start again today no. 95: heavy climbs + API-first
unit economics, Stripe, Plaid, user-trapping, switching costs, credit unions & craft beer, sheconomy
What would you say if you were coaching yourself?
I ask this a lot in spin class.
Usually during a heavy climb, when resistance is maxed out and the pedal no longer moves so smoothly, even with extreme effort. I ask as I notice body language change - hips shift forward, shoulders hunch, heads drop - breathing becomes labored, smiles thin.
In these moments, we quickly become overwhelmed. Especially when we think too far in the future. We have to choose to be here now. One foot in front of the other. Keep going. Stronger through it. Stronger from it.
I caught up with a rider friend recently after teaching a class for her birthday.
She shared that most of her favorite music is from the heaviest climbs in her life; with family, at work, in transition. And while these moments were hard, she looks back at them fondly, often through the lens of the music that got her through.
8yo and I took a walk down memory lane on Monday. 2018, just the two of us. Type 2 fun with a lot caught on video.
The soundtrack to that year hits different now. And when I’m not sure what to say or how to keep moving forward, I hit play.
What I read this week
🎥 "Plaid for X" startups - Sacra
My general hypothesis on infrastructure businesses is that you need to prove a land and expand for it to be a big business, right? The example I like to use is Stripe.
Everyone comes to Stripe for payments, but then they end up sticking around because they want checkout, or connect, or fraud, or billing, or invoicing or the 100 other value add services they add on top.
You need to do that because one of the interesting things about universal APIs is the aggregation layer, that middleware layer, if you are only ever a middleware layer, eventually if you become too big, your partners are going to try to circumvent you because you're just adding unnecessary cost, or your customers try to circumvent you because you're adding too much cost to the equation.
📊 2023 state of the API report - Postman
This year, more respondents embraced a thorough API-first approach to development: 11% ranked themselves as highly API-first. That's up from 8% in each of the prior two years.
🤖 APIs are eating the value chain - Chris Sperandio, Product Acceleration, Stripe
In this networked world, customer experience is the only true competitive advantage. In order to provide excellent customer experiences, what we used to think of as secondary activities are better framed as belonging right in the critical path through integration.
💡 on APIs and SaaS unit economics - Amias Gerthy, QED
The discipline of atomic thinking and the modularity inherent in the product tends to make launching new features and functions faster than others. Moreover, increasing the number of systems and number of functions that include your API creates a defensible feedback loop, so the long-term value of achieving a first-mover advantage is high.
💡 the way we measure apps is changing - Chris Maddern, cofounder of Button
Previously, developers would work hard to increase the time the average user would spend in their app by minutes & even seconds. These developers are now increasingly departing from this user-trapping behavior and are becoming more open to (the obvious truth of) users leaving their app when they’re done with their use-case.
🌊 lessons learned from a startup that didn’t make it - Jake Fuentes,
viaThe desktop app was a big part of the offering, but the community had helped solidify its moat.
Generally, teams think about switching costs as the amount of time and money needed to install one solution and remove another. But true switching costs are much more than that: they include the politics, emotions, career ambitions, esoteric business processes, competing priorities, and sheer laziness that all favor the existing solution.
💰 what do credit unions and craft beer have in common - Frida Leibowitz, CEO, Debbie
Micro brewers spent more resources focusing on the actual beer rather than on marketing efforts. Credit unions have that same edge - they are just yet to be discovered and yet to make their big comeback.
I see you, I love you, press play,
H
cowork with me | reading list | no. 94 | inclusive VCs