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SuperTokens.com (YC S20) Founder Interview Highlights

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00:00 So before SuperDuggan, we actually started this other company called Quali.

00:03 So when I was working at this venture capital firm, like I quit and basically started that

00:07 company and that company didn't work out, right?

00:09 Like basically like we were growing well, we got users, but it was like a free consumer

00:13 company and like, you know, the monetization wasn't pretty clear.

00:17 But what we ended up doing there is like we built like some interesting tech, like a bunch

00:23 of different, really interesting things.

00:25 And one of those things had to do with authentication

00:27 and specifically, very specifically to do with something

00:30 called session management,

00:31 which is like this one piece of the puzzle

00:33 in the overall authentication space.

00:35 But that piece was not being solved for well

00:37 at that point in time.

00:39 You know, it was like a big security vulnerability

00:40 for even very large companies.

00:42 And we saw that most like, you know,

00:44 companies were just not handling that piece of authentication well or securely so um so yeah so

00:50 we were like okay we've got this thing let's just write a blog post about it like just talk about

00:54 how it works um and you'll see how people respond and then we wrote like two very extensive pieces

00:59 on session management and what is the flow that we recommend and how we've built it out for ourselves

01:03 and that blog post actually did really well.

01:05 You know, it got like tens of thousands

01:08 to hundreds of thousands of views.

01:09 We had people from all over the world reach out.

01:11 It was like the first piece of content we'd ever written.

01:13 And we were like, okay, fine.

01:14 Like clearly people think this is interesting.

01:17 So yeah, so then we were like, okay,

01:18 let's see what we can do with this.

01:20 We got into YC with that.

01:22 And then there was always like, again,

01:24 we didn't know too much about like, you know,

01:26 a lot of these things.

01:26 It was like the whole, it was a lot of it was new for us.

01:29 So there was always a back and forth debate between open source, closed source.

01:32 Then from moving from session management to an overall authentication play, right?

01:36 Like not just solving one piece of the puzzle, but the entire puzzle itself.

01:40 So yeah, that didn't just came through the journey.

01:42 It wasn't like the first part of it was not, oh, I want

01:45 to build something open source.

01:46 It was very much like that game much after the fact.

01:49 We've got contributions from like small things like typos and improvements

01:53 and docs to all the way to like building full features and, you know, like months

01:57 of time of engineering effort of someone really good, so, you know, that would be

02:01 worth like tens of thousands of dollars each, so, so it's like the whole range of contributions.

02:06 I think we have 700 contributors across all the repos.

02:09 I think as an open source company, though, the thing that you always have to figure that

02:14 you get right is how do you structure the product in terms of being free as well as

02:18 being paid, right?

02:19 You obviously need to make sure that this becomes a good business, but at the same time,

02:22 you want to stay true to like making sure that you're delivering value to people in the sense that like you know if you're a developer

02:27 you're building a side app you should be able to use super tokens for free and then there should

02:31 be like a lot of you there should be a lot of use cases which should be free and they shouldn't have

02:35 to pay you but at the same time you want to be able to make sure that your fortune five like

02:39 your largest companies in the world that have billions of dollars can pay you right that they're

02:42 not being able to use the product for free. So getting that balance right is always tricky.

02:45 And obviously you end up giving away more for free than you'd like.

02:49 Like we have now companies that run super tokens on the scale of millions of users,

02:53 large companies, and they end up doing that for free, right?

02:57 So that's always something you need to make sure you get right.

03:00 We've crossed 8,000 GitHub stars now, which is like the public metric.

03:04 You know, we've, I think according to Luna Capital,

03:07 they released this Ross Index

03:09 of fastest growing startups every year, right?

03:10 So we were in the top 20 fastest growing startup,

03:13 open source startups from last year.

03:16 I mean, a lot of our metrics are public.

03:18 Like you can look at like our NPM downloads.

03:21 I think we've now crossed 40, 50,000 monthly downloads

03:24 of our Node SDK.

03:25 So over 10,000 weekly downloads on NPM downloads, I think we've now crossed 40,000, 50,000 monthly downloads of our node SDK. So over 10,000 weekly downloads on NPM.

03:29 Yeah, I mean, we have, you know, thousands of apps using Super Tokens today.

03:34 I was speaking with Cam from linen.dev, who actually used linen for your community page.

03:42 And so Cam told me that Super Tokens is his favorite project.

03:45 And he pointed out that he likes, you guys can do more with less.

03:49 And I reckon this relates to funding and to hiring.

03:53 So just very curious to hear your take on this.

03:55 Yeah.

03:56 Yeah, yeah.

03:57 We've been pretty lean throughout.

03:59 We've not spent much money.

04:01 I mean, I would say typically like for an open source dev tool and dev

04:05 infrastructure company, I think we've raised fairly less and spent very less. I would say that

04:09 again, maybe this is a bit of a bold claim, but I would say that today, like we're widely regarded

04:14 as like one of the mainstream authentication providers. Like if you see like someone

04:18 like evaluating all the options, we typically get featured in that evaluation.

04:23 And we've done managed to do that with not much at all in terms of like

04:27 relatively compared to the other people who are,

04:29 who also feature in that list.

04:31 So, yeah.

04:33 What do you think were the, have been the highest leverage points?

04:36 Surely it starts with product,

04:37 but any auxiliary activity you did that helped with that adoption?

04:42 Just like the entire culture and philosophy of how we built the company.

04:44 Like, you know, obviously we work really hard right so like which means you need less

04:49 people if you work really hard so um so that's that's one thing um and then i mean also it's

04:55 not like you know we did everything in three months like we've like a lot of it is done by

04:58 like a small group of people and we've done it like passionately and over time right so it's

05:02 been a few years since we've been doing this right so we didn't like you could obviously raise much more money and then do it in three months um but

05:08 then we think that like we think the amount of time we've taken is also the right amount because

05:11 you get to learn a lot as you're developing right so there have been a lot of like really interesting

05:15 insights that by virtue of doing everything ourselves we've learned a lot from the market

05:19 we've learned a lot from customers from users um. So yeah, so I think those two.

05:25 And then obviously being in India obviously also helps

05:26 because engineering costs are much, much less than in the US.

05:31 The team is about 15 to 18 people now.

05:36 It's kind of spread out across the world.

05:38 Like a lot of it in India, like majority of people in India,

05:40 but we do have people in Europe and the US as well.

05:43 Yeah, and I think we always have a couple of positions open. We always are looking for good people. So there's

05:48 always a couple of positions open. Being open source has definitely helped us with hiring,

05:52 at least like in terms of like a funnel, like a hiring funnel. I think there are a couple of

05:56 hires we've made, a couple of people that have worked in the product that just would not have

06:02 been possible if we weren't open source. Like the only reason they reached out or the only reason they applied or the only reason

06:07 they even contributed is because we're open source, right?

06:09 And that's all been very meaningfully advantageous to us.

06:11 Like we've seen a customer, for example, like, like people really want support help from

06:17 us.

06:17 Like they want to pay us for support to implement super tokens for them, right?

06:20 Like there are a lot of companies that actually do pay us and want to pay us for support services certain kinds of companies cannot do sell so with super tokens because auth is just such a

06:29 core part of the infrastructure right so they need to have like these specific questions that

06:34 even if it's then the docs and all they just want to talk to someone to talk through it

06:37 like they want to do like an architecture review or something like that and uh this this type of

06:43 support is it something that you know only the only the team members could help with or could a community member, an expert in the community

06:49 help a customer in this kind of way? Over time, I think definitely a community member could like

06:55 a hundred percent, but I think the, you need to be a little bit bigger. And like, I guess like

07:00 a community member needs to be financially incentivized to want to spend that kind of

07:04 time. Right. And there was a time when we couldn't get three people to use the product.

07:07 Right.

07:07 And, and I think we've definitely, that's definitely changed.

07:09 Like there are like a very large number of people now using super tokens and using it

07:14 consistently in production.

07:16 So I think we've proven like broad-based adoption and broad-based like ability, like

07:20 propensity for people to want to use super tokens.

07:22 I think now it's just like, can you continue to scale?

07:25 Can you continue to do that

07:26 at bigger and bigger scales

07:28 and with larger and larger companies?

07:31 So we've done that with a certain type of company.

07:35 Now you want the product to become even more mature.

07:39 So you want to go after even larger and larger companies.

07:41 So I think that's like sort of the next milestone.

07:43 I just hope people find this useful.

07:46 And if there's any other questions,

07:48 I'm always happy to answer them.

07:49 And people are feel free to like,

07:50 you know, always feel free to reach out.

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