API Evangelist Conversation with Luke Seelenbinder, Founder & CEO of Stadia Maps

Hello there, Kin Lane, API Evangelist here for another one of my API Evangelist conversations where I just talk to interesting folks who are doing interesting things with APIs. So let’s dive right in and find out who we have here today. Hey, who are you?

Hi, I’m Luke, I’m founder and CEO of Stadia Maps, and we offer a map and location API service for developers to use to integrate location into any part of their products. My background really goes back to starting as a technical developer, have been using APIs kind of from the beginning of my career, mostly at startups creating products that consume APIs, creating APIs as a product, and now for the last few years I’ve focused on creating a company with an API as the primary product.

Interesting. Well, I want to come back to the product piece there, but first I want to know, why a mapping API? What on earth makes you think you can take on Google Maps and the other incumbents?

Well, I would like to say it’s because we had this grand plan of absolute dominance and we knew we could do it, but at the end of the day we actually were just kind of naive and we had a problem and we thought we could solve it. If anyone has used Google Maps, you can look at their pricing over the last 10 years, and 10 years ago it was pretty much free, and so almost every developer in the world had used Google Maps API for something. And then about eight years ago they changed that, and they went from free to costing quite a lot, and that hit a company I was working at pretty hard. There was a very small part of the site that was very useful but really couldn’t justify a cost of hundreds of dollars a month. My co-founder and I looked at the problem and said, there’s this great source of data called OpenStreetMap, why don’t we see if we can solve this problem for the company we’re working at. And then, because we really wanted to create a company at the same time, we said, why not make Stadia Maps, why not sell this API to everyone else, because everyone else is having this problem too. Out of that we created kind of our first two APIs, which were mapping and then routing, and we kept thinking, well, no one’s stopping us, so let’s keep doing this, people are buying, let’s create something real here. And so fast forward eight years, we were crazy, but it actually ended up working out in the end.

I’m a big fan of that kind of energy and wanting to build something, especially in the big shadow like that. I like building startups, I’ve been part of lots of different startups and I love building new products, and kind of bottom-up, I would say product-led motions for building startups is a pretty common approach, and I’m a fan of, and I feel like we’re pretty good at it. But when I’m at a company that kind of hits Series C, Series D, not, Google was on a different trajectory, but I’m going to use it as a parallel, one of the things you do is you start charging more after you kind of build critical mass, and then some people kind of go a little too far with that. So what are your thoughts on product-led growth in that way?

It’s a really good question. We were definitely product-led for the vast majority of our time, and even now we’re mostly product-led growth. We’ve listened to clients quite a bit, and our product roadmap has been less about us having a grand vision of this is exactly what we want to build, but more about listening to the clients we have today and making sure that we’re building the next thing they need. And when you look at that in terms of pricing, one thing we’ve always tried to do from the beginning is, when we look at building a new service, sure, we look at the service market for that particular product, let’s say it’s a particular kind of map, but we also look at it from first principles. We ask, what should this cost if we just look at it in raw terms, what are the actual technical requirements that go into this product, what are the data requirements, what are the operational requirements, and then from there come to a number that gives us a really solid margin, and then build the product knowing this is the target we want to be able to hit, let’s see how we can architect systems to hit this target. And that’s led us to do some very interesting things over the course of our life as a company. Everyone would tell you not to build a CDN, I would tell you not to build a CDN, but we actually ended up building a CDN very early on in the company, and we still run on the same CDN, because one of the key cost inputs for map tiles is the cost of delivering them to the client, which is mostly bandwidth and the request count, which, when you have map tiles, they tend to be a really high number of requests and a really large amount of bandwidth. You put that together and people end up with CDN bills that are much higher than any of the application stack, and so we ended up building a CDN, creating a much better cost of delivering the product than our competitors, and that’s allowed us to price very competitively in the market. We have had price changes, because obviously things cost more than they cost eight years ago, but when you look at the amount we cost relative to the market, we’ve been trying to keep that quite consistent, so that when companies come to us they know they can start for a reasonable price, and then as they scale they can stay in kind of an economically viable solution.

So good to hear, honest. I just have spent too much time in the echo chamber where things start with this and then just go to a whole different realm and universe, so it makes me happy. Kind of, I heard it in there throughout what you said, but I would like to be more precise in asking this, and you said it quite a bit, APIs as a product, what does that mean?

It means that our primary, the thing we primarily sell, is not our dashboard or analytics, it is endpoints for developers to use. What we track people using is number of API requests, what we sell is credits to get access to APIs, and so basically everything we build for comes down to the API as a product. And that’s to get different kinds of data, because fundamentally an API is a request and a response. So if you look at our map API, it’s a request for a part of the world at some scale and a response with the data for that part of the world. Or if you look at our geocoding service, it’s a request with a search string, for instance you search for Paris, France, and you get back a response which is JSON and it says Paris, France is at these coordinates, it’s in this country, it’s in this continent, this is the postal code, things like that. And that’s to me what an API as a product looks like, it’s actually kind of the raw technical details of request and response, and that’s the fundamental business unit that you’re kind of selling.

Yeah, I like it. I’m very focused on HTTP APIs and really, I know there’s a lot of other APIs out there, GraphQL, there’s a lot of gRPC, but I’m staying very focused on defining HTTP APIs and governing them, because of what you just said, is that bounded context of what is a product, that’s meaningful to someone and they’re going to give you money for it, and you can actually understand that and have a feedback loop with them. That’s really the key aspect that I think the web brings us when it comes to APIs. But when you’re building a business like you are and trying to sell these products, what’s your biggest challenge right now?

I think when you look at it, the first biggest challenge we hit was the technical. We had to start with what amounts to gigabytes or terabytes of data and reduce it to something that’s fast, efficient, and affordable, and that’s the problem we really solved for the first probably four or five years with the company. And at that point, being technical founders, we realized that we’d spent five years building a product and not selling it. So really the challenge has been, as technical founders, to learn how to market and sell this fantastic product that we built. And I think if you look at a lot of technical founders, it’s the same growing process of, you start with a great product and then you realize only 10 percent of the people that should be using it are using it, and you think, well, we add this feature and then those other 90 percent of people will come, because someone will talk about us. And then eventually you realize no one’s going to talk about you, you have to go talk about yourself and go out and get people to be interested in what you’ve built. And that’s really the challenge right now, is we have quite a few customers, quite a few users, but actually getting out to all the customers that could potentially benefit from what we’ve built at Stadia Maps.

Yeah, I spent some time on your site. I do a lot of profiling of APIs, I also have an API search engine that I’m kind of building off from the side, and so I’ve looked at a lot of API portals, I’ve looked at a lot of API resources, and you guys have everything there. I mean you have all of what I would expect from a set of mapping resources, you have the directions, you have locations, routes, all of the core resources, but you also have the portal and all the supporting support and docs and all the things that you would expect as a developer. Do you feel like that all speaks to, so I guess is your customer the developer, or are you going to have to kind of craft that to speak to more of a business audience as well?

I think through most of the life of the company we have crafted what we’ve built for developers. We are developers, so it’s easiest for us to speak to other developers, and quite frequently customers do come to us through kind of the development team. But I think you’re right that quite a bit of messaging and the kind of work we’ve done so far has been targeted at developers, and as we grow it’s going to have to also target the people making the decisions and do a better job of communicating the same values that developers understand more intuitively, because it’s kind of what developers do every day is work with APIs, and convert those same values into messaging that a business decision maker will understand.

Yeah, well, I may like to have you back in the future and talk more. I’m really working to reach the product manager, the business stakeholders, and not that I’m going to stop talking about APIs, but I want to learn to talk more about business outcomes and things that matter to these folks. And the CDN piece I think is another thing I’d like to learn more about, you guys building your CDN, but we can talk about this in the future. But one last question before I let you go. Why do you do this? Are you really into mapping APIs, what keeps you coming in every day?

I think it really started because I love maps. I’ve loved maps since I was a kid, and the idea of being able to create something so visual and so aesthetically pleasing, and then create a business out of that, it really is a kind of self-supporting cycle of building a cool map, seeing people use it. And that’s really grown from just loving maps to helping companies and fundamentally people solve problems. I think as a technologist that’s what I’ve always tried to do, is take technology and use it to solve problems, not just create technology for its own sake. And creating a company is really the best way in my mind to do that, because you get instant feedback, people give you money because you’re solving their problems, and you get to use that as a feedback loop to then create a better product that solves more problems for more people.

And I’ll emphasize, you’re building a company that has customers, you’re not building a startup with massive investors and massive scale, you’re building an actual business, and I appreciate that. I think that’s a really important piece of the API realm, and I like seeing it and I want to support more of it, so thank you.

Thank you.

Well, I appreciate you coming by, Luke. Thanks for sharing your story, and like I said, maybe we can have you back, it was a pleasure.

All right, very cool. Exactly the type of API provider I’m looking to showcase here. I love the company focus. Definitely go check out their site, I’ll include several links in the show notes, but I definitely see the value of affordable, realistic mapping, especially in a time of environmental uncertainty, a lot of disasters in the future, I think these things are going to become increasingly critical. And I appreciate Luke coming by and having a chat. But until next time, I appreciate you all tuning in, thanks.