM.
So Salesforce hubs.
Gil Feig: Yeah.
Wow.
All things that are in their own way, very, very customizable and a
pretty significant problem to approach from a development standpoint.
I think maybe the only way you could have taken a harder route in would
have been to start with something like electric health records.
But it sounds like you went with a good challenge to start, and
it's cool to see that you've found some traction and whatnot.
So for the API, you won't hate audience.
One of the questions that I like to ask, because people invariably want to
know is can you tell us a little bit about what you built and merge with?
Maybe languages, architecture approaches, things like that.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, absolutely.
So I think for us choice of stack was, was more about speed to market.
How quickly can we move?
What is something that a lot of people are going to know coming in or
something that people can easily learn as opposed to going for something that
is the most optimized, fast language?
So naturally we chose Python, which I think as we grow now, it is a bit
of a slow language, but again, it lets us move incredibly quickly.
We've adapted, we use a Django backend and we've added typing since.
So, you know, we, we run into fewer issues there.
Then on the front end, we're we're fully react.
We have a pretty complex front end.
I would say it's actually surprisingly for an API based startup, we probably
have a more complex front end than most even non API based startups.
So yeah, that's, that's sort of our most common.
Gil Feig: Yeah.
Got it.
And So on the other side of that, for your customers who are consuming services
through merge, it looks like you ship a few different client libraries and,
and a couple of different languages.
Which of those do you support them?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
So what we did early on was was basically, we need to be able
to move incredibly quickly.
Everything we've done is about how much we can automate.
And so we're using open API for our APIs to document them.
I'm sure most listeners here know this, but a sort of similar to
swagger or any model Jen that you have at had a lot of bigger
companies where they build in house.
But we use open API.
Our open API spec itself is auto-generated using something called Django spectacular.
So it looks at our end points themselves, and then it generates our spec.
And then our spec is used by we, we sponsor and we use open API general.
Which can generate the client libraries or the SDKs.
They're not perfect.
Always, I would say.
And so we we've started to fork those templates a bit to customize
them and support some of the things that we need, but overall
it's helped us move incredibly.
Gil Feig: Sure.
Yeah.
That's probably the sign of a growing organization that has, has you know,
multi-variable requirements to fulfill.
But also one of those things where suddenly you don't have to go hire a
Python developer and a Ruby developer and a Java guy and somebody who can
do C plus plus and all these other things for people who want to consume
in every flavor under the sun open API is a good way to scale that stuff out.
That's really cool.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, it's been great.
And I think, you know, there's, there's obviously some, some elements of it.
Like when, when you stretch open API to its max, or when you stretch in general,
like the rest spec to its max, for example, we support the expand parameter,
which is a common rest, you know, sort of thing where, where we have certain
foreign keys relations that come back as.
But if in the request to our API, you say expand, and then that field name, it
comes back as a fully unwrapped object, as opposed to the ID the generators
being able to in the SDK say the type of this is either a string or an object,
depending on how that request went out.
They're not so great for that.
So those are some of the things we've had to adapt.
We run into a lot of issues as you get more advanced.
Gil Feig: sure.
Yeah.
I'd imagine as you get clients using your tools that are running
more sophisticated organizations, they want more of those things too.
And you kind of stress test those those, you know, little edge cases of the API to.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, exactly.
But when you have, you know, when you have 12 different languages
across five different API APIs, that 60 repos, it can be pretty hard to
stay on top of with a lean dev team.
So.
Gil Feig: Yeah, Yeah.
To that end.
How, how big is your team right now?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
So we are currently a total of 40 people.
We have about 12 engineers full time, and then we have five people
focused fully on building new integrations, using sort of a lot of
the internal tooling that we've built.
Gil Feig: Yeah, got it.
Got it.
so okay.
That's, that's actually a pretty sizable team and it makes sense.
Given the number of integrations you've got, like, I'd imagine you'd have to
have a pretty, pretty solid standing army to just to build out new integrations,
let alone keeping up with the old ones.
When we're talking about the services that you integrate with, I know you
mentioned that you started with sort of the applicant tracking stuff first.
How did you prioritize the, even the first API that you chose to integrate with
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, so we, we totally focus on market share here.
We, we can obviously try to build ones that we want to build, but the
most important is what people want.
So with ATS, there's.
Certain, I would say like looking at different market sectors,
there's there's dominant platform.
So in ATS you have greenhouse and lever that are really
common among tech companies.
But then we start selling to tech companies, right?
So we might sell to a company that helps you analyze that the diversity
of your recruitment funnel and that company is selling to companies we've
never heard of, you know, so maybe some oil company in Texas, or maybe they're
selling to taco bell of kid of Ohio.
Right, right.
You're now integrating with, with, you know, greenhouse and lever
are relevant to those people.
It's, it's Oracle Taleo, it's SAP's recruitment platforms.
And so we've really had to sort of focus on what our customers are asking
for that being said, building new integrations doesn't slow us down
because we spent our first six to eight months building out that infrastructure
to be able to build new integrations.
So it's more actually the sort of maintenance or dealing with edge cases,
as opposed to the initial build out.
That takes much time.
Gil Feig: Yeah.
Okay.
You said something earlier that, that I kind of grazed over pretty
quickly, but it's, it may be very interesting thing about the way it
sounds like you run the company.
How are you discovering what your customer is?
How, how are you picking those next integrations?
Like, is there a strategy for asking for feedback on those things or is it
something you're discovering through maybe the sales process or, or I don't know,
help desk ticketing, something like that.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, absolutely.
So essentially with all of our, all over our marketing pages, our landing page.
We show which integrations we support.
And whenever we do, there's always a button next to them that says
request new integration on top of that on our two premium plans or
two plans that people are committing to annually, we include building
new integrations at no extra cost.
So we just say, get us an API key from a customer or a, you know,
a sandbox key from a customer.
We're happy to go build that out on your behalf.
And so people can sign with merge knowing that any platform that they need, as long
as that bot form has an API, it's going to be supported and basically say mergers.
Now our integrations team offloaded.
Gil Feig: Yeah, that's ambitious.
That is quite the strategy.
That's very cool.
Do you ever find, you're asked to integrate with something that
is just not ready for the kind of integration you're looking for?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
So there's, there's a few different cases that happens in number one
is they don't have an API there there's a lot of value in that.
And we do have some ways of like, all right, we can try to integrate
with reports as a service.
And we, we do support doing that, but some really don't have an API.
And if there's something that no one's really requesting, we're just
not gonna, we're not gonna do it.
Other ones we've been asked to actually help customers or help
companies design their APIs.
So we'll have, we'll have a customer who's pioneering, let's
say some new HR platform or some.
Relatively new HR platform.
And they're hounding that HR platform saying, get, we need an API.
We want to pull our data out.
That HR platform, sometimes they'll connect them to us and
we'll help them design and figure out what it should look like.
And then lastly, you do have ones that are missing core functionality.
So we also work with platforms on that.
We integrated with an ATS.
Not to name names, but we, we didn't agree with one recently that exposed a lot of
data, but was missing just key candidate and application data and pulling jobs is
interesting, but most companies need to know who's actually applying for the jobs.
So working with them to add that from.
Gil Feig: Yeah, I don't really cool.
Do you provide a backlog of, of integrators that you're
hoping to implement next?
Mike Bifulco: We do, but it's really funny.
I know, I know it sounds a little hard to believe, but in general,
our backlog is not new integrations.
It's functionality.
We are, we have 12 engineers and they're not even building integrations, right?
That's our, that's our platform team.
And they're just incredibly fast.
We've gotten to the point where we can build most new integrations
unless we're heading something crazy.
Most new integrations in a matter of a couple of hours, a record of
my, my co-founder actually built three integrations in a day once.
The biggest part for us is, is passing them off to our QA team.
They take a couple of weeks to really, really test them out.
Gil Feig: Sure that for off the cuff, having never really done this myself,
that sounds pretty mindblowing.
I would expect a scale of, I don't know, at least a month, a two to a
couple of months for the integration in QA and then release kind of thing.
So it sounds like you're moving really fast and able to work with, I mean, loads
and loads of providers for good reason.
You, you must have a really good process for doing that.
That's that's very cool.
That's super impressive.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we like to say we've seen it all at this point.
I eat like 15 different types of auth.
We've seen people implement ooff, you know, oh, up to like 12 different
ways we found security vulnerabilities and how people implement it.
So our tooling is basically.
If the company, you know, we have, we have a pretty guided, I would
say process to help people on board.
And it's like, what is the name of the field that the access token comes in?
If the company does not abide by the spec and they call it something
else, enter that field name here.
So it's really guided.
It's really adaptable and kind of just helps us move really fast.
Gil Feig: Sure.
Yeah.
Built from all the little scars and pain points you've experienced in the past.
No doubt.
Mike Bifulco: Yep.
Gil Feig: Yeah.
Cool.
So let's talk a little bit about API APIs.
In general, I'm interested in your thoughts on since you, your company has
integrated with and consume so many API APIs what to you makes up a good API one.
That's good for developers to work with.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
I think thinking about.
First of all just being consumer first, thinking about what applications there
are people going to use your API for and creating good access patterns
around that data is, is really critical.
Anything to avoid people having to make a ton of API requests you make end queries.
And of course, obviously I think, I think before any of this actually
comes just really great documentation.
Yeah.
You know, there are preferences around using coauthor versus using other
offers is security of, of those.
And there, there are merits each of them, but if it's not documented.
I, yeah.
And, and I can tell you from our team, who's built hundreds of integrations.
At this point.
We don't really have a preference for what type of author you're using.
One might be a bit more of a pain to implement, but if we can't figure
it out by immediately looking at your dogs, that's, what's the really
annoying part having to get in touch with your team and try to have, have
that team, you know, figure it all out.
So yeah.
Documentations number one.
Gil Feig: Sure.
Yeah, Often the special sauce when you're implementing with anything
is kind of being able to read and understand what you're looking at.
And honestly, frankly, kind of an overlooked career path too, right?
Like really, really good technical writers who understand the problems
that are being solved and can eloquently describe what's going on.
And also accurately is it really, really special when you're working with an API.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, it's true.
And it's so it's like great technical writing is really important.
The other one is just the story or the journey of your docs.
You know, it's, it's really underrated and people aren't thinking about the
path that developer's taking there, but if, how you, if, if the method of
authentication is the last thing in your.
You know, you're, you're kind of guiding someone of path pathway having
to click all around and go all over.
So for us, we actually have our designer and, you know, I would say
our product team really dedicated to understanding the journey of our
customers within our documentation.
We treat that as a product really intensely now to the point where, you
know, we, we think of user stories and we say, all right, well, they can do this.
It's a really complicated action.
So we need them to be able to find this, this detailed doc along
their journey at the right time.
But only if they need it, otherwise we don't.
Slam to which information wants.
So we think really deeply about that journey that the developers.
Gil Feig: sure.
Yeah.
I, I lack of sufficient term to describe this, but almost the user experience.
Learning how to build with something is underappreciated
in the industry in general.
There's definitely companies, organizations with huge budgets who can go
And spin up a UX researcher just to work on docs, but that's often not the case.
And so you really just need engineers or technical writers with a lot of love
and care and patience for going and rewriting and, you know, experiencing the
journey and watching other people do it.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
And it's funny because companies are willing to invest big bucks in
optimizing copy on their landing page.
Just not people from, from bouncing.
But what about stopping developers from bouncing as they go through your docs?
Gil Feig: Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
We, we sometimes fund the wrong things at the wrong time, I think.
So okay.
I'm interested in any challenges that you've faced in sort of
building this unifying API service.
Is there something that stands out to you along the way that
you, that you've taken away?
Um,
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
So I think you can, of course look at all the differences in
authentication and pagination and, you know, rate limits and all of that.
They're solvable, right?
You just build things around them.
I think what is hard is what we describe as the mixed functionality
problem, which is that ultimately we can't define one, the functionality of
the platforms that we integrate with and two, what their API is exposed.
And so, and a lot of ways when you're building a unified API, or when you're
saying we want to build integrations with, let's say HR platforms, and it's important
to us to pull in everyone's title so that we can show that in this spot, on our
site, You know, ultimately our customers are like, we want that for all platforms,
but if a platform doesn't support it, we have to be able to tell our customer
like, Hey, that that's not possible.
And I would say that's been a really big challenge for us.
It's actually becoming better as we be, as we grow in the market, we have
a bit more sway with API providers asking them to add more data.
But ultimately again, if a doesn't support it, they don't support it.
And so building a unified API that perfectly claims to
normalize all data is tough.
When some firms just don't have certain data and some platforms have way more.
Gil Feig: Sure.
Yeah.
Are you finding that you need to demonstrate to people who end up buying
your services that they're getting ROI, or is it something that is kind of proving
itself once they get into implementation?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
I mean, I think first of all, for us, we only add value.
What merged does is revenue generating.
First of all right, you, you need certain integrations.
You don't have the capacity to develop them out.
You need those because you need to support customers who are on them.
So by having merged, you're able to close those new customers.
And then on top of that, you're saving developer time.
So it's revenue generating and it's costing.
It's, two-fold people come into our sales calls and they're, they, they get it.
They know what they're buying into before they even get on that call.
It's, it's pretty exciting.
I would say our AEs, our, our, our salespeople who have been at multiple
companies before ours that are, that are doing not similar things, but other,
you know, sort of like maybe API bays or other tech companies have described
marriage as just the easiest product to sell when they get on a call with someone,
because everybody just understands it and viscerally, grasps the pain.
So.
Gil Feig: Yeah.
That's a perfectly into my next question of how do you know in general, if you're
building something that people want.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
I mean, I think for us, it was a bit easier because Shamsi, my co-founder
and I both came from backgrounds.
We would have used those.
Right.
And so, so there was a little bit of bias of us coming into this
being like, all right, well, we both needed this and we both wanted this.
And so we, we also spent about six months before we started the company
talking to, we talked to over a hundred different startups in, in
a bunch of different verticals.
So we were like, all right, well, we don't want to just be
biased because we know this is a problem in recruiting and tickets.
We want to tackle everything.
So let's, let's ask.
So we talked to companies that needed HR integrations.
We talked to companies that needed marketing automation and CRM and
ticketing, just so many different things.
And with that every single time we got on a call, we were just like, if something
like this existed, would you use it?
Absolutely.
How much would you be willing to pay?
Honestly, anything we pay a team of five developers.
It costs us a million dollars a year, anything to take away the pain.
We even, even sometimes would flip it and we would just say like,
how are you doing it internally?
And they'd be like, well, essentially we have this one service that integrates
with all the different platforms and translates it to a common language.
And we're like, okay, well you've essentially built merge internally.
So it was either, they said they needed it or they had done it.
Gil Feig: yeah, sure.
Along those lines then when you're when you were first starting out, so you
talked to a hundred customers, you spent six months kind of researching things.
Did those 100 startups?
Sorry.
Did they end up being your sort of first customers or was there
something else you had to do to kind of get the word out there?
That merge was open for business?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, they, they definitely, I would say a good
number of them did for sure.
And we actually still have close them.
I think we, we fully remember it.
My co-founder tweeted about this recently, but there were three out of those hundred
that were, were very discouraging.
That's always going to happen, but we're like, this is a terrible idea.
Don't do it.
And I think it was as of like two months ago, all three are
now signed customers emerged.
So very, very validating.
And then that felt.
Gil Feig: Yeah, that's amazing.
I hope you pop the champagne or had a nice lunch that day.
Something like that.
That's really.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, it was really exciting.
Gil Feig: For a follow on to that is how has your strategy
for acquisition of new customers changed since your initial launch?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
So, so we still continue to do a bit of outbound.
We're more inbound and outbound though.
Word of mouth is a big one.
I would say we're hearing about, you know, a lot of our customers are coming
in now saying, oh, we heard that, that, you know, this company is using.
We have to a lot of competitors thinking about how their competitors are building
and, and, you know, wanting to get a leg up or wanting to at least have
the same advantage that they have.
Those, those are a couple, we are really big on SEO.
So you do things like search for, you know, any platform that we
integrate with search for that name, plus API on Google, we tend to rank.
So we're, we're really trying to follow the developer's journey, which in that
case is, you know, their CEO is going to them saying, Hey, all of our customers
are asking for Workday API integration.
But in general, if you, if you need a work day integration, you need just
works in bamboo HR and, you know, Gusto and namely and all the other ones.
And so when you, when you click on it, you land on marriage.
It says, get a, get a Workday integration, but also get all
of these other ones sign up now.
And that's sorta how we're acquiring.
Gil Feig: Yeah, Cool.
That's really cool.
It's it's you've built a lot of momentum inherently in the process here.
Let's say tomorrow you were starting from scratch again and you were
gonna build a new API first company, whether it was merged or something
else that was sort of APIs at its core
what are the things you would do first?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, it's interesting.
I want to say, like, I would choose a more, more performant language, but I
actually don't cause, cause the fact of the matter is we constantly had to just
pivot and change how we were building and you know, doing Django and Python at
Elta enabled us to move incredibly quick.
We've been able to really scale with that.
So I wouldn't change, you know, choice of language or any technologies.
I think one thing that we might might've done is just do a bigger sort of survey
of the landscape, more research across APIs and understand what the variability
looks like, because along the way, we've enforced it just tack on things
like, you know, I kind of mentioned that earlier, but if they don't call
this field the correct thing, then what, what, you know, do they get.
But if we had just really gone and looked at a hundred API APIs and spent the
time we could have, we could have really planned out, like, all right, here's a
robust system, rather than having all these flags that we have to deprecate
and be like, does the platform do this?
Doesn't apart from, and now the flags are kind of confusing.
We've we've done some work to clean that up, but you know, again, I
think doing a bigger survey, the landscape would have gone on.
Gil Feig: Sure.
Yeah, For whatever it's worth from where I'm sitting, that sounds like
a great optimistic task and also something that would require you
to become an expert on a hundred new APIs which takes a lot of time.
And you may never have been able to get things off the ground, you know?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, it's true.
It's a balance.
And yeah, I say that now, going back when we were sitting there with no product,
just sit there and spend potentially two months going through a hundred
APS and deeply understanding our off.
Probably not.
So maybe getting an expert, someone who's built a hundred
integrations, but that's also tough.
Right?
Who's done that.
I mean, I had, I had already built several and I think we still,
we still just constantly see new things that we haven't seen before.
Gil Feig: Sure.
Sure.
Yeah.
Oh, that's all very interesting.
You you've had quite the journey kind of from gosh, 2020.
I mean it's two and a half years or whatever, something like
that to this 0.2 years, roughly.
That's.
That's a lot of first of all, a lot of implementation, but also a lot
of lessons learned that it sounds like you're speaking from some
really good experience and have built a really fascinating product.
What, what haven't I asked you about merge that I should have asked.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
I mean, I think, I think one thing that we find really interesting is
just how people actually use versus what the customer use cases are.
They've been, they've been really exciting for us.
I'm happy to dive into that a little bit, but I would say they they're very varied
and I'm glad we went in with this mindset of, you know, we want to provide the data.
We don't want to provide any.
Information on top of it.
Like let's say you're building a diversity recruiting platform and
you want to help people analyze the diversity of the candidates
throughout your recruiting funnel.
We didn't, we didn't focus on that use case necessarily when we
were building, we more said, let's give companies the data there.
Maximize the amount of data that's normalized and return from our API
APIs and all the tools that developers need to be able to pull it efficiently
and do what they want with it.
Let's not try to be experts in data analytics or insights
or anything on top of it.
And so because of that, we've had some really, really cool use cases on top.
And so a good example would be, you know, a lot of credit card companies
like ramp and you know, some other big ones that, that, you know, you've
probably heard of that, that startups are using to power employee credit cards.
They, they use us for one really cool.
One is a lot of employees are remote these days by companies
still want to give a lunch stipend, give $25 a day to all engineers.
For a lunch if you're within the engineering org, but if you're
in the partnerships org, you get $200 a week for travel and meals.
Cause you might want to take out a client or something, you know,
along there to take out a partner.
And so what, what ramp does is they offer integrations with 35 different
HR platforms because they don't know which HR platform their customers on.
So they're using merge.
Of course now a ramp costs were, can just log in, connect their HR
system and then say, all right, we see these teams coming in from merge.
Which team, and now give them a budget and give them, you know, sort of
spending categories and employee joins.
They, we automatically send ramp a web hook to say, Hey, an employee just joined.
This is their department.
Here's their address?
Here's everything ramp allocate to credit card and automatically just
mails it to them with all the categories that that's one great use case.
Another, another really cool one.
And then I'll stop.
There is, is cybersecurity.
So a lot of these soft to automation platforms that are
becoming popular, vantage drugs.
That that helped you make sure that you're in compliance.
They use us to monitor employees.
Are they contractors or full-time.
And with that, they're able to make sure that if someone gets terminated,
for example, was there access, revoked from all other services within 24 hours?
So many different use cases.
I've only gotten into a couple and those are just within our
HR API, but it's been really.
Gil Feig: Yeah, those are really creative and they, they provide some special,
like magical solutions to modern problems too, that you definitely need to tie
into lots of things for it to make sense, to even try something like that.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, absolutely.
And what's interesting also is just that, that nowadays as, as a consumer, you
expect everything to be integrated deeply.
Like when when, when you're buying a platform and they're like, all
right, well, whenever someone joins come add them and invite them here,
or, you know, whenever someone does.
Whenever you close a sale, go out in Salesforce, but also
go add it in our platform.
No one wants to do that anymore.
And no one expects.
Everyone expects that your systems are.
Gil Feig: Yeah.
Yeah what about other verticals?
So are there other other verticals that you're dying to get into,
or that are interesting to merge?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, we do have other verticals for sure.
And we can build very quickly.
What's important to us is that our customers have a great experience.
So since we're B2B, we're actually B2B to be all of our customers also
sell to businesses, of course, right.
Because these are B2B tools we're integrating with.
And so it's, it's really important to us to give them a good experience because
their customers are probably paying them.
Yeah.
Anywhere from 10 to several hundred thousand dollars a year
for that, for that service.
And that means it has to be great.
And so we do spend a lot of time on follow-up making sure that
the use cases are supported and that the data is high quality.
But we do have a bunch of other verticals we want to move into.
We're, we're, we're not publicly disclosing get which ones, but
there's some really cool ones and, and they definitely need unification.
But what we do is.
Analyzed demand.
Look at what our existing customers want versus what new customers want.
Look at, you know, where VCs investing, what are emerging markets.
There's so many different factors that go into it.
Also, how fragmented is a market?
If there's one player that's dominant, what's the power of a unified API.
Gil Feig: Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
I figured you might not be able to share kind of what's coming,
but it couldn't hurt to ask there.
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, I think there are some good ones and some ones that developers
especially will be really excited about.
Gil Feig: Yeah, Cool.
Cool.
Well, we'll have to keep an eye out for news.
And along those lines if our listeners developers are interested
in following merge and keeping an eye on merger, trying out merge for
their product where should they go?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, absolutely.
So a merge is it's free to sign up and just get started.
You can, you can go to merge.dev dev.
There we have, you know, really good guides to get you
started to help you dive in.
And you can start with any of our categories.
It's you get a hundred dollars a month for free.
So it's really easy to just have.
Gil Feig: Yeah.
got it.
Are there interesting sort of first integrations they can try?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
So a lot of our integrations, we actually listed there, but a lot of our
integrations have free trials listed.
So like bamboo HR is a great example.
If you, if you go in and just sort of look at a bunch of the platforms
there, you can just click on them and we provide links to the free trials or
instructions on how to get a demo account.
And then also, you know, again, since, since you know, any listener who'd be
interested, likely works at a B2B company.
You can also test with adding your company's zones.
Gil Feig: Yeah.
Cool.
So there's, there's a value prop in itself of just being able to
get in and try sort of the whole full fledged thing with free tools.
That's really interesting and I'm sure lots of the folks that will be
listening to this podcast are more on the, Hey, we need to integrate
with this side of things as well.
What sort of things are you interested in hearing feedback on from our audio?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, we, we would love to hear, you know, we
are a developer first company.
We think that's why, you know, we're, we're winning among developers is, is
everything we do is focused on deaths.
So we want to hear about the experience we want to hear about onboarding was
anything confusing in the journey.
We want it to be as clear and as simple as possible.
We're developers building for developers.
We feel fortunate that we can almost be product managers of our own products,
because we understand what we're building.
But that being said, you can be, you know, sometimes caught up in, in the internals
of something and take for granted that you have some inside knowledge.
And so we just want, we would love feedback on what the journey is like,
what the onboarding journeys like and then any additional features
and things people are looking for.
Gil Feig: Yeah, you'll, you'll be surprised to hear that
our audience is not shy about sharing their thoughts on things.
So hopefully you get some good feedback there.
What about hiring?
Are you hiring for.
any roles right now?
Mike Bifulco: We are absolutely hiring.
We are hiring for virtually every role across the board.
We have grown incredibly fast.
We went from zero to 1700 customers in under a year.
So we, yeah, so we're really looking to hire we're hiring back end
engineers software back at, sorry, back end front end, full stack.
Definitely across the board there.
And, you know, even, even things like technical solutions, engineers customer
facing things more on sales, and then we're, we're hiring people to build
integrations on our platform team.
So I definitely everywhere in the org and that's ed merged.dev/.
Gil Feig: Cool.
And just for sake of completeness, cause I know someone will ask me,
are you hiring remotely or you're hiring just in a specific location.
How does that work?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah.
So we're, we are in person we're in New York and San Francisco and both
offices are where we're open to.
We were remote flexible.
I would say we, we, you know, we like to say we're kind of pre COVID, you
know, your packages are, you want to work remotely for a week here and there.
Totally fine.
But in general, we are in.
Gil Feig: Gotcha.
Cool.
Okay.
So that's a bit about merge.
How can our listeners find you if they want to get in touch with you?
Mike Bifulco: Yeah, absolutely.
So you can feel free to email me gil@merged.dev dev.
Follow me on Twitter, Gil FEI, G Gill fag or, you know, also send me a LinkedIn.
Gil Feig: Heck.
Yeah, I will stick all of the relevant links and URLs in the show notes
for this and make sure that they're posted when the show goes live here.
It's been really fantastic talking to you.
I appreciate you coming and spending some time with me and sharing
about your product experience.
Yeah.
Thanks for your time.
It was great chatting.
Mike Bifulco: Thank you so much for having me