
How to sell to 20M software devs with amazing onboarding - garry
https://blog.garrytan.com/masterclass-with-algolia-how-to-capture-the-heart-of-20m-software-developers
======
sudhirj
I tend to feel a little intimidated by companies that offer fantastic
experiences like this, but then I keep trying to remember this:

Algolia looked like shit when it started. There was none of this shine and
polish. IIRC it was some text styled with Bootstrap 2. Or might have been 1.

Stripe also looked like shit when it started. No shine or polish, no developer
website based developer experience to speak of, no world leading 60fps
animations, no fantastically versioned docs, nothing.

Build something people want / something that solves a hard problem and makes
people powerful and more enabled. Companies that do this can afford to build
fantastic developer experiences after 10 years of doing it, but companies that
try hard to build excellent developer experiences will not necessarily be
successful.

~~~
justaguyhere
If someone starts a Algolia or a Stripe competitor today, they _have_ to have
good user experience to even compete, isn't it? Because Stripe and Algolia
have already shown what is possible.

~~~
stickfigure
If you plan to compete using their feature set, then yes. But that's a
terrible idea.

Find something that Algolia or Stripe won't or cannot do (for deep reasons)
and offer that. Stripe has a list of "Restricted Businesses" each of which is
a market that would be delighted to be served _at all_ , let alone with some
polish. Of course there are complicating factors... but you don't expect this
to be easy, do you?

~~~
Redsquare
Algolia sadly cannot yet do things like "show me the items around/about $200",
i don't care if the are +/\- a few dollars

~~~
sarahdayan
Hi there! I work at Algolia and I may have a solution for you: you can filter
on ranges to offer that kind of experience.

For instance, if you decide to accept a +/\- $20 margin, instead of filtering
on exact price, you'd create a filter like `price < 180 AND price > 220`
(replacing the numbers with your formula to calculate the range).

This gives you full power on what is the "error margin" you accept. Hope this
helps!

------
takumo
Except its right there in the transcript. It used to be a self-service SaaS
application, to enterprise sales. Nearly all features are gated behind an
enterprise-sales "contact us" box with no transparency in pricing.

They're not selling to developers, they're selling to business executives,
they give a nod to the fact developers are the end-user of this product, but
all the material on the site is as executive-oriented as it gets. Listing
other brands they've sold the product to, big stats about ROI and increased
sales and revenue and "white-papers" which are really just fluff-pieces to
hype up the product.

As a developer, I __need __to see transparent pricing up-front. It 's no good
telling me about features, APIs without a way to figure out what it'll cost
because that cost might easily be orders-of-magnitude out of range. Look at
the pricing for Algolia - $499/mo and you don't actually get any of the
features that separate it from products like ElasticSearch which are available
as open-source downloads or as a much cheaper hosted service. You get tooling
to make integrating search easier than the open-source alternatives, but now
you're bound to the tooling provided by that service and its capabilities, or
writing your own tooling anyway.

Either give me a monthly cost I can use to determine if its worth suggesting a
product, or give me usage-based pricing that lets me start out cheaply, and
lets my bill grow as the value I gain from your product grows.

~~~
redox_
(Sylvain from Algolia speaking) Thanks for sharing, our pricing & its
transparency is actually something we are working on right now to address this
perception. We've been iterating a few times already over the past 7 years,
but this is one more signal for us to act!

The reality is that based on the number of objects you want to search in, your
search traffic, your searches' complexity and your index/relevance
configuration; the underlying resources can vary soo much, it's hard to have a
single pricing that fits all use-case.

~~~
WaltPurvis
This has always been a major deterrent to me wanting to use Algolia. It's
basically impossible for me to know whether for x number of users doing y
number of searches Algolia will cost $100/month or $1,000/month or
$10,000/month. It amazes me that anyone commits to investing development
effort in using Algolia (with lock-in, to boot) when you have no idea whether
it's something you can even afford.

~~~
donmatito
As with all usage-based product, when you start it is cheap (much cheaper than
building on your own), then as you grow your resources will hopefully scale
with the number of users.

If your resources don't scale with usage, yes, you have a problem, but I'd say
not limited to algolia

~~~
WaltPurvis
What's different is that with other products, i.e., those that have clear and
understandable pricing, you can forecast the future costs and make a decision
about whether it's an affordable solution for the particular product/business
you're building. With Algolia, you can't.

Why would I want to build a product/business that uses Algolia technology as a
key component when I have no idea whether the eventual cost of Algolia will be
acceptable? I wouldn't, which is why despite Algolia's extremely attractive
features, I have time and time again been unable to recommend its use.

------
wenbin
I recommend Algolia to my friends who are working on side projects or want to
implement search for small datasets (less than 100k documents to index).
Algolia is indeed an amazing service / api!

But I don't use Algolia for my project (and my full-time job now) Listen Notes
(a podcast search engine). I did some back of envelope calculation on pricing,
and figured that I had to pay $50k ~ $100k/month (at least) to Algolia, which
is like I have to raise a pre-seed round every month :) I run a podcast API
myself. I understand that it's impossible for an api (and its pricing) to fit
every use cases in the world.

~~~
tschellenbach
There is some truth to this, API pricing is difficult. Hard to make it work
for every use case.

------
kirstenbirgit
My experience (target is small teams)

– Be up front about pricing and terms (depends on target business size though)

– Easy to understand but detailed feature lists, tier comparisons,
screenshots, videos

– Public, well organized documentation that goes in depth and is easy to
search/navigate, also acts as good SEO

– Plenty of samples in documentation so you can paste and go

– Quick support that can get technical enough

– Offer yearly and monthly subscriptions

Developers usually spend a few minutes scanning each solution they're
comparing, so within very short time and clicks, they should be able to decide
why you should be a pick and not the next one. There's usually a hard
criteria. They need to solve a problem. Investigate what kinds of features
your users picked you for.

Also, trials: If you don't offer trials, you'll get higher quality customers.
(But still offer refunds just in case.) They'll be the type who can spend the
first monthly fee to check out your site, and have realistic expectations.

------
softfalcon
And if you go to their home page and try and click on "Developers" in the
navigation bar, nothing will happen...

You have to click on one of the other links that actually shows a correct
hover icon and THEN click on the "Developers" link to get there.

Maybe their docs are great, but a bunch of links on the main site are
broken...

~~~
redox_
Oh that's weird, a dropdown menu should appear and give you access to a list
of developer resources :/

------
jpkeisala
This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?

~~~
garry
Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I
also invested from my fund.

But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while.
We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past:
Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so
some of this is wanting to point to things that work well.

Interactivity in particular is _really_ important to nail in first time
experience.

I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including
Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used
both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my
top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team...
but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at
scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I
genuinely believe it's pretty magical.

~~~
throwaway3157
> Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago.
> I also invested from my fund. But I've been meaning to do a sit-down
> discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first
> developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and
> developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point
> to things that work well. Interactivity in particular is really important to
> nail in first time experience. I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in
> all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to
> implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when
> I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In
> retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.)
> And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having
> something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely
> believe it's pretty magical.

You didn't answer OP's question, which was:

> This is an advertisement of Algolia. Isn't it?

Reflecting on your answer, you appear to be advertising for Algolia as well.
It's a nice product, but the impression I get is that OP is right -- this post
is an advertisement.

~~~
lnanek2
It's certainly advertising, but he did seem to offer some extra role of: >
wanting to point to things that work well

Which is more inline with normal HN content. Pointing to some technical thing
which works well we can integrate into our coding/startups/etc.. In this case
it happens to be a non-open source subscription business replacement for
coding your own search, so it's very commercial, of course, but paid off the
shelf solutions are technically an alternative to coding your own search with
open source stuff.

------
dhruvkar
I see a lot of comments here deriding this as an ad for Algolia. With all the
conflicts of interest, that may well be true.

However, automatically dismissing an entire piece of content because of a
conflict of interest, which actually may not be that big (e.g. what percentage
of their portfolio is Algolia, that it'd be worth pushing), seems closed-
minded.

Investors are people, and like anyone, being excited about a company/product
and using their platform to share it, is a pretty benign thing to do.

The over-the-top cynicism seems unnecessary.

------
andygcook
Meta question: @garry - Do you have a post on the your video making process
and what equipment you're using? Would be curious to know if you're mostly
making these videos all yourself or if you hired a video production agency to
help with the recording, editing, etc. Thanks!

------
mabbo
Call this whatever you want, but it really feels like it's primary purpose is
to sell me something, not to teach me something. And that's fine- that's
something every company has to do eventually - but it doesn't feel like real
HN content to me.

~~~
throwlaplace
i would guess that a full %50-%70 of HN content is content marketing of some
sort (either for a startup or for someone's personal brand). so many
prescriptions on HN but no ban on this kind of content. makes you think.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The content has to meet certain quality standard to survive here. Most content
marketing dones't, but some does, sometimes. And when it does, you may as well
leave it up - per [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/).

~~~
keanzu
Wow, that's fantastic, best xkcd ever!

~~~
TeMPOraL
Nice try :).

~~~
keanzu
Oooh, oh, are you kidding me?! This is the meanest and most hilarious thing
anyone has ever said to me on HN! Two words and I got accused of being a spam
bot making a "not constructive" and/or "unhelpful" comment!

Destroyed!

I tip my hat to you good sir. I have been roasted, but well.

------
chenlianmt
Trying to add search features in my personal blog. Its free plan looks good
enough.

p.s. looks like Hacker News is using algolia for searching right now.

~~~
dang
HN Search has been using Algolia for many years now.

------
AlchemistCamp
Looking at the docs at 4:37
([https://youtu.be/idyfHs3DWmc?t=277](https://youtu.be/idyfHs3DWmc?t=277)),
I'd suggest they add Elixir and Rust as options!

~~~
aseure
Disclaimer: I'm maintaining the Java/Scala/C#/Go API clients at Algolia.

Exilir and Rust would indeed be great additions to our integrations. However,
we are really cautious when considering to support new languages. As said in
the interview, we try to provide those API clients in the most idiomatic way
for each language.

At the moment, we do not have a lot of demands for those languages nor the
necessary workforce to onboard on those two languages (only very few people
are proficient with those languages at Algolia and we don't have any
production code using them IIRC).

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Sure, I understand. It was a purely selfish request since 100% of my
production code is currently Elixir and I'm also interested in Rust.

Can't blame a dev for being drawn to newer languages!

