API Evangelist Conversation With Marc Laventure of Scalar

Hey Ken, uh, I’m Mark. I’m the co founder and CEO of Scaler.

So Scalar is focused all around open API. So we’re trying to build tooling to [00:01:00] make documenting, testing, and then eventually discovering APIs easier. And that’s all built on the open API standard. So we started with, um, building beautiful API references, so if you’re familiar with Swagger UI or Redocly, we built an alternative to that, that’s become, um, very, very popular. And inside of it we have a deeply integrated API client, and if you’re familiar with API clients, Usually they’re for testing your APIs, whether that’s HTTP based or maybe, uh, real time based messaging, um, and usually they’re kind of, there’s a few open source options and that’s great, but the big difference for Scalar is we keep the OpenAPI document alive, so when you import Your open API collector document. We actually don’t like fully dereference it. We keep it alive. And then also if you’re just using the API client ad hoc testing APIs that maybe aren’t originally [00:02:00] from an open API document, you can actually export it as an open API document. So. Pretty much like bring an open API document to Scalar, you can document it, get an API client for your team to all collaborate on, and you just keep that document alive.

Well, firstly, My co founder and I, Cam, just love open source and something more that we love than open source are just great standards. So when you have a wonderful [00:03:00] open source, open standard to define an API that’s completely agnostic of the language you’re building in, you can’t really get much better than that. Um, and one of my favorite things actually about Open API is sometimes the fact that when people don’t even know that they’re leveraging it. So a lot of wonderful backend frameworks like fast API, light star, um, and now. net with version nine, they automatically generate open API documents right for you, right when you’re building your code. So you don’t even have to think about it. And what’s cool about that is you get all these sweet second order. Um, bonuses. So you can quickly document with scalar your API. You can quickly use your API client to, to live test your API as you’re building it. If you need to generate SDKs, you can go and take that to a ton of wonderful open source ones. There’s also like, you know, speakeasy, um, stainless and, and fern. And there’s just [00:04:00] like, I think hey, API is one for TypeScript. There’s all these great SDKs. If you need mocking, you kind of unlock this, this huge engineering velocity from just adopting this standard. And, um, yeah, I’m a really, really big fan of open source. So having the standard being open sources is wonderful too.

It’s both. And one of my favorite parts about, about APIs too. And this is one of the things that Cam and I, [00:05:00] when we were thinking, so our first company, we, We started called Launchico and we sold, sold to Namecheap and that company was a website builder, all focused around accessibility and making it as easy as possible to build a website. So when we were looking at starting Scalar, we were like, why aren’t APIs as accessible as they could be? And there’s all these jumping off and like hook points for someone integrating an API, whether that’s like an internal consumer or producer, but then also the external facing. So. Maybe that’s really great docs, really great SDKs, a really great testing client integrated with the API. And you as the API producer having all these resources available for your consumers in an easy way to consume just makes that for that time to 200 like as short as possible, right? So what we found is a lot of our customers and users are producers. But [00:06:00] now, you know, since we’re on both sides of it. The consumers of it are coming into scaler as well to easily adopt any API that they’re interfacing with that is hopefully on the open API standard.`

Yeah. One of the, the, [00:07:00] uh, us mentioning kind of the. The thread that we pulled on when we started Scalar was all around accessibility and making APIs as accessible as possible. So right now, primarily focused on engineers, but we have some pretty cool, um, ideas. You know, all around large language models and how models are able to interact with APIs that we think will unlock. It’s kind of like the retool, but for APIs so people can come in and build whatever they need to or whatever they want to interface with APIs that are maybe internal or external facing. Um, so today, more so engineering, but I would say. Uh, at the end of this year, if hopefully we do another one of these, uh, I’ll probably talk a lot about how it’s, uh, maybe the whole stack of the team.

Yeah. So what we really enjoy right now is we have like two parts of scalar. We have the cloud hosted offering and then we also have the open source version and our API client is. It’s fully offline, uh, built off open standard and it will be offline first forever. We want people to be able to, if they need to, publish their API docs right from the client. Um, but all of that kind of goes to this like centralized [00:09:00] dashboard that we have on the cloud. So. A common issue with apps that you love, you could name any of them, uh, is over time, more enterprises come in and you’re building for not only just like the people, the smaller teams, SMBs, mid markets, but then you’re kind of building for enterprises. And a typical feeling that people have for apps that they loved is like it feels bloated, or maybe there’s all this stuff that they don’t need. So for us, it’s when we build our products, we really emphasize on having them be able to stand alone on there and do exactly what they’re meant to be. But if we want to do more, we kind of integrate it into this dashboard and this centralized place for managing all your open APIs or publishing right from there. So we keep the dedicated apps simple and straightforward. Um, whereas when you go and you want to do more, let’s just say mocking, OpenAPI linting, or managing of your OpenAPI documents, um, we, we wouldn’t jam [00:10:00] that in, in the client per se. Just like how when you’re writing docs, we don’t want to do all of that in there as well. It’s, it’s, it’s, and this is something Cameron and I have a lot of experience with, with when we built our website builder. We built a really popular logo maker as well. And those two products can stand on their own. But when they’re deeply integrated in a meaningful way, it’s like magic. So,

So for us, what, again, what I, what I really love about scaler [00:11:00] and why we built like this open source company is the things that we’re open sourcing can fully live on their own and. We would never want to monetize exactly that. So what we really see the power in for Scalar, and what we’re seeing for how we do make money, is for enterprises to come in and manage, version, document, all of their APIs on our cloud offering. And that would never seep into our off, like any of our open source. You should think of it, or we can think of it as, as the things that we open source. Are really powerful tools and then the cloud offering is okay. Now we’re putting this in a tool kits that is fully managed, maintained by scalar that large enterprises don’t need to worry about and can just focus on bringing in their open API documents and none of [00:12:00] the extra stuff that goes into it. But the nice part is, is if you want to fully self host scaler, like you can go and do that and we would never try to monetize on that. So again, it’s kind of like this registry. Um, and open API document management. And then we, we kind of take that and go to the second order effects of, okay, you want docs, okay, you want a testing client and you want that feedback loop back in.

Those are great questions. Right now there’s kind of like on the micro level where we’re shipping a lot of features for our open source community around, uh, multiple open API documents. This one I’m like, like on the short term, I’m super excited about this one. It’s our most requested feature, um, specifically in the dot net community, uh, which has been absolutely wonderful, wonderful for us to, to be a part of. And we’re trying to hit HTTP parity with other API clients, which will be done by the end of this month. Longer term, um, what we really see Scalar as, and what we’re seeing it happen now, um, for the rest of the year is, is a place where companies Bring their APIs to and think of open API and when they are looking for things around open API, whether that’s [00:14:00] docs, client, um, SDKs, anything that they need for their API, they come to scaler and we’re seeing that and so the kind of roadmap around all of our products is really just honing in on that. So we did a lot of building last year, Introducing like the new clients, um, and this year’s a lot of refinements and really bringing in all those products together. Um, In a meaningful way.

Yeah, that’s, oh my gosh. So for me, one of my favorite things about working on Scalar is, is really just being able to, it’s like the quintessential, like, building something that people want. I think it’s like the YC one. But it’s like, we didn’t go through YC, but it, but it’s such a, it’s such a good one. For, for, for, for us, it’s, we have such a high impact because not only does The product we build help the engineering, like the producers, but it also impacts and makes consuming the API so much better. So pretty much every sales [00:16:00] call, every customer support thing is around trying to make their APIs more, more accessible and consumable or producible. So, and it’s just been so wonderful to see the diversity of, of types of customers and, and just like APIs that we’re, we’re going like, I, I couldn’t even. When we started this two years ago, I wouldn’t have even been able to guess that we would be helping with, like, incredibly large shipping freighter companies. Like, that wasn’t even in my radar. Like, I didn’t even think that APIs were used in that regard, but they are heavily. And so, um, but then going from that to, to really early startups that are trying to, like, make their docs and SDKs awesome. Um, so for me, it’s, it’s really all around the users and customers and, um, And we built, like, an incredible team at Scalar, so, uh, you know, I’m, I’m saying this from an incredibly privileged position. We have unbelievable, you can go look at our GitHub and all [00:17:00] the open source contributions that are coming in from the whole team at Scalar. It’s, uh, Yeah, those two, we’ve created this, just the dream kind of work environment, uh, for Cam and I, and, um, yeah, I’m super grateful for that.