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Open source Interviews #28 - Marc Laventure, founder of Scalar.com

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00:00 All right. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the new season of the Open Source Founder Podcast.

00:08 Joining me today is Mark, co-founder and CEO of Scalar.com. Thanks so much for joining, Mark.

00:15 Of course. Great to be here.

00:17 Back in October, late October, I saw a tweet of yours where once Scalar crossed a thousand stars on GitHub,

00:26 you actually made a video one or two hours where you were reading out all the names of

00:30 all the stargazers.

00:31 That was awesome and made an impression on me.

00:32 So you have to quickly tell us about it.

00:35 And since then, the stars have doubled and the community is growing super fast.

00:41 I know.

00:42 I'm glad you liked the video.

00:43 Yeah, my co-founder and I cam, we were

00:45 thinking of a fun way to kind of celebrate that milestone. And we thought it was really cool to

00:52 read through all the stargazers on a live stream. It was really late. It was,

00:56 it was probably around 12 or 12 30 AM. Um, but it was awesome. Uh, and I'm really glad that you

01:02 liked it. And we, as you you said doubled our stargazers uh

01:07 right on new year's eve and i did another live stream i read out the the full 2000 so i think

01:13 i think we're gonna do it every thousand um which is good uh but yeah that one took that one took a

01:19 lot more time so we'll see yeah yeah no i love it great idea and like i'm excited to follow the

01:26 cool things you do with media um we're also trying to get creative on that front with my

01:31 co-founders so yeah and and speaking of co-founders and team you have put together a stellar team at

01:38 scalar uh all the co-founders and engineers they're all previous founders from yc companies

01:43 they had acquisitions.

01:45 You yourself had an acquisition, Brad Taylor.

01:48 You sold your company.

01:49 So how did you do that?

01:50 How did you put together such a good team?

01:54 Yeah, it's a great question.

01:57 I know everyone talks about how hard hiring is,

02:01 but for us, I met my co-founder, Cam,

02:04 just a quick precursor on this. We met

02:06 almost eight years ago now at a hackathon, and we kind of became really fast friends,

02:12 built Launchico, which was a startup website builder, which we, while I was still in school

02:18 and funded by my student loans, grew to 1,000 paying customers, and we got acquired by Namecheap.

02:24 Bones grew to 1,000 paying customers, and we got acquired by Namecheap.

02:32 And then when we were building Longico, though, we were pretty early on using Vue and really early on using a framework called TipTap.

02:37 And Hans, who's on the team, he's one of the co-creators of TipTap.

02:45 And so really what this team is a culmination of is almost eight years of meeting people and building connections.

02:46 And then a lot of great timing where people were available to work on

02:53 something like scalar,

02:55 like quite the moonshot.

02:56 So I'm pretty excited that the opportunity is here to work with really

02:59 amazing people.

03:00 Like you said,

03:00 like Hans previous co-creator of tip tapap, Bryn they co-founded Ping which went

03:07 through IC and then Cameron and I did Launchaco and then we have a lot of other really amazing

03:12 people on the team so yeah it's I'm really I'm incredibly grateful for the team we have

03:17 and it yeah it makes a huge difference when you're building these relationships over a really long

03:23 time and it doesn't really feel like work so that's the tip i got i guess it's time absolutely uh i love it thank you so much

03:30 for sharing and uh you know now the team is off to the races i'm wishing you happy growth in 2024

03:36 and and beyond and uh why don't you quickly recap for us how scaler started and then since

03:44 the founding of the project of the company

03:45 where you are today. So Cameron and I are builders. We built so many great products around

03:57 the website builder, logo maker, everything. And pretty much time and time again, something we felt

04:02 that was really underserved was amazing API documentation.

04:08 And, you know, Stripe's been around for a long time.

04:10 And it's always been interesting to us, like, why hasn't Stripe Docs been kind of a foundation for everyone's docs?

04:17 So we kind of started pulling on that thread and thought, okay, why is that, like, Swagger or or open API spec documentation, API testing, and then also just

04:27 API documentation as a whole felt really stale and fragmented. So Cameron and I, you know,

04:34 we're like, okay, this is definitely a space we want to go to huge markets to tackle. And so after

04:40 we finished testing at Namecheap, which was, I think, January 1, we finished working at Namecheap, which was, I think, January 1st,

04:45 we finished working at Namecheap.

04:47 We were off to the races building Scalar.

04:50 And yeah, I mean, it's been a crazy year

04:53 just to think that we started just one year ago

04:56 with the open source launch of the Swagger UI

04:59 and Redocly Alternative.

05:01 And then we also have our full docs platform

05:03 that we're going to be launching next month, which I'm excited to. How have you experienced introspection? What is new?

05:10 What are the challenges so far? And benefits, of course.

05:17 Yeah, I've been a huge open source advocate and in the space for a long time. I haven't maintained an open source project to this scale,

05:26 but luckily Hans, he was the co-creator of Tittap.

05:32 Kaminai's passion is really just making something people want

05:36 and making people excited about building.

05:39 So really just interacting with the community

05:41 and being able to help people with their docs and everything

05:44 is just something I wake up every day and i'm super excited for um so so far it's been really great

05:50 and i'm really excited for this year as we continue to grow absolutely one of the so one

05:58 of the main things i guess i like to ask often with founders which are areas where challenges

06:03 are presented is one one, distribution.

06:05 And I think you're already doing great on that front.

06:08 And then the other one is monetization.

06:10 So I'm curious to hear what your strategy is on these two fronts, how you're approaching

06:14 it and what you would like to do as the year progresses.

06:21 So I think for around distribution, one of the big things we're really excited about too is just trying to integrate with as many frameworks as possible.

06:33 I think everyone is building their services in different ways.

06:38 It's like Express, Fastify, Elysia.

06:44 Bun's really big right now, which is great.

06:46 It's super cool to see.

06:48 And pretty much there's just all these different ways to build your services.

06:52 But luckily, the kind of glue together there around something we can do for documentation

06:57 is around OpenAPI spec and Swagger.

07:00 So really, we built everything around that.

07:03 So when we go to integrate with these frameworks

07:05 it makes it a lot easier for people to get amazing 10.0.10 docs uh effectively with zero lift um we

07:14 also made it really simple to theme too and that's something that we're really excited about my

07:18 co-founder cam he does an unreal job i'm going to show some of the themes he's made today and he

07:24 does such an amazing job and uh so yeah that's that's for us just really trying to help as many

07:28 people get Rockstar documentation. And then I think on the how do we make money side, which is

07:36 always a fantastic question, we have a hosted version of the docs. So, you know, the Open API

07:43 specification and Swagger documentation is free and open source.

07:46 We also offer hosting for that on scaler.com.

07:50 And then there is a paid version where if you want full guides or longer form written

07:54 content, which we're using TipTap for our rich text editor, you can write longer form

08:02 content.

08:02 We have AI search, AI content content writer and a lot of really

08:06 cool features there too love it and in terms of launching uh what have you seen work best

08:13 on different online channels and forums and whatnot think that's a fantastic question.

08:28 And I think the quintessential answer is it depends, but I think something that the anecdote

08:32 of Cam and I, where we've had a lot of success, we've been number one on Hacker News twice

08:37 now, um, pretty much making it effectively low friction, trying things out is always great and making something really,

08:46 really great. I know it seems like a simple answer, but if people can just go try it out

08:52 and have that magical experience within under 15 or 30 seconds, it's truly sweet and people

08:59 are going to want to talk about it and try it out more. So that's probably my biggest

09:03 recommendation is really reducing those

09:05 barriers to entry.

09:07 And then the other one too is,

09:09 is finding your community.

09:11 I think that's a big one,

09:12 finding out people who,

09:14 who really want to use it or the ideal people that are going to be using it

09:18 and really building it,

09:20 building it for them.

09:21 So that's probably,

09:22 probably the advice I give.

09:25 100%. I second that. Make it super easy it for them. So that's probably the advice I give. 100%.

09:26 I second that.

09:27 Make it super easy to get started.

09:29 Have a test run.

09:31 And maybe I can add to keep launching again and again.

09:36 So utilize different platforms as well.

09:38 There's Hacker News, but there's also Reddit, there's Product Hunt, of course, Twitter and

09:44 LinkedIn.

09:47 reddit this product hunt um of course twitter and linkedin for uh and and for on the socials um what what could you say there i think for for me personally i'm just really excited to

09:55 help people and get them like get their docs awesome so putting putting ourselves up there

10:00 it's just uh it's just a way to help people i think for if people are

10:05 feeling i think to to really go on your on your point of uh of just launching as much as possible

10:11 i think that's great i think there's so many amazing y combinator uh blog posts about like

10:16 launching as much as you can like there's you can never launch too early um i think there is a little

10:22 bit of a caveat there where if you make something really, really polished and launch it. But again, it's just the barrier to entry and friction,

10:28 getting that wow moment as fast as possible. But I think it's a lot easier when you're doing

10:35 something that you're genuinely excited about, where you'll feel a little bit less embarrassed.

10:40 But I think everyone's different. So I think that there's some mediums where you don't really necessarily have to like

10:45 put your face out there per se.

10:48 Like you mentioned, like Reddit, Hacker News,

10:50 like Product Hunt.

10:52 So really what you think and feel is right

10:55 and are excited about.

10:56 I think people really, I get excited

11:01 and some of the most favorite people in my life

11:03 are people that are super passionate about subjects that they're just talking about endlessly.

11:07 And you can really see that on Twitter or any of these places where people are like actually excited about it.

11:14 So I think just be genuine.

11:18 I agree.

11:19 Absolutely.

11:19 And it does come across when someone has that genuine excitement.

11:24 And then, you know, of course, we should do it one way or another.

11:28 We should do this.

11:29 We should distribute on those channels.

11:30 And then, truth be told, if the product is awesome, it makes everything easier.

11:35 In Q1 2024, you are also working on a marketplace on top of Scalar.

11:42 Is there something we could say about it at the moment?

11:47 Yeah, we essentially, you know,

11:51 the H1 is document, discover, and test APIs.

11:54 And a big part about one of the friction points

11:59 we kind of see at the beginning

12:00 was around documentation and making docs amazing.

12:03 But the other side of it is integrating with APIs.

12:07 The kind of goal that we're going for is...

12:11 So I have an engineering background.

12:13 Cam's like a phenomenal designer, unreal designer.

12:16 Something that we really want to be able to hit is Cam's ability

12:19 to just like jump in and start integrating with APIs.

12:22 Right now, there's like a huge uh friction point and

12:26 really it's not as accessible as it can be for the new wave of developers and engineers coming in so

12:32 uh the kind of idea with it is we want to make it incredibly easy for people to integrate with

12:38 other apis with with their apis so we're hoping for q1, might be Q2. We'll see.

12:47 I know how these timelines go as a fellow founder.

12:50 But with all these

12:51 conversations so far, I can't help

12:54 but want to jump

12:56 in straight to the demo and

12:57 see all the action with Scalar

12:59 if that's something you'd like to do.

13:02 Yeah, for sure. I was thinking

13:03 we could demo the open source stuff,

13:07 and then at the end, I can jump into the hosted version.

13:09 So let me just share my screen.

13:12 Awesome.

13:15 Okay, so this is the Scalar open source repository,

13:19 and this is where you can get started

13:20 with our OpenAPI specification documentation tool,

13:24 or Swagger, if you're familiar with OAS 2.0. So our integrations are, you can go right from a CDN with Vue.js,

13:32 we also have, or React, we also have a bunch of server frameworks. So Fastify, Hono, Express,

13:39 Nest, and also Elysia.js and kind of what Scalar is.

13:45 Here, we'll jump into the demo.

13:48 You can kind of drop in your open API specification.

13:51 So this is PetStore.

13:52 You can preview it

13:53 and you get really amazing documentation.

13:56 So there's tags, endpoints.

13:58 We have full offline search.

14:02 So you get to search right in the browser, go to it.

14:04 We show the responses, also the

14:08 different code snippet languages you can use.

14:11 And then the really, really cool feature is that you can test endpoints right in the browser.

14:15 So we have a full dedicated testing client that goes over, so it feels really seamless.

14:21 And you can change variables, auth, cookies, the body, send out the request. And

14:29 then you can see all the responses right here. And then also you can see the full history

14:33 of your requests right there, which is really great.

14:37 And one of the really, really cool things about Scalar too is all of the theming we have. So it's really easy to add customization.

14:47 So this is the moon theme, purple, solarized.

14:51 And then we have dark mode and light mode.

14:54 So it's really, really easy to make amazing documentation

14:57 with fantastic themes to your brand.

15:01 So I'll walk through some of the cool themes we made

15:04 with some of our integrations.

15:06 So what was recently announced is Elysia made Scalar the default, which is absolutely amazing.

15:13 So now the default documentation for Elysia that you get when you're building APIs is actually

15:18 Scalar. And let me jump through into what that actually looks like code-wise. So here's an Elysia app,

15:26 really straightforward. You just import the Elysia Swagger package and you use it. You can

15:35 change some information about it. And then when you're actually building your framework

15:41 or your server-side code, you can get all of your actual endpoints um and then when you run uh it's fun run source index.ts um let's go to

15:55 uh what is the sorry what's the port now this is classic classic. I think it was 3,000. Yeah, let's see.

16:06 3,100.

16:11 So now if you go to Swagger, which is where the endpoint is,

16:14 this is what your documentation actually looks like for all of your endpoints.

16:17 So you get pretty much free documentation.

16:19 And this is the Elysia.js theme that we built, which is amazing.

16:23 the Elysia JS theme that we built, which is amazing.

16:23 Cam did such a fantastic job.

16:24 Cam does such a fantastic job.

16:27 So light mode, dark mode.

16:32 It's got all of the parameters fully typed.

16:35 Everything's right there and zero work, which is really cool.

16:38 So Elysia JS is great.

16:39 You can go check it out.

16:40 Super fast.

16:41 Love it.

16:44 And the community is really, really nice. So this is one of the examples.

16:47 We also have inside of the repository, we have an examples folder, which goes through all of

16:53 our integrations. So there's Hono.js, which again, it's super easy to get started. You just import

17:00 the scalar API reference. And then depending on your experience with Hono,

17:07 and you know it very well, or maybe you're new to it,

17:11 you can create routes, add kind of decorators to it,

17:14 describe the endpoints.

17:17 And then this is, again, the Hono theme that we built.

17:21 So this is the API being described by Scalar through the OpenAPI specification.

17:23 And again, light mode, dark mode,

17:26 if offline search, you can go check out each one, and then you can test out the endpoints.

17:31 And what's really magical about this integration too, is that it goes right to the server. So you

17:36 can actually test out the API that you're building in real time with Scalar, which is something

17:43 really, really cool. So you can get really

17:45 great docs, cool theme, test out your API while you're building it, which is really sweet.

17:50 We also have the Fastify integration. So Fastify is, these are all just really amazing frameworks.

17:57 So Fastify is kind of the super fast and kind of the de facto standard right now for Node.js, I think it's one of the most popular frameworks.

18:07 Again, we have npm install at scalar classified API reference.

18:12 It's really easy to add it.

18:14 And then, boom, after you've done your API coding and you're excited,

18:20 you get these amazing docs for free with the theme right there.

18:24 So this is something that's really great.

18:26 We also have Express, which is awesome.

18:30 And then this is the NestJS theme that we built as well.

18:34 So all of the frameworks that we support, let me just go to the repo,

18:41 can be followed through from the Getting started page, which is great.

18:45 And we also have the full configuration here

18:47 so you can configure everything.

18:49 And we also have, we actually just released,

18:53 I think this got merged this morning,

18:55 but we actually have a classic layout.

18:57 So kind of similar to what you're familiar with

19:01 with Striker UI.

19:02 And it works really well if you only have one tag.

19:06 But the layout that I was showing was the modern one.

19:12 You can also use our classic layout.

19:14 And that's really needed to change.

19:15 You just pass them into the config with layout.

19:18 But we also walk through how to actually theme and style

19:23 your scalar docs.

19:26 Right here, it's just all through CSS variables.

19:30 Cam did a really great job showing the visualization and what everything is, which is great.

19:35 And yeah, so we're super excited about this.

19:38 And this is all the open source integrations, but if you want to use, if you go to scaler.com,

19:49 we actually have the hosted version, which is here.

19:54 So this is docs.scaler.com.

19:57 So as I showed before, this is the references.

20:00 You can import your Swagger spec, preview it right here.

20:04 But if you need long form

20:05 content, we built this notion like editor. So you can write longer form content. If you need guides

20:11 or getting started pages. Right now, everything is done in the app. But we are working on a get

20:17 markdown sync feature, because we know people like to have their docs in code. So that's something we're really excited about. And we have lots of

20:25 really fantastic integrations like math. We built all this using tip tap to tap is amazing.

20:32 I highly recommend if people are looking for to build rich text editors to use to tap.

20:39 I've been using it for like six years. And again, customization, we have it really easy to change themes

20:46 and customize themes and light mode, dark mode.

20:51 And when you're ready to publish,

20:54 you make an account

20:55 and you can either publish

20:56 on a apidocumentation.com subdomain

20:59 or your own custom domain.

21:02 And yeah, that's Scalar in a nutshell.

21:06 So docs that are open source,

21:08 but then also we have a paid hosted version

21:10 in case that is what you need.

21:14 Wow, I love it.

21:15 This whole thing looks very, very kudos to you guys.

21:21 Thank you so much.

21:22 Yeah, it's super easy to,

21:24 oh, I totally forgot about this as well, but we have a CDN version also. Where is it? So it's super easy to just drop in. You just put in the, you import the script tag right there from JS Deliver.

21:44 ID to mount to, and then you can just drag this in.

21:47 And this is just with the pet store example. So really easy to integrate into your existing apps, or however

21:52 you're doing it, just in case we don't have any integrations built out yet for you.

21:55 So it's really simple to swap out for Redocly or Swagger UI,

21:59 or whatever your existing solution is. That was the last one.

22:03 Love it. And for complex

22:05 parameters like arrays and

22:08 objects, I saw that you guys have

22:09 nesting support and stuff.

22:13 And that is...

22:14 Yeah, we support

22:15 models and everything, right?

22:19 Yeah, we have

22:20 models. Yeah, I can

22:21 show it. We have models, we have...

22:32 Here, I'll show you. Yeah, I can show it. We have models, we have... Yeah, so enums, any nested attributes, everything gets dereferenced too. So if you have models, you can go down here and we show

22:37 all the types. Also, we preview the examples too, which is really helpful.

22:46 And then this is a great example because we actually show nested right here.

22:48 So yeah, we support Swagger, which is OAS 2.0.

22:53 And we also support OpenAPI spec 3.0 and up.

22:58 And then when I think it's going to be called,

23:03 right now it's Operation Moonwalk,

23:04 but it's going to be OpenAPI spec 4.0.

23:07 We will be supporting that at launch as well.

23:10 I think hopefully later this year, I don't really know.

23:12 I don't really know what their target is for that, but I'm excited for it.

23:15 It looks great.

23:17 Yeah, sounds very exciting.

23:19 Phenomenal.

23:19 Awesome.

23:20 That's good.

23:21 Thank you.

23:21 Thank you so much for the demo, Mark. What I think if people are really excited about, the biggest thing I can really advocate for is, is open source is It was with this open source project called Jasper.

23:48 And it was created by Charlie and I forget.

23:53 Shubo, I forget their names, but they created like an always on voice controlled system built on top of the Raspberry Pi.

24:01 It was kind of like the Iron Man Jarvis, but it was called Jasper.

24:06 And actually, Charlie is the creator of Ruff,

24:09 which if you're familiar with the Python linter,

24:11 like that's just, it's been unbelievable

24:13 to watch that absolutely grow.

24:16 Speaking of open source,

24:17 so I remember I sent an email to Charlie

24:20 asking if I could contribute.

24:23 This was like back in 2014.

24:27 And they were incredibly kind and gave me some guidance because I was still in university. I didn't really know what I was,