Mack: Spokal slowed new feature development to maintain ~20 API integrations
Chris Mack · 1411 This Tool is Flat, Bootstrapped, Why Won't Founder Get The Hell out and Sell? · Jun 5, 2019 · at 8:05
Chris Mack, founder of marketing automation platform Spokal, explains to Nathan Latka why maintaining third-party API connections dominates developer capacity.
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“So the issue with this kind of space is it changes so fast that it's difficult to try to like you can't just build a product and then leave it running because all the other, like we integrate with probably about 20 different systems, which is kind of where a lot of the value add comes from like in Spocal. So just maintaining a lot of the systems when, for example, you know, Facebook updates their API or Twitter updates their API or any of our partners do requires quite a lot of work. So we've slowed down on new feature development. And really kind of focused on maintaining current APIs and also.”
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“SMB is kind of a tough space. People, Start a new platform. You know, try to handle it for three months or six months or a year and then leave.”
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“We stopped growing probably a few years back and we went fully remote and now we manage everything remotely.”
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“I'm not sure there's a whole lot of point in discussing exact numbers, but we, you know, we were doing yeah. High five figures.”
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