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Refine.dev Founder Interview Highlights

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00:00 The whole founding team lives in Istanbul and the rest of the team is living in another

00:07 state of Turkey and Europe.

00:09 So we are a reboot native company.

00:12 We are three founders, me, Eren and Omer, and we are working like more than 15 years

00:18 together.

00:19 We are like best friends and we have been part of many big projects in Turkey. We started from some e-commerce business

00:26 that we used to manage the largest online dating platform of Turkey. So at one point our passion

00:35 for software was so big so we decided to found a software development house. This was primarily for our own brands,

00:46 producing for some software products,

00:49 but we also did some consultancy and external projects

00:54 for some big enterprises in Turkey,

00:56 like the big telco companies.

00:59 We started doing some open source projects.

01:02 At one point, our site projects started to become

01:06 somehow popular around the community.

01:09 Our first projects were some React boilerplates,

01:12 application boilerplates with all the architecture,

01:15 with the build tools, exactly the same thing

01:17 what we were using for our projects inside the company.

01:21 For example, you start with a React project

01:23 and the super plate wizard asks you if you are

01:27 doing a Create React app or you would go for Next.js or the Remix.

01:32 Then next question is which router in a question and answer style, your React boilerplate,

01:38 your starting point and all the technologies were offered like options.

01:44 So this was the first time we had a great traction in an open source tool.

01:49 It was featured on Product Hunt.

01:51 It's gone over two K-stars on GitHub.

01:54 These projects were a really great warm-up for us.

01:57 So at that time, the Refines idea came out.

02:00 Refine Core is a very lean library.

02:08 idea come out. Refine core is a very lean library. So the core component is for the basic refine functionality plus the headless option. And many of the extended features of refine is

02:16 given as external packages. So if you need some external connectors for connecting to Strapi, Airtable, Sura-like backends, or if you need some

02:30 connect ready-made connectors for popular UI frameworks, starting to contributing for other

02:36 developers other than the core team is very easy in that sense. They have a limited scope

02:44 They have a limited scope for their own developments.

02:51 They are not forced to learn all the core structure and contribute to Refine Core,

02:59 but they can easily develop some community packages for different backend connections,

03:07 different UI framework bridges, and many of the other functionalities which extends the Refine. We had a successful fundraising on May and after that things got very much accelerated.

03:15 We dropped all other businesses and we gave a whole 100% focus of three developers to the

03:21 Refine project. It was just the starting of a new era.

03:25 We grew our team now up to 10 people.

03:27 We started Refine as an open core business model.

03:31 Just in the release time of the open core components,

03:34 we already know how to transform in the feature

03:39 for monetization.

03:40 These are like some easy authentication flows,

03:44 some one-click deployment solutions, some audit log and document versions.

03:49 And we have a bigger list of some enterprise features which are tightly integrated with the open framework and creates a bigger picture of a refined ecosystem.

04:01 We have a page on refine.dev and here on that website you can find

04:07 links to the repository. We have a well-detailed documentation. We have a quick start tutorial

04:13 which you can start your Refine project in just a couple of minutes and try it for yourself.

04:19 And also we have a very detailed examples page. You can see the 30 plus examples from some ready-made e-commerce sites to some real life examples.

04:33 And you can just dive into the refinery.

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