API Evangelist Conversation with Luke Seelenbinder, Founder & CEO of Stadia Maps

I’m Luke. I’m founder and CEO of Stadia Maps. And we offer a map and location API service for developers to use to integrate location into any part of their products. My background really goes back to starting as a technical developer. I’ve been using APIs kind of from the beginning of my career. Um, mostly at startups, creating. Products that consume APIs, creating APIs as a product. And now for the last few years I focused on creating a company with an API as the primary product.

Well, I would like to say it’s because we had this grand plan of, of absolute dominance and we knew we could do it. But at the end of the day, we actually were just kind of naive and we had a problem and we thought we could solve it. We, if you, anyone has used Google maps, um, you can look at their pricing over the last 10 years and 10 years ago, it was pretty much free. And so almost every developer in the world had used Google maps API for something. Um, and then about eight years ago, they changed that and they went from, Free to costing quite a lot. And that hit a company I was working at pretty hard. Um, there was a very small part of the site that was very useful, um, but really couldn’t justify a cost of hundreds of dollars a month. And my co founder and I looked at the problem and said, there’s this great source of data called open street map. Um, why don’t we see if we can solve this problem for, uh, the company we’re working at and then. Because we really wanted to create a company at the same time. We said, why not make stadium apps? Why not sell this API to everyone else? Cause everyone else is having this problem too. And out of that, we created kind of our first two APIs, which was mapping and then routing. And we kept. Thinking, well, no one’s stopping us. So let’s keep doing this. People are buying. Let’s, let’s create something real here. And so fast forward eight years, um, we were crazy, uh, but it actually ended up working out in the end.]

It’s a really good question. We actually were definitely product led for the vast majority of our, um, Time. And even now we’re, we’re mostly product led growth. Um, we’ve listened to clients quite a bit and our product roadmap has been less about us having a grand vision of this is exactly what we want to build, but more about listening to the clients we have today and making sure that we’re building the next thing they need. Um, and when you look at that in terms of pricing, um, what thing we’ve always tried to do from the beginning is. When we look at building a new service, sure. We look at the, the service market for that particular product. Let’s say it’s a particular kind of map. Um, but we also look at it from French first principles. We ask. What should this cost? If we just look at it in, in raw terms, what is the actual technical requirements to go into this product? What are the data requirements? What are the kind of operational requirements? And then from there come to a number that gives us a really solid margin and then build the product knowing this is the target we want to be able to hit. Let’s see how we can architect systems to hit this target. And that’s led us to do some very interesting things over the course of Kind of life as a company. Um, everyone would tell you not to build a CDN. Um, I would tell you not to build a CDN, but we actually ended up building a CDN very early on in the company. And we still run on the same CDN because one of the key cost inputs for map tiles is. The cost of delivering them to the client, which is mostly bandwidth and request count, which when you have map tiles, they tend to be really high number of requests and really large amount of bandwidth. You put that together and people end up with CDN bills that are more, much higher than any other application. And so we ended up building a CDN, creating a much better cost of kind of delivering the product than our competitors. And that’s allowed us to price very competitively in the market. Um, we have had price changes because obviously things cost more than they cost eight years ago. Um, but when you look at kind of the amount we cost relative to the markets, we’ve been trying to keep that quite consistent. And so that when companies come to us. They know they can start for a reasonable price. And then as they scale, they can stay in kind of an economically viable solution. So good

It means that our primary, the thing we primarily sell is not our dashboard or analytics. It is endpoints for developers to use. What we track people using is number of API requests. Um, what we. Cell is credits to get access to APIs. Um, and so basically everything we bill for comes down to. The API is a product. Um, and then that’s to get different kinds of data because fundamentally an API is a request and a response. So if you look at our map API, it’s a request for a part of the world at some scale and a response with the data for that part of the world, or if you look at our, uh, Geocoding service. It’s a request with a search string. For instance, you search for Paris, France, and you get back a response, which is Jason. And it says Paris, France is at these coordinates. It’s in this country. It’s in this continent. These are this. Postal code, things like that. And that’s to me what an API is a product looks like. It’s actually kind of the, the raw technical, um, details of a request response, and that’s the fundamental business unit that you’re kind of selling.

I think when you look at it, the first biggest challenge we hit was the technical, we had to start with what is amounts to gigabytes or terabytes of data and reduce it to something that’s fast, efficient, reliable. Um, and that’s the problem we really solved for the first probably four or five years of the company. And at that point, being technical founders, we realized that we’d spent five years building a product. And. Um, and so really the challenge has been as technical founders to learn how to market and sell this fantastic product that we built. Um, and I think if you look at a lot of technical find founders, it’s the same growing process of you start with a great product and then you realize only 10 percent of the people that should be using it or using it. And you think, well, I’ll add this feature. And then those. Other 90 percent of people will come because someone will talk about us. And then eventually you realize no one’s going to talk about you. You have to go talk about yourself and go out and get people to be interested in, in what you’ve built. And that’s really the challenge right now is we have quite a few customers, quite a few users, but actually getting out. To all the customers that could potentially benefit from what we’ve built at Stadia Maps.

I think through most of the life of the company, we have crafted what we, what we’ve built for developers. We are developers, so it’s easiest for us to speak to other developers. And quite frequently, customers do come to us. Through kind of the development team. Um, but I think you’re, you’re right. That’s quite a bit of the messaging and the kind of work we’ve done so far has been targeted at developers. And as we grow, it’s going to have to also target the people making the decisions and do a better job of communicating the same values that developers need to communicate. Understand more intuitively because it’s kind of what developers do every day is work with APIs and, and convert those same values into messaging that a business decision maker will understand.

I think it, it’s really started because I love maps. Um, I’ve loved maps since I was a kid and the idea of being able to create something so visual and so, uh, aesthetically pleasing and then create a business out of that, it’s just. It really is a kind of self supporting cycle of building a cool map, seeing people use it. And that’s really grown from just loving maps to helping companies and fundamentally people solve problems. And I think as a technologist, that’s what I’ve always tried to do is Take technology and use it to solve problems, not just create technology for its own sake and creating a company is really the best way in my mind to do that because you get instant feedback. People give you money because you’re solving their problems and you get to use that as a feedback loop to then create a better product that solves more problems for more people.