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Nango (YC W23) - Founder Interview Highlights

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00:00 Thanks again, Robin, for doing this with me.

00:04 Hi, Ernest.

00:05 Nice to be here.

00:06 So would you like to tell me a little bit about your background and how Nango started?

00:11 Sure.

00:12 I'm originally a software engineer by training.

00:14 I started a B2B SaaS a few years ago.

00:17 We built that to about 55 people.

00:19 We had a lot of integrations with other software systems and then we discovered the pain of running those.

00:25 So we had 15% of our engineers actually just working on integrations

00:28 and maintaining them and adding a few more.

00:31 And so that's how we discovered that.

00:33 And then we went deeper and realized that there's a lot of teams out there

00:36 basically building integrations one by one from scratch.

00:39 And so that's something that we wanted to improve upon.

00:41 And that's how Nango got started.

00:44 I love it.

00:44 These are the best problems to work on, the ones that come from personal experience.

00:47 Yeah, the ones that you know yourself, definitely.

00:50 Just check out the GitHub repo.

00:51 And I think it takes, like, you know, two, three minutes to set up a first sync.

00:54 And from there on out, it should hopefully be quite smooth.

00:57 Exactly.

00:57 So now it is the first year of Nango.

01:00 How did you approach finding your first contributors?

01:02 Where did they come from?

01:03 And what have you learned maybe from it?

01:06 Yeah, that was a really interesting one.

01:08 You know, like we were not really like looking for contributors per se.

01:12 I think we were definitely like, you know, looking for users and people to try it and give us feedback.

01:16 And that sort of naturally morphed into people contributing.

01:19 I think one of the things I was very positively surprised about, like the whole open source community coming sort of from more traditional, you could say, sort of like cloud B2B SaaS background.

01:28 So people don't just raise problems, but they like actively contribute solutions.

01:32 So as quickly as we had a few people like, you know, find problems or small, you know, bugs, they would typically like say, look, here's the issue and here's the PR that fixes it.

01:41 And that was, you know, really, really cool, obviously.

01:43 And it continues to be really cool. People come with a solution prepared, right?

01:46 And they're like, you know, here's my PR, basically, that fixes the bug that I found yesterday

01:50 that, you know, I messaged you on Slack about. And I was like, this is amazing.

01:54 And at the moment, it's just the founders working on this full time, or are you also looking

01:58 to expand your team, maybe involve some contributors more?

02:03 No, currently it's just the two founders

02:05 who are working on this.

02:06 And then, you know, we do have a few contributors

02:07 who are contributing quite actively.

02:09 And then, you know, we're definitely looking

02:10 to expand the team in terms of like hiring

02:12 and growing the team, right?

02:13 Like we're starting to see, you know, good growth, basically.

02:16 We went from, you know, zero to 200 stars

02:19 in less than two months

02:20 and like a hundred people in the community.

02:22 So we're starting to see good traction.

02:23 I think it makes sense to double down on the team as well

02:25 in order to be able to continue the trajectory that we're on, basically,

02:30 and make sure everybody has a great experience from day one.

02:32 That makes total sense.

02:34 And so do you think it's an edge when it comes to product development

02:36 to actually be open source and you can move faster like that?

02:40 I think for us, it's definitely been a great fit.

02:43 I'm not sure every product would benefit as much from it.

02:46 I think if you're building for engineers and you're building a very infrastructure or dev-centric

02:50 product, I think there's a lot of advantages.

02:52 I think it's actually one of the really interesting movements that's happening is that I think

02:56 a lot more companies are going open source first this way.

02:59 So they started with Cal.com and GitLab certainly was one of the very first guys.

03:05 And now, you know, you have companies like Postalk, Airbyte, right, like sort of doing a lot of things there.

03:11 Databases have been open source for a very long time.

03:14 That's been a very successful model for them.

03:16 So I think there's like a big, you know, sort of culture around that, especially for dev-centric products.

03:22 I'm not sure it'd be great, like, for everybody.

03:24 I think it always, you know, depends what you're building, basically.

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