WEBVTT NOTE This file was generated by Descript 00:00:00.853 --> 00:00:02.983 Mike Bifulco: Hello friends, and welcome back to APIs you won't hate. 00:00:03.043 --> 00:00:06.313 My name is Mike Biko, API developer, consumer sufferer 00:00:06.313 --> 00:00:07.513 designer, all of those things. 00:00:07.823 --> 00:00:11.003 And coincidentally also hosted the show for quite a while now. 00:00:11.033 --> 00:00:14.673 I am excited to be sitting down today and chatting with a new friend to 00:00:14.673 --> 00:00:17.583 talk about a product that is very relevant to lots of API developers. 00:00:17.663 --> 00:00:18.413 If you have built. 00:00:18.613 --> 00:00:23.323 A tool or product or service that relies on lots of APIs, you've probably also 00:00:23.323 --> 00:00:28.493 incurred spend and cost and you know, sent dollars across the wire having to do with 00:00:28.493 --> 00:00:30.353 using other people's service services. 00:00:30.753 --> 00:00:34.653 Like me, you've probably also heard nightmarish tales of people accidentally 00:00:34.653 --> 00:00:37.993 taking advantage of too much of a service and ending up with a, you 00:00:37.993 --> 00:00:42.473 know, $20,000 spend accidentally month over month because of a runaway. 00:00:42.518 --> 00:00:44.348 You know, for a loop or something like that. 00:00:44.558 --> 00:00:47.898 And so I believe get into answering some of the questions and some of 00:00:47.898 --> 00:00:49.188 this sort of neck of the woods. 00:00:49.238 --> 00:00:52.938 Chatting with my new friend Alex Clarkfield who's founder of Super Good ai. 00:00:52.998 --> 00:00:54.498 Alex, thanks so much for joining me today. 00:00:54.498 --> 00:00:55.608 I really appreciate you being here. 00:00:55.608 --> 00:00:56.088 How are you doing? 00:00:56.683 --> 00:00:57.223 Alex Klarfeld: I am doing well. 00:00:57.223 --> 00:00:58.063 Thanks for having me. 00:00:58.813 --> 00:00:58.877 I'm excited to be here. 00:00:59.563 --> 00:01:00.313 Mike Bifulco: Yeah, of course. 00:01:00.313 --> 00:01:02.053 I'm really, really glad you're here as well. 00:01:02.133 --> 00:01:05.403 I, I think I hinted pretty strongly at super good and what you're doing. 00:01:05.403 --> 00:01:07.923 Why don't we start with the elevator pitch of super good and I'll work 00:01:07.923 --> 00:01:09.853 back through your story from there. 00:01:09.853 --> 00:01:12.763 But yeah, tell, tell me the 32nd pitch for what super good looks like. 00:01:12.763 --> 00:01:12.853 I. 00:01:13.448 --> 00:01:14.138 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, for sure. 00:01:14.138 --> 00:01:15.008 It's pretty simple. 00:01:15.058 --> 00:01:17.698 So it's a couple lines of code you drop into your code base and we 00:01:17.698 --> 00:01:21.118 automatically monitor the cost and performance of your third party APIs. 00:01:21.628 --> 00:01:22.798 That's it in a nutshell. 00:01:23.048 --> 00:01:25.598 The performance and cost piece, you can go into like a rabbit hole 00:01:25.598 --> 00:01:27.158 of like exactly what that means. 00:01:27.158 --> 00:01:31.028 I'm sure listeners of this podcast, like horror stories are popping into their 00:01:31.028 --> 00:01:35.438 heads right away when they talk about like APIs failing or causing problems 00:01:35.438 --> 00:01:38.948 and taking down parts of the business, causing executives to freak out over. 00:01:39.223 --> 00:01:40.633 Insane invoices. 00:01:40.913 --> 00:01:42.653 But those are all the problems we're looking to solve. 00:01:43.433 --> 00:01:43.853 Mike Bifulco: Yeah. 00:01:43.913 --> 00:01:44.333 Got it. 00:01:44.483 --> 00:01:46.313 Well, you've certainly come to the right place. 00:01:46.343 --> 00:01:49.853 I am definitely one of those people who uses a lot of APIs that are 00:01:49.853 --> 00:01:53.353 sort of spend per usage or at least on some monthly cost based on. 00:01:54.303 --> 00:01:55.233 You know, capped use. 00:01:55.293 --> 00:01:57.273 And I think lots of the folks who listen to this show will be 00:01:57.273 --> 00:01:58.473 really interested in that as well. 00:01:58.743 --> 00:02:01.803 I also should add that many of the folks who listen to the show are 00:02:01.803 --> 00:02:04.863 also builders of API based products and would probably be interested in 00:02:04.863 --> 00:02:08.623 what you have to say about offering spend management tools to people and 00:02:08.623 --> 00:02:12.293 creating user experience, end user experience for the people being billed. 00:02:12.293 --> 00:02:15.083 That is, I dunno, the most ideal perhaps. 00:02:15.133 --> 00:02:17.203 Before we get into that, I would really like to hear about 00:02:17.203 --> 00:02:18.733 your story before Super good. 00:02:18.733 --> 00:02:21.493 So can you tell me a little bit about you before this and kind of how you got here? 00:02:22.053 --> 00:02:22.713 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, for sure. 00:02:22.903 --> 00:02:27.093 So, so before Super good, I helped found a PropTech FinTech company called 00:02:27.153 --> 00:02:29.783 Divvy Homes divvy really cool mission. 00:02:29.783 --> 00:02:32.603 We were basically trying to help renters transition into homeowners. 00:02:32.783 --> 00:02:34.973 So we take folks who like, maybe they couldn't get a mortgage today. 00:02:35.273 --> 00:02:37.373 We thought they could get one in like a couple years time. 00:02:37.473 --> 00:02:39.033 And then they would pick a house out. 00:02:39.033 --> 00:02:41.228 We would buy it for them, and then they would, live in it. 00:02:41.293 --> 00:02:43.723 And each month, part of their monthly rental payments would 00:02:43.723 --> 00:02:44.623 go towards a down payment. 00:02:45.043 --> 00:02:47.803 And the idea is at the end of this program, they would we'd cash 'em out 00:02:47.803 --> 00:02:49.903 and we'd like help them get FHA mortgage. 00:02:50.213 --> 00:02:51.263 So really cool mission. 00:02:51.513 --> 00:02:54.723 The sort of like nitty gritty inside was we built like an 00:02:54.723 --> 00:02:56.133 end-to-end home buying platform. 00:02:56.403 --> 00:02:59.763 So every part of the home buying process was all in-house software. 00:02:59.983 --> 00:03:02.593 Which, you know, was a lot of my responsibility for building. 00:03:03.133 --> 00:03:05.923 And as you can imagine, we had actually sat down and counted, 00:03:05.923 --> 00:03:07.483 we had like 47 different. 00:03:07.738 --> 00:03:10.228 Third party APIs that we had to integrate with. 00:03:10.568 --> 00:03:16.448 So it was the usual FinTech suspects like Plaid, Experian Equifax, TransUnion 00:03:16.448 --> 00:03:18.428 checker, you know, you name it. 00:03:18.428 --> 00:03:19.718 All the payroll APIs. 00:03:19.988 --> 00:03:22.148 And then there's sort of like a long tail of a bunch of like 00:03:22.148 --> 00:03:23.528 real estate specific ones. 00:03:23.888 --> 00:03:27.308 And, you know, two things would happen, I'm sure a ton of people listening can 00:03:27.308 --> 00:03:30.848 relate to this was, you know, my day job is like building code, trying to build 00:03:30.848 --> 00:03:32.078 the best product for our customers. 00:03:32.288 --> 00:03:34.988 And what felt was like my night job was dealing with vendors so. 00:03:35.918 --> 00:03:38.408 One, like we'd get a bill at the end of the month. 00:03:38.438 --> 00:03:39.668 Not to name names, but I will. 00:03:39.668 --> 00:03:43.868 But like DocuSign would like suddenly say like, Hey, you guys are over and you 00:03:43.868 --> 00:03:46.418 owe us some crazy number of, of overages. 00:03:46.418 --> 00:03:49.178 And we're like, they would send us a graph, I remember very vividly. 00:03:49.178 --> 00:03:50.828 And we're like, how do, how do we not have this graph? 00:03:50.828 --> 00:03:53.588 Like, it's like buried in logs somewhere and it's crazy. 00:03:53.888 --> 00:03:56.948 And the other part would happen is like a developer, these APIs 00:03:56.948 --> 00:04:00.548 would break in really weird ways and it wasn't like outages are 00:04:00.548 --> 00:04:02.348 easy to detect, like it's down. 00:04:03.233 --> 00:04:04.073 What do you do about that? 00:04:04.073 --> 00:04:07.163 But like schema changes were a little bit more nefarious. 00:04:07.163 --> 00:04:10.733 Like the vendor suddenly upgrades their version and everything breaks. 00:04:11.033 --> 00:04:14.633 Another one that like schema changes were like value changes, like enums changing. 00:04:14.993 --> 00:04:15.773 That was pretty bad. 00:04:15.773 --> 00:04:19.433 The other one that was like worse I'd imagine is like data quality issues, 00:04:19.643 --> 00:04:23.553 like all the, the hype that, you know, someone trying to sell you an API 00:04:23.553 --> 00:04:26.823 can give you like you really don't know until you run it in production 00:04:26.823 --> 00:04:28.113 and like against real customers. 00:04:28.293 --> 00:04:30.423 And then once it's in there, you have to like continually analyze to 00:04:30.423 --> 00:04:33.303 make sure like you're paying like a non-zero amount of money to that. 00:04:33.333 --> 00:04:35.313 So better get the most bang for your buck. 00:04:35.583 --> 00:04:38.193 So these were the two problems I kind of ran into as super good was like. 00:04:38.388 --> 00:04:43.188 The sort of data quality, keeping up with like the version of the APIs and 00:04:43.188 --> 00:04:46.128 then they kinda like all boiled down to like the bottom line of our company. 00:04:46.128 --> 00:04:49.038 Like we were running customers through this application flow, hitting a 00:04:49.038 --> 00:04:52.818 gauntlet of APIs and it was just like would make or break our business 00:04:52.818 --> 00:04:55.518 depending on which, like how the API performed and how much it cost. 00:04:56.813 --> 00:04:58.283 Mike Bifulco: Yeah, I think what a lot of. 00:04:58.623 --> 00:05:01.893 People maybe haven't experienced UN until they're sitting at the helm of a 00:05:01.893 --> 00:05:05.443 company is that a lot of your success or failure once you have a product that 00:05:05.443 --> 00:05:10.043 people are buying, is getting down to unit economics and driving each user's 00:05:10.043 --> 00:05:13.973 experience to profit for you and value for them in whatever way that means, 00:05:13.973 --> 00:05:15.083 you know, depending on the company. 00:05:15.263 --> 00:05:16.823 And it's a really hairy problem to solve. 00:05:17.048 --> 00:05:20.738 And every dollar that goes out the door in the, in the name of making your customers 00:05:20.738 --> 00:05:23.048 happy is you know, working against you. 00:05:23.048 --> 00:05:26.708 And effectively in that sort of unit economics game, it's a tricky thing to 00:05:26.708 --> 00:05:29.818 wrap your head around especially if you know, you've, you've spent your days 00:05:29.818 --> 00:05:32.998 studying, say, computer science and worrying more about merge sorts than like. 00:05:33.243 --> 00:05:36.903 The realities of a consumer facing product or even a B2B product for that matter. 00:05:37.383 --> 00:05:41.463 Um, I, I'm curious, I don't know if you mentioned before you built divvy 00:05:41.463 --> 00:05:43.203 homes and before you built super good. 00:05:43.203 --> 00:05:43.923 What was your background? 00:05:43.928 --> 00:05:45.513 Or you come from a prop tech background. 00:05:45.513 --> 00:05:46.703 Are you more on the business side? 00:05:46.703 --> 00:05:48.593 Are you a, a sort of straight up and down developer? 00:05:48.593 --> 00:05:52.433 Like how, how has your, how has your career path shaped where you are now? 00:05:53.093 --> 00:05:53.693 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, for sure. 00:05:53.693 --> 00:05:55.973 So I'm a full stack developer through and through. 00:05:56.073 --> 00:05:58.593 I studied electrical computer engineering in college. 00:05:58.653 --> 00:06:02.283 Like made my way from like embedded software into like web application 00:06:02.283 --> 00:06:06.523 software from the Midwest, moved out to Silicon Valley based on. 00:06:06.803 --> 00:06:09.203 Some, some friends that came out here and just got, kind of got 00:06:09.203 --> 00:06:12.233 fascinated by the ecosystem, but I've always been a full stack developer. 00:06:12.233 --> 00:06:16.163 Sort of a master of none I like to say, but I just love the breadth that 00:06:16.163 --> 00:06:18.913 it, that sort of, sort of gives me and like really being able to like, 00:06:18.913 --> 00:06:20.503 dig into very specific problems. 00:06:20.583 --> 00:06:24.643 I also love product so just combining like the two, two parts 00:06:24.643 --> 00:06:26.173 of like, just like building things. 00:06:26.273 --> 00:06:30.343 I care a lot about the, the what that I'm building more so than a lot of like. 00:06:30.778 --> 00:06:33.328 Much better developers than me care about, like the how. 00:06:33.578 --> 00:06:35.633 So that's, that's, that's kind of me, 00:06:36.598 --> 00:06:37.858 Mike Bifulco: Sounds shockingly familiar. 00:06:38.038 --> 00:06:40.498 I feel, I feel like in a lot of ways I'm looking in a mirror there. 00:06:40.998 --> 00:06:44.118 Can you tell me then about ha have you worked on developer facing 00:06:44.118 --> 00:06:45.318 products before Divvy homes? 00:06:45.318 --> 00:06:48.168 Sounds like it was more consumer facing, but this is really built 00:06:48.228 --> 00:06:50.268 building four developers or dev teams. 00:06:50.358 --> 00:06:51.713 Is this your first time around the block with that? 00:06:52.193 --> 00:06:52.313 I. 00:06:52.813 --> 00:06:52.873 Alex Klarfeld: S. 00:06:53.203 --> 00:06:54.463 P pretty much. 00:06:54.523 --> 00:06:57.533 I had a I worked at a company that was, it was very interesting. 00:06:57.533 --> 00:07:00.293 It was tools for like data engineering teams. 00:07:00.323 --> 00:07:02.703 It was founded by one of the he was founded by the creator 00:07:02.703 --> 00:07:04.513 of Postgres Mike Stone Breaker. 00:07:04.733 --> 00:07:08.893 So we were building for fortune 500 companies basically, and like 00:07:08.893 --> 00:07:10.183 the development teams in there. 00:07:10.433 --> 00:07:11.273 So that was an experience. 00:07:11.273 --> 00:07:14.933 And then at Divvy we were like, we had a very cool consumer facing application. 00:07:15.483 --> 00:07:18.123 But the, like, the sort of like iceberg below, it was 00:07:18.123 --> 00:07:19.623 building for ops teams actually. 00:07:19.683 --> 00:07:22.203 'cause we had like an operations, like it was a, it was like 00:07:22.203 --> 00:07:23.933 software powered ops company. 00:07:24.243 --> 00:07:27.363 So no developers specifically, but I'm familiar with like working 00:07:27.363 --> 00:07:29.073 with like the in-house folks. 00:07:29.123 --> 00:07:31.223 Those were usually the people I had to work with when I was like 00:07:31.223 --> 00:07:34.823 dealing with API issues because it was typically like an ops person 00:07:34.823 --> 00:07:36.383 or like someone on underwriting's. 00:07:36.383 --> 00:07:38.873 Like I don't, I don't know why a bunch of customers are starting getting 00:07:38.873 --> 00:07:39.893 stuck in their application flow. 00:07:39.893 --> 00:07:41.483 It's like, all right, well Experian is down. 00:07:41.813 --> 00:07:42.683 And that kind of explains it. 00:07:43.858 --> 00:07:44.548 Mike Bifulco: Okay, cool. 00:07:44.578 --> 00:07:47.688 Yeah, and I, I guess the other thing is as a you know, self-assigned 00:07:47.748 --> 00:07:50.988 full stack developer, you've probably been subject to many other 00:07:50.988 --> 00:07:52.518 developer products along the way too. 00:07:52.518 --> 00:07:53.148 So I 00:07:53.148 --> 00:07:56.238 think that buys you some familiarity with it, at, at the very least. 00:07:56.913 --> 00:07:59.733 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, I've been a, I've been a huge consumer of these, these 00:07:59.763 --> 00:08:03.633 APIs and there's, there's great ones and then there's not so great ones. 00:08:03.963 --> 00:08:06.993 And I just, my goal with super good, my long-term vision is I 00:08:06.993 --> 00:08:09.063 wanna make all the APIs great. 00:08:09.403 --> 00:08:11.113 So like the ones that are great are like. 00:08:11.113 --> 00:08:14.223 Killing it in the market like plaid, I'd say. 00:08:14.223 --> 00:08:17.343 Like, they're so ubiquitous, but they're, they're ubiquitous for a reason. 00:08:17.373 --> 00:08:19.923 Like the, the documentation is incredible. 00:08:20.163 --> 00:08:23.013 The onboarding experience for developers are, are incredible. 00:08:23.013 --> 00:08:26.703 And like, I think also like Stripe is, is one of the top dogs in 00:08:26.703 --> 00:08:27.843 terms of like developer experience. 00:08:27.843 --> 00:08:31.563 And I like, there's just a long tail folks who like either just getting started out 00:08:31.563 --> 00:08:33.183 or don't have the resources to invest. 00:08:33.183 --> 00:08:36.783 And I just wanna like, bring everyone up to the level that like the stripes 00:08:36.783 --> 00:08:37.953 and plaids of the world's have set. 00:08:38.788 --> 00:08:39.388 Mike Bifulco: Sure, yeah. 00:08:39.388 --> 00:08:40.678 It's an extremely high bar to hit. 00:08:40.728 --> 00:08:41.028 Is one of 00:08:41.028 --> 00:08:43.458 those things that I think a lot of dev teams aspire to, 00:08:43.458 --> 00:08:45.768 especially if you're building things for other developers to use. 00:08:46.008 --> 00:08:49.098 We as developers tend to be really good at sniffing out things that 00:08:49.098 --> 00:08:50.508 we don't like, for whatever reason. 00:08:50.868 --> 00:08:54.798 And Metaphor is a really powerful tool there, like saying, Hey, you 00:08:54.798 --> 00:08:57.408 know, like plaid's version of this is so much better wise than this. 00:08:57.408 --> 00:08:59.418 More like plaid or, you know, what were they thinking when they 00:08:59.418 --> 00:09:00.708 got here is a very common thing. 00:09:00.708 --> 00:09:03.258 And usually by way of comparison, like, oh man, I really wish that 00:09:03.258 --> 00:09:05.988 was like Stripes web hooking interface or whatever it may be. 00:09:06.138 --> 00:09:09.258 We, we also very nearly made it to 10 minutes into the podcast without 00:09:09.258 --> 00:09:12.558 me having to give the disclaimer that I also previously worked for Stripe, 00:09:13.153 --> 00:09:13.653 Alex Klarfeld: Oh, cool. 00:09:13.788 --> 00:09:15.468 Mike Bifulco: something I feel like I should call out on, on 00:09:15.468 --> 00:09:17.178 each and every mention of it. 00:09:17.228 --> 00:09:19.718 For, for clarity and, and for transparency and all that. 00:09:20.173 --> 00:09:20.463 Alex Klarfeld: Cool. 00:09:20.888 --> 00:09:23.328 Mike Bifulco: okay, so we touched a little bit on the, the 00:09:23.448 --> 00:09:24.918 elevator pitch for super good. 00:09:24.918 --> 00:09:28.308 So the tagline I think on your site says something along the lines of 00:09:28.308 --> 00:09:32.608 like, curb your API spend before you get a bill which is super cool and. 00:09:33.073 --> 00:09:34.993 I, I get the mission from that. 00:09:34.993 --> 00:09:37.683 You also mentioned that it's something like a, a two or three 00:09:37.683 --> 00:09:39.333 line implementation to do that. 00:09:39.333 --> 00:09:41.073 So I'm curious about that. 00:09:41.073 --> 00:09:41.823 What does that look like? 00:09:41.823 --> 00:09:44.463 How do I integrate with super good and start getting benefits from it? 00:09:45.203 --> 00:09:45.713 Alex Klarfeld: For sure. 00:09:45.743 --> 00:09:49.573 So super good is a, the way that it works today is for a free 00:09:49.573 --> 00:09:51.553 version, it's a passive interceptor. 00:09:51.553 --> 00:09:52.453 It's not a proxy. 00:09:52.703 --> 00:09:55.523 So the way it works, all the clients or SDKs are open source. 00:09:55.523 --> 00:09:56.813 You can check us out on GitHub. 00:09:57.153 --> 00:10:00.033 You drop in the few lines of code and we basically apply 00:10:00.033 --> 00:10:01.683 a light monkey patch to like. 00:10:02.053 --> 00:10:03.973 Your favorite HTP library. 00:10:04.223 --> 00:10:07.573 And then what it does behind the scenes is like, as calls get you know, made 00:10:07.573 --> 00:10:11.623 in your application, we kind of stow away the calls locally in memory. 00:10:11.803 --> 00:10:14.233 And then what we'll do is basically redact everything. 00:10:14.233 --> 00:10:17.203 Like there's, one of the big things that I take very seriously is we do not want 00:10:17.203 --> 00:10:20.163 to have any data that we should not have. 00:10:20.373 --> 00:10:22.023 So everything is redacted by default. 00:10:22.023 --> 00:10:26.023 You can set that flag and then once on an interval, those 00:10:26.023 --> 00:10:27.673 logs will get shipped to our. 00:10:28.063 --> 00:10:32.053 Our, our service, which will start to analyze from a cost perspective, 00:10:32.053 --> 00:10:33.283 data quality perspective. 00:10:33.883 --> 00:10:38.393 We're sort of like just running live analysis on your HTP logs specifically 00:10:38.603 --> 00:10:39.713 in order to solve this problem. 00:10:40.813 --> 00:10:41.233 Mike Bifulco: Got it. 00:10:41.233 --> 00:10:43.573 And so it sounds like it's a client side integration. 00:10:43.673 --> 00:10:45.533 I mean, I would imagine there's a service side element to this too, 00:10:45.533 --> 00:10:46.913 wherever API calls are happening. 00:10:47.123 --> 00:10:47.633 Is, I 00:10:47.633 --> 00:10:50.943 feel like one of the, the, the things that my API dev friends 00:10:50.943 --> 00:10:54.353 would ask is what does that look like in terms of performance hit? 00:10:54.413 --> 00:10:57.983 Is, is, are you getting in between my call and the service? 00:10:57.983 --> 00:11:01.443 Or is this truly something that is just like queue safe for later? 00:11:02.508 --> 00:11:05.148 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, it's, it, I intent, we intentionally built it 00:11:05.148 --> 00:11:06.948 to get out of the critical path. 00:11:07.188 --> 00:11:08.868 So that is why it's not a proxy. 00:11:08.868 --> 00:11:11.558 So it doesn't mess with any like actual network traffic. 00:11:11.558 --> 00:11:14.468 There's no like network call between the call that you're making. 00:11:14.768 --> 00:11:18.448 The only limitation is like memory like the memory limitations of the 00:11:18.448 --> 00:11:19.468 machine that you're running on. 00:11:19.498 --> 00:11:22.978 'cause all it is, is dropping the call into like a memory 00:11:22.978 --> 00:11:24.538 store locally and then running. 00:11:24.868 --> 00:11:27.508 Redaction on the, the, the js ON. 00:11:27.508 --> 00:11:28.588 So it's very minimal. 00:11:28.808 --> 00:11:31.993 Latency hit just like completely memory bound to the machine that you're running. 00:11:32.793 --> 00:11:33.093 Mike Bifulco: Yeah. 00:11:33.093 --> 00:11:33.693 Fascinating. 00:11:33.698 --> 00:11:34.868 That's a very interesting angle. 00:11:35.118 --> 00:11:40.168 I can imagine the challenge of trying to track billing for every, every API call 00:11:40.168 --> 00:11:42.298 is the every a API call part of that. 00:11:42.298 --> 00:11:43.828 So what, what have you done 00:11:43.828 --> 00:11:44.338 to try and. 00:11:44.698 --> 00:11:48.968 Determine like which of these calls I'm making out of my service are 00:11:48.968 --> 00:11:50.823 ones that are metered in some way. 00:11:50.883 --> 00:11:52.463 How do you determine who's billing me? 00:11:53.458 --> 00:11:54.268 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, exactly. 00:11:54.268 --> 00:11:58.798 So when the calls come in, we basically run it through categorization right away. 00:11:58.798 --> 00:12:02.968 So try to figure out like easy ones, like domain is specific to the vendor. 00:12:03.068 --> 00:12:04.118 The harder one is each. 00:12:04.148 --> 00:12:08.198 API has like a different signature, for example, like S3 uses, like the sub-domain 00:12:08.198 --> 00:12:12.308 to like identify calls, but like maybe certain plaid calls use the path. 00:12:12.308 --> 00:12:15.648 And then sometimes they'll stick a like a ID somewhere in there. 00:12:15.738 --> 00:12:18.138 So the first step that we do is sort of like categorize the calls. 00:12:18.138 --> 00:12:19.158 So as they flow in. 00:12:19.438 --> 00:12:21.358 We'll try to automatically categorize them best we can. 00:12:21.358 --> 00:12:22.618 We actually use LLMs for that. 00:12:22.618 --> 00:12:23.608 It's pretty good. 00:12:23.928 --> 00:12:27.588 And then sort of like we can manually re-categorize things if they're 00:12:27.588 --> 00:12:29.118 not like being grouped properly. 00:12:29.548 --> 00:12:33.688 And then after that, the, we kind of had have like a toolbox in like 00:12:33.688 --> 00:12:35.308 the standard way that people bill. 00:12:35.558 --> 00:12:36.128 So like. 00:12:36.308 --> 00:12:41.648 We know how open AI and together, like all Bill and plaid, also bill specifically 00:12:41.648 --> 00:12:43.418 based on like accounts rather than usage. 00:12:43.598 --> 00:12:46.498 And then we sort of built this flexible framework on our end 00:12:46.798 --> 00:12:50.648 where we have the tools basically to just implement custom billing. 00:12:50.648 --> 00:12:54.008 Like if you're like overage based where it's like you get certain amount 00:12:54.008 --> 00:12:57.158 of calls for a certain value and anything over that, it's more value. 00:12:57.158 --> 00:13:00.378 We can, we can basically fine tune it to your specifications. 00:13:00.458 --> 00:13:04.718 But like for free users right away it's just like, drop us in and get usage. 00:13:04.718 --> 00:13:08.588 And then the sort of like more advanced metering for like the long tail APIs. 00:13:08.588 --> 00:13:09.638 We, we, we charge for 00:13:10.343 --> 00:13:13.703 Mike Bifulco: One of the things that I am fascinated by is that it sounds 00:13:13.703 --> 00:13:18.833 to me like the hello world is drop a snippet in and the product sort of starts 00:13:18.833 --> 00:13:20.303 sprinting away and going to work for you. 00:13:20.878 --> 00:13:21.168 Alex Klarfeld: that. 00:13:21.293 --> 00:13:21.743 That's right. 00:13:22.443 --> 00:13:23.133 , Mike Bifulco: that's really cool. 00:13:23.213 --> 00:13:24.983 What did the first version of this product look like? 00:13:24.983 --> 00:13:27.683 Like did you target one API in particular, or were you starting 00:13:27.683 --> 00:13:29.153 from categorization from day one? 00:13:29.993 --> 00:13:33.183 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, the first version of the API was, it was just a node 00:13:33.183 --> 00:13:37.503 library that like monkey patched fetch and then just logged all the calls. 00:13:37.603 --> 00:13:40.693 I think like a lot of people, like outta the gator, like, you know, I have Datadog 00:13:40.698 --> 00:13:42.553 or, or, or sort of century to do that. 00:13:42.553 --> 00:13:46.183 And like the first version that we built at Divvy was like 00:13:46.183 --> 00:13:48.343 trying to use Datadog to do this. 00:13:48.343 --> 00:13:48.883 And 00:13:49.153 --> 00:13:52.423 it's really hard, like it's just a very, like both like expensive from like a 00:13:52.423 --> 00:13:53.773 cost perspective where you have to. 00:13:54.173 --> 00:13:57.863 Like triangulate everything, like every, every single thing that you 00:13:57.863 --> 00:14:01.853 need to, to meter or you need to like tag and, and instrument appropriately. 00:14:02.153 --> 00:14:05.663 Plus the sort of like dashboarding and setting up of it is like hard. 00:14:05.663 --> 00:14:08.673 And sometimes like there's a lot of like, you know, native 00:14:08.673 --> 00:14:10.353 knowledge to the, to the team. 00:14:10.353 --> 00:14:13.053 That's like, it's one person that understands the Datadog logs and then 00:14:13.263 --> 00:14:14.433 you also have to like maintain it. 00:14:14.433 --> 00:14:17.913 So like not only is Datadog gonna charge you per like field that you're 00:14:17.913 --> 00:14:20.493 indexing, they're gonna, you're gonna like have to continue to maintain it. 00:14:20.493 --> 00:14:22.503 So the first version of this honestly, was like, tried to 00:14:22.503 --> 00:14:24.243 build in Datadog super hard. 00:14:24.638 --> 00:14:25.838 Very difficult to maintain. 00:14:25.928 --> 00:14:29.268 Second version of it was like a custom logger which is more similar 00:14:29.268 --> 00:14:30.408 to what super good is today. 00:14:30.628 --> 00:14:32.368 And then really it was just a graph on a screen. 00:14:32.368 --> 00:14:34.858 There's just like, here's a bunch of vendors you use and then here's 00:14:34.858 --> 00:14:36.838 like their, their associated usage. 00:14:37.058 --> 00:14:40.118 Get ready for the invoice and, and, and kind of like building on from there. 00:14:41.473 --> 00:14:41.763 Mike Bifulco: Okay. 00:14:42.248 --> 00:14:42.998 And so. 00:14:43.983 --> 00:14:47.223 Let's say I, if I've integrated with super good, it's starting to measure metering 00:14:47.223 --> 00:14:48.993 for the various APIs I'm consuming. 00:14:49.203 --> 00:14:52.053 What does my end user experience look like with Super good? 00:14:52.053 --> 00:14:53.283 Is it a dashboard I get? 00:14:53.283 --> 00:14:54.393 Do I get a series of emails? 00:14:54.393 --> 00:14:54.963 Is it ACL I? 00:14:55.263 --> 00:14:58.713 Like what, what's my how do I get insight into what this all looks like? 00:14:59.463 --> 00:14:59.823 Alex Klarfeld: For sure. 00:14:59.823 --> 00:15:01.083 So we have a dashboard. 00:15:01.133 --> 00:15:04.298 Though as an engineer myself, I do not want to give engineers a. 00:15:04.418 --> 00:15:06.098 Another single pane of glass to look at. 00:15:06.368 --> 00:15:09.278 So it is, is meant to audit if you, if you want to. 00:15:09.498 --> 00:15:13.578 The two ways that we mainly interface with, with folks is through alerting. 00:15:13.628 --> 00:15:15.848 So right now we have standard slack alerting set up. 00:15:15.848 --> 00:15:18.818 So if it's like we start to notice overages spikes in the bill, you'll 00:15:18.818 --> 00:15:22.208 get, you'll get a Slack alert and then also like sort of a weekly report. 00:15:22.268 --> 00:15:25.268 So at the end of the week you'll say, okay, this is sort of like the 00:15:25.268 --> 00:15:27.178 usage that we, we've been seeing. 00:15:27.368 --> 00:15:29.618 If you have uploaded like your contract information, 00:15:29.618 --> 00:15:31.148 we'll sort of be able to like. 00:15:31.523 --> 00:15:34.403 Give you a heads up that like some sort of renewal is, is happening. 00:15:34.453 --> 00:15:38.503 And then the sort of the, the other suite of tools we have is around 00:15:38.503 --> 00:15:41.863 like data quality monitoring and like more of like the nitty gritty error 00:15:41.863 --> 00:15:44.623 monitoring, where it's like, okay, we see an error that we haven't seen before. 00:15:45.358 --> 00:15:48.448 We just wanna flag this to you to make sure it's not taking down another system. 00:15:48.448 --> 00:15:51.428 'cause a lot of these errors that issues have can go quietly. 00:15:51.608 --> 00:15:55.118 Mostly because if you, even if you have instrumentation set up and like the 00:15:55.358 --> 00:15:58.838 best tools, which we, we use personally, like Century and Datadog, they get 00:15:58.838 --> 00:16:01.418 noisy because APIs might error for. 00:16:02.003 --> 00:16:03.233 A non error reason. 00:16:03.233 --> 00:16:05.813 For example, like if plaid, someone disconnects their account, 00:16:05.813 --> 00:16:08.003 you're gonna get errors all the time, every time you pull it. 00:16:08.003 --> 00:16:10.793 But like, it's not really an actual error, so you tend to ignore it. 00:16:10.793 --> 00:16:14.723 But if you have like 80% of your calls to plaid totally disconnected, that's 00:16:14.723 --> 00:16:18.213 probably something that you, you shouldn't ignore to save some money, at least. 00:16:19.113 --> 00:16:19.473 Mike Bifulco: Sure. 00:16:19.503 --> 00:16:20.763 Yeah, that all sounds very familiar. 00:16:20.763 --> 00:16:21.183 Actually. 00:16:21.183 --> 00:16:25.953 I spent a non-trivial amount of time, just this week debugging an error with Twilio. 00:16:26.263 --> 00:16:28.573 We were getting an error response from, from some API calls. 00:16:28.573 --> 00:16:31.723 And the API call is basically like Mike and Alex are texting each other. 00:16:31.723 --> 00:16:36.283 If I have a text conversation with you over SMS and I, if I send an API call to 00:16:36.283 --> 00:16:38.053 say, please add Alex to this conversation. 00:16:38.053 --> 00:16:41.333 It fails sends a a 4, 4 0 9 back. 00:16:41.523 --> 00:16:45.423 And the docs for Twilio say like, if you get this error, probably just ignore it. 00:16:46.278 --> 00:16:48.558 But it, it's, you know, when you start getting that error a lot, 00:16:48.558 --> 00:16:49.728 it sends up a lot of signals. 00:16:49.728 --> 00:16:51.648 And especially if that was something that was billed, it's 00:16:51.648 --> 00:16:52.698 something I'd wanna know about. 00:16:52.698 --> 00:16:56.038 But it may also just be a signal from my tooling that we're trying to 00:16:56.038 --> 00:16:57.268 do something we shouldn't be right. 00:16:57.273 --> 00:17:01.298 It, it may be a a non breaking error or maybe a breaking error, but it's a little 00:17:01.298 --> 00:17:02.648 hard to ascertain from the beginning. 00:17:02.968 --> 00:17:06.718 And I would certainly wanna know if all of my, or 80% of my Twilio 00:17:06.718 --> 00:17:08.488 calls started failing in a hurry too. 00:17:08.698 --> 00:17:10.388 That's that's a great angle to take. 00:17:11.678 --> 00:17:13.238 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, and the, I mean like it just feels like 00:17:13.238 --> 00:17:14.228 pushing a boulder up the hill. 00:17:14.228 --> 00:17:17.948 Like even if you instrumented something to catch that specific error and you 00:17:17.948 --> 00:17:21.068 put all the instrument, like, okay, this is a thing that we need to like alert. 00:17:21.068 --> 00:17:23.528 If it's only exceeding a certain threshold, it might be 00:17:23.528 --> 00:17:25.688 another one that's like probably gonna come up in the meantime. 00:17:25.688 --> 00:17:27.398 And it's just sort of never ending battle. 00:17:27.548 --> 00:17:29.198 That's why like as an engineer, it's like. 00:17:29.378 --> 00:17:30.308 Just drop us in. 00:17:30.488 --> 00:17:32.138 We handle like the instrumentation remotely. 00:17:32.138 --> 00:17:35.958 Also, like APIs are like a finite there's like a finite schema for each of them. 00:17:35.958 --> 00:17:38.508 Like there's documentation, there's a lot of data that sort of 00:17:38.508 --> 00:17:39.978 like confines the problem space. 00:17:39.978 --> 00:17:43.958 So like why not utilize that rather than trying to set everything up on your own. 00:17:44.768 --> 00:17:45.218 Mike Bifulco: Sure. 00:17:45.278 --> 00:17:45.428 Yeah. 00:17:45.428 --> 00:17:49.518 To, to that end, I'm curious for devs who may be listening who build API products 00:17:49.618 --> 00:17:52.468 is there something they can do or is there a way for them to integrate from 00:17:52.468 --> 00:17:56.428 their side to ensure that Super goods understanding of their API is correct? 00:17:56.718 --> 00:17:59.418 Do you consume anything along those lines to say that, like, don't let the 00:17:59.418 --> 00:18:03.068 LLMs decide, let, let you know, the product owners themselves configure it. 00:18:03.833 --> 00:18:06.803 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, actually, so part of, part of our, our pitch is we 00:18:06.803 --> 00:18:08.483 wanna also help out the API vendors. 00:18:08.483 --> 00:18:13.323 We're starting to roll that out right now, where basically we wanna help give 00:18:13.323 --> 00:18:17.193 the same experience that the plaids and the stripes of the world give to 00:18:17.193 --> 00:18:19.133 their customers to those API vendors. 00:18:19.133 --> 00:18:19.403 So. 00:18:19.623 --> 00:18:21.123 That integration's a little bit different. 00:18:21.123 --> 00:18:25.293 We basically don't wanna get in in the way of any sort of like live traffic as well. 00:18:25.503 --> 00:18:29.703 So we'll actually hook into the API vendors logs themselves and sort 00:18:29.703 --> 00:18:31.533 of start, start using our tool. 00:18:31.533 --> 00:18:34.833 Like the first version of this product is basically like building out internal 00:18:34.833 --> 00:18:36.363 dashboards if they don't already exist. 00:18:36.363 --> 00:18:39.073 And then surfacing that information up to the sales team 00:18:39.073 --> 00:18:40.843 or supports teams so that like. 00:18:41.463 --> 00:18:43.533 They can provide a better experience for their customers. 00:18:43.533 --> 00:18:47.433 Like some of the best API experiences I've had are from like, honestly 00:18:47.433 --> 00:18:50.583 like Century and the Datadog, where they're like, Hey, your usage is 00:18:50.763 --> 00:18:52.683 about to exceed what you pay for. 00:18:52.683 --> 00:18:54.003 Just like wanna give you a heads up. 00:18:54.313 --> 00:18:55.843 And that's just like not the norm. 00:18:56.063 --> 00:18:59.573 So we want to kind of help, help the API vendors themselves, make a 00:18:59.573 --> 00:19:02.213 better experience for the customers, like engage customers when we they 00:19:02.213 --> 00:19:05.343 notice they're having issues engage when like there's spikes in usage. 00:19:05.343 --> 00:19:07.953 So that's also like a pretty big focus of ours is like building 00:19:07.953 --> 00:19:09.093 a product for the vendors. 00:19:09.193 --> 00:19:11.893 Mike Bifulco: Yeah, as a vendor, there's many things to get right there. 00:19:12.263 --> 00:19:16.193 Pricing is a tricky challenge because it needs to ensure the vendor can make 00:19:16.193 --> 00:19:19.943 money, but also that there's an on-ramp for users who start at a reasonable level 00:19:20.043 --> 00:19:23.673 and that they, they don't have to, you know, invest a ton to prove that the thing 00:19:23.673 --> 00:19:26.073 is useful and valuable at the same time. 00:19:26.073 --> 00:19:29.183 I would imagine some of it is also, trying to be competitive with the 00:19:29.183 --> 00:19:33.053 competition and making sure that comparable services, you know don't under 00:19:33.143 --> 00:19:36.353 underprice or overprice you or whatever the optimization challenge is there. 00:19:36.833 --> 00:19:38.933 To that end, maybe one of the things I'm curious about and I had kind of 00:19:38.933 --> 00:19:42.203 noted to ask you about is tell me a little bit about Super goods pricing. 00:19:43.278 --> 00:19:43.608 Alex Klarfeld: Right. 00:19:43.668 --> 00:19:45.438 So we, we just released a free tier. 00:19:45.468 --> 00:19:47.118 You can download it for free. 00:19:47.428 --> 00:19:50.878 We basically limit to like, we, we won't actually block you because I don't believe 00:19:50.878 --> 00:19:55.998 in that sort of sales tactic just as like an API consumer who, goes overage. 00:19:55.998 --> 00:19:57.678 We're not gonna, we're not gonna overcharge you for that. 00:19:57.678 --> 00:20:01.518 We'll hopefully have some conversations at the start, but the free tier is basically 00:20:01.618 --> 00:20:02.878 a hundred thousand calls a month. 00:20:02.928 --> 00:20:06.708 You can, you can set up pricing for three vendors automatically and 00:20:06.708 --> 00:20:09.758 then sort of like track usage from the rest of the vendors for free. 00:20:10.158 --> 00:20:13.188 Just to, the idea is like, we don't wanna charge you for the vendors that 00:20:13.188 --> 00:20:15.198 like work and aren't really expensive. 00:20:15.198 --> 00:20:17.298 Like you shouldn't have to pay for like tracking, like. 00:20:17.628 --> 00:20:21.288 You know, maybe Google APIs or like Stripes APIs. 00:20:21.318 --> 00:20:22.518 'cause those just work. 00:20:22.638 --> 00:20:26.328 So the best customers are the ones who are like, yeah, we, we like, have a specific 00:20:26.328 --> 00:20:30.778 set of APIs that we wanna keep an eye on from price and like, quality and usage. 00:20:30.868 --> 00:20:34.438 And those are the ones that like, we also want to provide value for. 00:20:34.728 --> 00:20:37.578 So that's, that's the way that like philosophically, like I'm trying, we're 00:20:37.578 --> 00:20:39.628 trying to price is, is get that for free. 00:20:39.628 --> 00:20:42.658 And then everything else is sort of like the enterprise part where 00:20:42.658 --> 00:20:44.128 you have more than a million calls. 00:20:44.253 --> 00:20:47.073 You have all sorts of vendors that you want to sort of keep an eye on. 00:20:47.353 --> 00:20:51.293 That's, that's sort of like dependent on the the, the, the enterprise itself. 00:20:53.063 --> 00:20:53.303 Mike Bifulco: Okay. 00:20:53.303 --> 00:20:53.963 That makes sense. 00:20:53.963 --> 00:20:55.178 I, I feel like there's a pretty big. 00:20:55.783 --> 00:21:01.063 Delta between three APIs and a hundred thousand calls and enterprise grade. 00:21:01.363 --> 00:21:04.753 The question I would have there as a potential consumer is when I get 00:21:04.753 --> 00:21:09.743 to 100,001 calls and four vendors like what is, what is the on-ramp? 00:21:09.743 --> 00:21:13.103 Like there, am I jumping from zero to, you know, thousands of dollars a month? 00:21:13.103 --> 00:21:16.463 Is it like, what's the scale of, of initial costs, I guess for 00:21:16.463 --> 00:21:17.633 someone who's incrementally adding. 00:21:18.323 --> 00:21:18.653 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah. 00:21:18.653 --> 00:21:22.613 And, and, and like our goal is like onboard slowly, especially like with 00:21:22.613 --> 00:21:25.733 growing companies, like you just don't know how many APIs you're going to use. 00:21:25.733 --> 00:21:28.733 And I, for one, don't wanna be someone who's like, oh, surprise, 00:21:28.733 --> 00:21:31.463 you added like another LLM, this is like adding to your bill. 00:21:31.743 --> 00:21:34.473 So we basically try to charge, we basically try to give 00:21:34.743 --> 00:21:36.603 th 30 days free to monitor. 00:21:37.323 --> 00:21:40.413 Every single API at any volume, just to make sure that like, okay, 00:21:40.413 --> 00:21:43.383 is this an API that is like worth monitoring and worth tracking? 00:21:43.653 --> 00:21:46.863 And the idea is at the end of the 30 days, you tell us and say like, yeah, 00:21:46.863 --> 00:21:50.763 I wanna keep tabs on that, or I don't, and then we basically discard it. 00:21:50.763 --> 00:21:54.543 Or like, there's, there's a way that you can set, set to ignore certain vendors 00:21:54.543 --> 00:21:58.263 inside of our UI to just like, turn 'em off right away so it won't stop working. 00:21:58.263 --> 00:22:01.783 We'll just stop tracking if you choose to, to stop tracking that API. 00:22:02.698 --> 00:22:03.118 Mike Bifulco: Sure. 00:22:03.118 --> 00:22:03.538 Got it. 00:22:03.908 --> 00:22:05.888 I'm gonna press a little further only because I feel 00:22:05.888 --> 00:22:08.258 like it's my solemn duty to do so, but like what was 00:22:08.258 --> 00:22:09.398 truly, what's the scale there? 00:22:09.398 --> 00:22:10.928 Am I looking at hundreds, thousands? 00:22:11.428 --> 00:22:12.573 Alex Klarfeld: Scale in terms of like the volume. 00:22:13.093 --> 00:22:14.503 Mike Bifulco: No, sorry, in terms of cost, right? 00:22:14.503 --> 00:22:19.053 So, so like, when, when your customers convert from free to paid maybe for 00:22:19.053 --> 00:22:21.213 the smallest ones who are growing, what does that tend to look like 00:22:21.213 --> 00:22:22.433 for their, their incremental ad? 00:22:23.183 --> 00:22:23.783 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, for sure. 00:22:23.783 --> 00:22:28.403 So it's, if it's pushing a million calls upwards we basically start 00:22:28.403 --> 00:22:33.093 at like 99 a month and then 10 million calls upwards, like, sort of 00:22:33.093 --> 00:22:34.593 like custom pricing based on that. 00:22:34.593 --> 00:22:39.543 But again, if it's a million calls to, like, Google doesn't, like, probably 00:22:39.543 --> 00:22:40.443 something you don't need to track. 00:22:40.443 --> 00:22:44.633 So it's like more of like million calls, like, like open ai a month kind of 00:22:44.633 --> 00:22:45.713 thing is like a hundred bucks a month. 00:22:46.448 --> 00:22:46.808 Mike Bifulco: Right. 00:22:46.838 --> 00:22:47.138 Okay. 00:22:47.228 --> 00:22:48.188 Yeah, that makes sense. 00:22:48.708 --> 00:22:51.558 That, that to me is a narrative that I think is easy to sell too. 00:22:51.618 --> 00:22:54.908 Like the the scary thing is if the product you're using to manage your 00:22:54.908 --> 00:22:57.128 spending becomes a giant spend to 00:22:57.128 --> 00:23:00.038 manage the spending, then it's like, you know, an or a boroughs 00:23:00.038 --> 00:23:03.058 of challenges to, to upsell through the product stack there too. 00:23:03.803 --> 00:23:06.293 Alex Klarfeld: No, I'm very cognizant of that, like all the ways that vendors have 00:23:06.293 --> 00:23:10.943 hurt me with pricing is like not something that I wish to incur on like my own users. 00:23:11.183 --> 00:23:15.203 So the idea is to be transparent and like not screw up their 00:23:15.203 --> 00:23:16.613 businesses as much as possible. 00:23:17.123 --> 00:23:17.423 Mike Bifulco: Cool. 00:23:17.513 --> 00:23:18.173 Yeah, I love that. 00:23:18.173 --> 00:23:21.333 I think that's a, a good angle to take and especially like I alluded to 00:23:21.333 --> 00:23:23.733 before, I think developers are really good at sniffing out when they're 00:23:23.733 --> 00:23:26.913 being toyed around with, and, you know, they're the first ones to head for 00:23:26.913 --> 00:23:28.233 the hills if something feels fishy. 00:23:28.863 --> 00:23:29.643 Alex Klarfeld: I don't really blame him. 00:23:29.643 --> 00:23:30.333 I've done the same. 00:23:31.233 --> 00:23:31.473 Mike Bifulco: Right. 00:23:31.473 --> 00:23:31.833 Yeah. 00:23:31.953 --> 00:23:32.673 You are one of 'em. 00:23:32.673 --> 00:23:33.243 So it, it 00:23:33.243 --> 00:23:33.783 makes sense. 00:23:33.783 --> 00:23:34.053 Yeah. 00:23:34.603 --> 00:23:34.873 Okay. 00:23:34.873 --> 00:23:36.403 So tell, tell me what's next? 00:23:36.403 --> 00:23:38.713 Like, what other problems are you starting to think about or maybe do you have 00:23:38.713 --> 00:23:40.453 releases coming that you're excited about? 00:23:40.453 --> 00:23:41.458 What, what are you working on now? 00:23:42.223 --> 00:23:42.433 Alex Klarfeld: yeah. 00:23:42.433 --> 00:23:48.313 So you can download the Super Good Tracker for free at Super Good AI current account. 00:23:48.553 --> 00:23:49.633 One of the things I hate is. 00:23:50.248 --> 00:23:52.948 Trying to te test out a dev tool with like talking to a salesperson. 00:23:53.158 --> 00:23:55.318 So you can do it for free without talking to any of us. 00:23:55.478 --> 00:23:59.048 We'll add you to a Slack channel just to help you get onboarded async. 00:23:59.048 --> 00:24:03.748 But drop us in check us out, kind of go off to the races from there. 00:24:04.018 --> 00:24:07.168 And then the sort of like longer term is we want to help 00:24:07.168 --> 00:24:08.778 the API vendors themselves. 00:24:08.778 --> 00:24:11.788 So starting to talk to the vendors that we're already monitoring 00:24:11.788 --> 00:24:14.128 today to try to make a better experience for the customers. 00:24:14.338 --> 00:24:17.188 The current integration today is if, if we have a special partnership 00:24:17.188 --> 00:24:21.088 with these API vendors, you get essentially premium support through us. 00:24:21.418 --> 00:24:24.328 So you're the first to know if these, these vendors have issues. 00:24:24.328 --> 00:24:25.978 It's super good. 00:24:25.978 --> 00:24:29.478 We'll know before the status page updates just because we already have. 00:24:29.758 --> 00:24:31.018 A bunch of the data going. 00:24:31.018 --> 00:24:33.508 So like if you're having an issue, one other customer's having an 00:24:33.508 --> 00:24:37.408 issue, we joke, it's like the, the age old problem of like debugging an 00:24:37.408 --> 00:24:39.028 API is like, is it us, is it them? 00:24:39.248 --> 00:24:41.168 We try to answer that, that pretty quickly. 00:24:41.418 --> 00:24:44.528 And yeah, just trying to make the vendors have the best 00:24:44.528 --> 00:24:45.848 experience for their customers. 00:24:46.068 --> 00:24:48.168 And then also trying to get into larger enterprises. 00:24:48.168 --> 00:24:51.868 So we actually have a, eBPF agent also in the works, which is targeted 00:24:51.868 --> 00:24:53.128 towards like larger enterprises. 00:24:53.128 --> 00:24:55.048 I'm happy to go into detail of that. 00:24:55.048 --> 00:24:57.658 It's an interesting technology, but it's like a little bit more 00:24:57.658 --> 00:24:59.638 robust than making a code change. 00:24:59.638 --> 00:25:00.868 It's more of like an infrastructure change. 00:25:01.778 --> 00:25:02.078 Mike Bifulco: Yeah. 00:25:02.078 --> 00:25:02.558 Interesting. 00:25:02.558 --> 00:25:05.498 So that's more, more gateway level, presumably, or like more broad level 00:25:05.498 --> 00:25:08.838 where maybe you have dozens and dozens of different software stacks through an 00:25:08.838 --> 00:25:11.898 organization and it's hard to just add three lines in one place and be happy. 00:25:11.943 --> 00:25:13.143 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, exactly. 00:25:13.143 --> 00:25:14.463 So trying to, trying to gear up for that. 00:25:14.463 --> 00:25:17.793 So it's a agent that sits next to your box and does the 00:25:17.793 --> 00:25:19.323 same thing as the, the logger. 00:25:19.513 --> 00:25:23.213 But does it on like the, the kernel level and then performs the same way. 00:25:23.213 --> 00:25:24.923 It's just a little bit more effort to debug. 00:25:24.923 --> 00:25:25.703 It's usually teams that have. 00:25:26.203 --> 00:25:27.643 DevOps teams already set up. 00:25:27.743 --> 00:25:31.733 But we, we had, we started with the, the logger because that was the easiest way 00:25:31.733 --> 00:25:33.113 I thought that we could integrate too. 00:25:33.878 --> 00:25:34.868 Mike Bifulco: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. 00:25:34.868 --> 00:25:37.628 I think one of the interesting things about what you're working on 00:25:37.628 --> 00:25:38.763 it super good is that you get to. 00:25:40.283 --> 00:25:45.353 Interpret and traverse and feel parts of the software stack, the protocol that 00:25:45.353 --> 00:25:46.703 a lot of developers don't think about. 00:25:46.703 --> 00:25:48.893 Like, you're, you're making some really interesting network requests. 00:25:48.893 --> 00:25:51.093 You're sniffing out for certain shapes of things. 00:25:51.093 --> 00:25:55.053 Patching, fetch is like an idea that I've never even remotely considered, right? 00:25:55.083 --> 00:25:59.103 But it's a super cool thing to, to be able to do and to kind of monopolize 00:25:59.103 --> 00:26:02.223 isn't the right word, but utilize as, as an opportunity creator for you and 00:26:02.223 --> 00:26:04.223 certainly a value add for developers. 00:26:04.533 --> 00:26:07.443 Maybe this is a good, good segue into one of the other things I was 00:26:07.443 --> 00:26:11.763 interested in is like, tell me about your team, the size of the team 00:26:11.763 --> 00:26:13.203 building this thing and the tech stack. 00:26:13.203 --> 00:26:14.073 What does that look like right now? 00:26:14.698 --> 00:26:15.238 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, for sure. 00:26:15.238 --> 00:26:16.198 So we're a really small team. 00:26:16.248 --> 00:26:17.268 There's three of us. 00:26:17.298 --> 00:26:18.288 We're all engineers. 00:26:18.628 --> 00:26:20.948 The tech stack is pretty straightforward. 00:26:20.998 --> 00:26:23.578 I'm a big fan of TypeScript, so all the web application 00:26:23.578 --> 00:26:24.628 stuff is done in TypeScript. 00:26:24.628 --> 00:26:28.068 And a lot of like data processing is also done in TypeScript. 00:26:28.308 --> 00:26:30.128 We actually utilize neon. 00:26:30.608 --> 00:26:32.408 So I'm a Postgres stalwart. 00:26:32.618 --> 00:26:33.878 Like I just think it's the best. 00:26:33.978 --> 00:26:36.778 Hopefully that doesn't lose me too many favors, but there's 00:26:36.778 --> 00:26:37.888 a really cool technology. 00:26:37.938 --> 00:26:40.398 Called Neon that helps, like, does like serverless Postgres. 00:26:40.398 --> 00:26:41.208 I'm a huge fan of it. 00:26:41.898 --> 00:26:44.408 It's greatly increased our developer productivity. 00:26:44.438 --> 00:26:47.468 Being able to like clone a database immediately in the cloud 00:26:47.918 --> 00:26:50.948 behind your, your VPN just makes developments so much faster. 00:26:51.258 --> 00:26:53.718 So we use Neon for, for Postgres and you can also like set up 00:26:53.718 --> 00:26:55.428 multi-tenants very easily with them. 00:26:55.828 --> 00:26:59.188 And we deploy on a combination like render for the front end stuff and then 00:26:59.438 --> 00:27:01.328 GCP for a lot of the backend stuff. 00:27:01.378 --> 00:27:02.068 And then. 00:27:02.453 --> 00:27:06.813 Just using like the core GGCP stuff like cloud run and things like that. 00:27:07.743 --> 00:27:09.333 Pub sub and GGCS. 00:27:10.068 --> 00:27:13.878 Mike Bifulco: What I really like about your product and a thing that I really 00:27:13.878 --> 00:27:16.818 like talking to founders is when you hear about a product that has such an 00:27:16.818 --> 00:27:20.818 interesting and simple implementation story and that a lot of it is just good 00:27:20.818 --> 00:27:24.768 fundamentals and a solid idea for how to help people and not not having to go 00:27:24.768 --> 00:27:28.128 spend 10 years like researching a brand new, you know, I don't know, algorithm. 00:27:28.128 --> 00:27:31.128 Not having to do what open AI did and figure out how to make 00:27:31.128 --> 00:27:33.048 an LLMA thing to begin with. 00:27:33.433 --> 00:27:37.803 There are loads of opportunities for, you know, enterprising people to go and solve 00:27:37.803 --> 00:27:42.413 problems without having to I don't know, level up computer science as a theory. 00:27:42.503 --> 00:27:42.773 Right. 00:27:42.773 --> 00:27:44.903 And it's, it's a really cool sign that you're onto something 00:27:44.903 --> 00:27:47.763 that is an interesting value add and also just fundamentally 00:27:47.763 --> 00:27:49.173 probably a helpful thing too. 00:27:49.253 --> 00:27:50.213 That that's super cool. 00:27:51.053 --> 00:27:53.693 Uh, and the team size of three is pretty impressive for what you've built too. 00:27:54.328 --> 00:27:54.688 Alex Klarfeld: Thanks. 00:27:54.688 --> 00:27:56.458 Yeah, they're, they're top engineers. 00:27:56.738 --> 00:27:57.818 I'm a, I'm a big fan of them. 00:27:58.673 --> 00:27:59.033 Mike Bifulco: Yeah. 00:27:59.453 --> 00:27:59.873 Cool. 00:28:00.143 --> 00:28:02.983 Well Alex be, before I let you move on, I've got a, a couple of questions 00:28:02.983 --> 00:28:04.503 that I wanna make sure I don't skip. 00:28:04.833 --> 00:28:07.443 Um, where's the best place for developers to find super good 00:28:07.443 --> 00:28:08.943 online and to get started with it? 00:28:09.408 --> 00:28:09.978 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah, for sure. 00:28:09.978 --> 00:28:12.138 So you can check us out@supergood.ai. 00:28:13.113 --> 00:28:13.473 Mike Bifulco: Cool. 00:28:13.903 --> 00:28:15.223 We'll send them that way straight away. 00:28:15.223 --> 00:28:17.773 And maybe what's a sign that someone should be considering using? 00:28:17.773 --> 00:28:18.223 Super good. 00:28:19.108 --> 00:28:21.608 Alex Klarfeld: If you've ever got a bill that someone has, I. 00:28:22.133 --> 00:28:25.343 Could been very confused by that's one if you have a horror story in 00:28:25.343 --> 00:28:28.643 mind where you're like, this API caused me to wake up in the middle 00:28:28.643 --> 00:28:29.993 of the night and, and heartache. 00:28:30.323 --> 00:28:32.963 That is, that is a good sign that we might be helpful. 00:28:33.213 --> 00:28:37.173 If you have more than, I'm gonna call it like five APIs, like if you're, the 00:28:37.173 --> 00:28:41.493 best customers that we have are like, kind of like they've, they've started 00:28:41.493 --> 00:28:42.933 to think about their unit economics. 00:28:42.933 --> 00:28:46.303 Maybe they haven't like implemented things yet, but if you're like a smaller 00:28:46.353 --> 00:28:49.113 company, you probably are just like, Hey, I'm just trying to, trying to grow. 00:28:49.113 --> 00:28:52.443 So I don't care that much about like, watch these APIs. 00:28:52.443 --> 00:28:53.583 We're just gonna chuck stuff at it. 00:28:53.733 --> 00:28:55.173 Which, which I've been in that place too. 00:28:55.173 --> 00:28:57.623 So typically like larger companies that are just starting 00:28:57.623 --> 00:28:58.643 to think about this problem. 00:28:59.013 --> 00:29:01.443 And also if you're dealing with international APIs 00:29:01.513 --> 00:29:02.743 we actually have a pretty. 00:29:03.143 --> 00:29:06.263 Large contingent of, of international vendors that we've 00:29:06.263 --> 00:29:08.033 been working with to monitor. 00:29:08.303 --> 00:29:10.763 They are working pretty hard to get up to snuff with some 00:29:10.763 --> 00:29:12.953 of the, the US based vendors. 00:29:13.203 --> 00:29:14.253 So that's a good, that's a pretty good one. 00:29:14.253 --> 00:29:15.633 So anything expensive too? 00:29:15.633 --> 00:29:16.593 Is, is, is great. 00:29:16.593 --> 00:29:18.823 Like the Twilio stripes plaids. 00:29:19.123 --> 00:29:19.243 Oh. 00:29:19.243 --> 00:29:21.943 If you're working with any credit bureau also I'd love to talk to you. 00:29:21.943 --> 00:29:24.523 They, they have a special place in my heart 'cause they've been 00:29:24.613 --> 00:29:25.873 pretty difficult to work with. 00:29:26.458 --> 00:29:27.298 Mike Bifulco: No doubt. 00:29:27.298 --> 00:29:27.538 Yeah. 00:29:27.538 --> 00:29:27.898 Wow. 00:29:27.898 --> 00:29:29.068 That makes it super easy. 00:29:29.068 --> 00:29:32.208 If, if you have just listened to Alex and you, you fall into any one 00:29:32.208 --> 00:29:34.548 of those buckets get in touch stat. 00:29:34.598 --> 00:29:36.548 Alex, then where's the best place to find you online? 00:29:37.048 --> 00:29:38.938 Alex Klarfeld: You can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me on Twitter. 00:29:39.128 --> 00:29:41.158 I respond to dms on both. 00:29:41.158 --> 00:29:42.738 So please, please hit me up. 00:29:42.738 --> 00:29:45.288 You can find me on GitHub too if you wanna watch me write code, 00:29:45.288 --> 00:29:46.538 but that's a little less exciting. 00:29:48.053 --> 00:29:50.273 Mike Bifulco: Well, I will make sure that there's links in the show notes 00:29:50.273 --> 00:29:53.923 to everything we've discussed ways to get super good and to you and Twitter 00:29:53.923 --> 00:29:55.303 and LinkedIn and all the other places. 00:29:55.523 --> 00:29:57.833 Alex, I really appreciate you coming and hanging out and telling 00:29:57.833 --> 00:29:59.063 us a little bit about Super Good. 00:29:59.403 --> 00:30:00.183 Thanks so much for joining. 00:30:00.183 --> 00:30:00.813 I really appreciate it. 00:30:01.443 --> 00:30:01.653 Alex Klarfeld: Yeah. 00:30:01.653 --> 00:30:02.463 Thank you so much, Mike. 00:30:02.463 --> 00:30:03.213 I appreciate it too. 00:30:03.873 --> 00:30:05.133 Mike Bifulco: Of course, Alex Feld. 00:30:05.133 --> 00:30:05.793 We'll catch you next time. 00:30:05.793 --> 00:30:06.213 Thank you. 00:30:06.388 --> 00:30:07.198 Alex Klarfeld: Alright, see ya. 00:30:07.893 --> 00:30:08.073 Mike Bifulco: Bye.