Welcome everyone, I'm Jared and you are listening to The Change Log, where each week we interview the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. On this episode, Steve joins us for a deep dive on TL Draw, a very good free whiteboard and the business he's built, selling SDKs that help others build very good whiteboards and more with TL Draw's high-performance web canvas. Along the way, we discuss the excitement slash fear we share about keeping our agents busy, how SDK and infra-companies are affected differently by agent software than SAS companies, how Steve is approaching the coming era of internal tooling, what will happen when we equip LLMs with an infinite canvas, and a whole lot more. But first, a big thank you to our partners at fly.io, the platform for devs who just want to ship, build fast, run any code fearlessly at fly.io.
Okay, Steve Ries with TL Draw, on the Change Log, let's do it. Well friends, I'm here with my good friend Chris Kelly over at Augment code. Chris, I'm a fan. I use Augie on the daily.
It's one of my daily drivers. I use Cloud code, I use Augment, Augie. And I also use Ant code and others, but Augie, I keep going back to it. And here's where I'm at.
I feel like not enough of our audience knows about Augment code, not enough about Augie, the CLI. It's amazing. I love it. What can you share?
As a filter user. Once you're the teacher and your assistant, you're never heard of and that's both frustrating as is someone who works there. And it's, like, very proud of the work we've done, but also, like, inspiring. Like, we want to go and sort of punch above our weight because, like, we aren't anthropic and we aren't open AI.
And so the quality of the product itself, you know, with our context engine, once you do touch it, people are, like, just blown away by that. And so, like, that keeps you going every day. So not the best I'll eat here, but this is a paid spot. You are sponsoring this show to get this awareness.
Now at the same time, we're selective and I love to use as your tool. But there is in the world, so a lot developers look at the space and they say, okay, well, how How long can this work? How long is this sustainable in the case of cursor or windsurf? Or you pick the name and you think this kind of tokens help me shape a lens for audience.
I think it's a lot of awareness, right? Like, um, cursor got a lot of, um, publicity early on for like fast revenue growth, which well deserved. I think, you know, frankly, some of the media got that gets the story wrong and that like, if I gave you a dollar 50 for every dollar you sent me, I'd be the fastest growing startup in the, in the valley. And so when you're selling discounted tokens, yes, of course you're going to go very fast, but all that money plus more goes to the model providers.
So I think the real story is the story of entropic and, you know, being an API provider. I think the market just moves so fast and there's so many pieces of competition out there that it's just hard to get noticed. So friends, I love Ahmed code and I love using Augie and I highly recommend you use it. I love using Augie.
I can hand Augie a well-defined specification, a well-defined PEP as I call them in my world, an agent flow and it executes flawlessly. So the cool thing about Augie that I love most really is that context engine and I can hand it a task and it can just churn away on my well-defined plan and just never bother me and accomplish the mission. I love using the latest models, the context engine and all the fun things behind the scenes in that awesome CLI. So yes, go try it out, Augmentcode.com, right in the top there is a CLI icon, a terminal icon, click that, install it and change your world, it's going to be awesome, Augmentcode.com.
Friends, we're here with Steve Ruiz and Steve I think the way it's best to kick off this pod is that we have had a couple of Twitter DMs back and forth and one thing you said was you're kicking off this new year trying to figure out how to run a software company in the age of clods. I think we're all kind of feeling trying to run something, maybe our lives, our careers, our software companies, our latest new thing, these new superpowers we have in the age of clods. So how do you feel about that statement? Like, when you share that with me, what do you feel when you hear that back to you?
Yeah, we're done. Let's just dive in right in. First off, thanks for having me on. I was just saying I've been listening to you for a while for years, really enjoy the conversations out here.
Yeah, running a company. So it is a weird time to be a programmer. I think it's also a weird time to be someone who's trying to decide what to program, you know? There are things that were on my roadmap for 2026 that I finished in the first week of 2026 that I expected to take like, you know, be like a Q3 type of project, essentially every hard part about having a startup that it has suddenly become like, harder, actually.
The only part that's become like, easier is the actual producing of code, right? But the alignment, the reviews, the, how do I position this technical product? I sell the code, right? How do I make sure that we are picking projects that play to our strengths in that position rather than producing the same thing that someone else could make?
Like with a hate clod, could you please fix this or please add this feature? How do I, how do I report to the community, you know, with, you know, contributions and issues and things like that? Teal Draw is not open source in the normal sense. It's not like MIT license, but it is open, it is source available.
And until very recently, we, we just took, you know, like we participated in that contribution ecosystem, just like an open source project would, but like that's had to change as well. We could talk about that. And then all the, you know, like the communication overhead in order to know what we're all doing at the same time when running a team like this is just become harder because everyone's moving so quickly, right? And even the differences between how quickly people are moving no longer seem to like directly relate to their seniority or they're like, you know, anything.
It's like, suddenly everyone can contribute at a level that is much more impactful on the product and can just do more of that. It's just really hard. I don't know. I'm sure everyone else is kind of experiencing the same thing.
But just to put a name on it, it's just, it's weird and it's hard and it feels very new and exciting. But certainly weird and hard. You're hard and new, exciting. Those are great adjectives to describe how I think it's kind of funny that you mentioned, you know, the roadmap you have for the year and in the first week and then really just the, the paradox of choice, really, because when you have a to do list that gets done in a week or two, well, now you have a lot more choice because you maybe actually might have less potential because you didn't plan well enough to have an exhaustive list.
But for me, it's like a, a paradox of choice where you have so much to choose because you can know so many different directions and, you know, without maybe some prior knowledge or some wisdom, you can sort of get lost in the, oh my gosh, I could do so much. So I should do so much. So I do so much. And then you get this cycle that sort of just turns into your life in some way, if you allow it to.
I mean, I think everyone's had that experience of a, well, I don't know, hopefully not everyone. I've definitely had the experience of going to bed and being like, what? I didn't queue up any work tonight. Like, my clothes are just going to be sitting there waiting for me to wake up in the morning.
We better get them something to do. And yeah, I've had a couple of chats with friends of confused partners to be like, what are you, what exactly are you doing? And why, why is this important? And yeah, I think, especially for programmers who like, I don't know, I like to optimize.
I like to, like to play factorial, I like to, you know, set up, you know, machines that sort of run themselves and, and now that I can do that with programming and with coding and really other things as well, like it's hard to not do that in a way. I almost feel ineffective to not have playing the head to put a little Ralph Lube going or something like that. You know, I should, I should write 17 specs today so that while I'm sleeping, Ralph can turn, you know, something like that might as well, it'll just be, uh, I don't otherwise, you know, yeah, I don't know. That's a good solution.
I do feel like that's a pressure on the aware, I would say it, like not everyone has that awareness. There's a lot of folks who obviously are aware of the era of claus over in and the era of AI assist development and all that stuff. But somebody who's like truly steeped in the minutia of running multiple clods, that's someone who's like truly aware of the guilt potentially that you would play yourself for, not pointing ahead and not putting all the clods in the motion is a guilt item. I think it's fear.
Yeah, I guess it's a version of FOMO. At least what I'm seeing and Steve, you can respond because it's your emotion. But I'm not saying you're personally afraid, but I think a lot of us are, there's a fear, not a missing out, but a fear of being left behind. And we've always said around here, open source moves fast and software will lose fast.
And I feel like in the last 12 months, it's gone from fast to like, you know, Olympic skiing downhill, you know, when they're just, they're just flying down that mountain. And there's a coming on slot of software. I mean, you're already feeling it. I already see it.
So many announcements, so many new things. Things are ramping up so fast. I think it's a fear of being left behind, like with your product, with your skills, with your business, whatever it is, where it's like, I'm wasting, you know, if I don't have my clods running while I'm asleep, you know, somebody else does, so that there's a sense of urgency that's not new, but I just feel like it's ramped up. And you can opt out of that, but then, you know, we have this fear of being like useless eventually.
And if you're not doing something with something, then you're kind of useless, right? Something else. Yeah. Right.
Yeah. I think that that is the thing that's interesting. I mean, I'm just watching the Olympics. So like when they're flying down the side of that mountain on these skis and they're going for speed, right?
Like they are, oh, there's fear there because you crash going any miles per hour down a mountain, like pain. But it's also fun. It's also exciting. They also enjoy it.
And so it's not like a univariate emotion. Because also you're like thinking, wow, look at all the stuff I can do. That's an amazing opportunity. If I'm not doing stuff all the time, I'm missing out on more opportunity.
And so I don't want to say it's just fear, but there's certain like this fear slash excitement. This is why we use all the adjectives right now because we're just trying to describe how we feel about it. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm really, really powerful and kind of remind me a lot of like gambling, you know, type of like toxic things people say about gambling very much. Yeah, like a little danger. Yeah, like, I mean, I go through phases of my watching TikTok a lot and I'm currently in a TikTok watching phase. And somehow the algorithm is a must have watched one of these gambling edicts talking about their gambling addiction videos for more than, you know, 10 microseconds longer than the algorithm.
Just a lot of us get another one. Yeah. Exactly. And there's a lot of like, you know, like, hey, you gambled away the house.
You know, you know, where it was like, hey, at least I was trying, you know, like, I had I won, that would have been a life-changing thing for our family. I was doing it for us. And it's like, okay, that, like, I can kind of make sense of how that would make sense, you know? Right.
And I think with, and there is a lot of this sort of like fear and excitement mixed together. And yeah, when using these tools and stuff, absolutely, I feel like the same way that I really felt the need at one time to learn TypeScript, like way early, you know, even when it was still like a, just part of like the Android ecosystem, or not Android, what was it, Angular ecosystem, right? That was using TypeScript. I was like, well, this is clearly the future.
Like, this would be such a high signal, like good thing for me to be good at, because like, if I'm good at this, it goes this way, like, that'll be just great for me. Like, I'll be able to do more. And there've been a couple of these times where I'm like, oh, well, this is clearly the most important thing for me to learn and to be good at, like an expert at. And using, like, AI coding assistants, using these tools, without a doubt, like, this is the most important.
Like, if I wanted to become good at anything, this is the thing to become good at right now. Not because I'm not even sure that the industry is gonna shrink in the way that we've talked about, but it's just like the amount of, you might have like the stuff that you can, the amount of power that you can have within an organization within an industry, like just being able to say, I can ship this much, this fast, based on this understanding, and allow us to have the time to iterate, like six, seven more, sorry, seven year old, six or seven more iterations than I would have otherwise, you know, and we deliver this stuff that would have remained on the backlog, like so much faster and everything like that, like just so high impact, like so high impact, absolutely got to work out, right? And at the same time, if you don't, if I don't learn this, if I don't like develop these skills, if I don't become familiar with like, how to use whatever clock code and how not to use clock code or something like that, I might become irrelevant, you know, like those skills that I have right now just might be, or that the things just might jump ahead so quickly that I'm no longer able to make sense of the next jump. That's also a big fear for myself.
One of our engineers went a year long kayaking trip last October, and I'm thinking like, my God, like when Alex gets back, like, is it gonna be like, is it gonna be even possible to make that, will any of this make sense, right? Still on the trip, or is Alex going? Yeah, yeah, no, Alex is kayaking for another six months. Okay, I'll be honest with you, you know, how it went, but yeah, still happening.
Wow, I mean, I do think it's interesting that Peter Steinberger, right, the maker of Open Claw, this was like the first technical project that he's, he had a programming background, had worked on some incredible developer products before, but had also been on a, essentially, in retirement, like not looking at computers typically until, I don't know, six months ago, nine months ago, when he got back into programming AI, this might be apocryphal actually, you know, I'm saying it a lot, but like that, the other hand, maybe it's possible to come back into this with fresh eyes without that continuity, and just be like, oh, here's how I'm gonna use these tools. But it is a fear of mine that, again, I'm gonna be able to make sense in that next jump. But I also, man, I love the fact that we can, the things that, last Friday, I was, you know, going into the weekend and I'm thinking, you know what, we've been talking about doing this, like, comfy UI style, like, image pipeline starter kit, right, teal drive, it's a SDK, we all, you can make anything at the top of it, but for like, into the canvas apps, but we also have like starter kits for, if you're gonna make like a workflow tool, here's like a workflow starter kit, or if you're gonna make like, embed this thing inside with a chat, like here's a chat starter kit, or a multiplayer app starter kit, that type of thing. And we've been talking about doing one that was kind of like comfy UI, are you familiar with these types of the software but it's like a pipeline for AI image generation.
So you say, generate an image of a cat, okay, like generate an image of a landscape, use a mask to pull the cat out of whatever image you generated, compose those things together, and then make all, I don't know, Instagram ads or whatever people use the stuff for, but it runs asynchronously, it's like a workflow thing. And we've been saying like, you know, children would be perfect for that, let's make a starter kit for that. But we knew what would be complex, we knew it would be a couple of weeks of work, and you know, okay. But last Friday, I'm just like, you know what, Claude, I can describe this to you, I can point you to, you know, six or whatever, a number of other products that kind of have these features and stuff, you know, come up with a minimum spec for the features out of this thing, and then just build a starter kit, like go for it.
And two hours later, I remembered that I had like fired off that glad to work on this, and I've loaded up, and I'm like, my God, this is like 80% done, like, you know, okay, I need to guide it, I need to, you know, make sure that's not eight percent left. Yeah, I still didn't write any of the code myself, but I just kind of steered the UX of it and the architecture and stuff like that. And we shipped it today. Like that was a four day, five day like shipping cycle for something that I really expected to take weeks of a focus, one or two engineers, you know, to really get across the line.
And like, that's amazing, like, I love that. Like, that's like, like, forget the fear, like that's just awesome. Like, I want more, like, I can't believe it, like pinch me, you know, so, but how do you plan for that? Now that I have, you know, we joke about having a zero backlog at teal draw, is that like, you know, we've gone through all the PRs, all the issues and stuff, we've identified them, we've even had different AI's, like do some like research on all the bugs and everything like that.
And it's just like, if in six months, there's still any issues left. Like, like, like, would we be surprised? Like, is there any reason why we wouldn't be able to chew through all of this stuff? Either closing or ignoring or saying we're not gonna work out that, but even just building a prototype for some of the stuff.
See if it works out. More software, more bugs for sure, but maybe not. If you have a bug churner or something like that, that sort of, all it does is look for bugs, you know, even like, deterministic simulation testing, like there's ways you can deploy that beyond the database, which is traditionally what you've seen at these higher level, higher order places, there's a lot of places you can apply that kind of thinking even to sort of in the background, try deterministic things, seated with an idea, just to try things you would never do. And now you might even actually employ or deploy that kind of tactic in your codebase, which largely will just help you restructure a lot of things.
Maybe you've written it poorly, maybe clouded it poorly, maybe move it over it properly. And now you're rethink how you turn your knobs and levers. But now, now you can actually take the time, if you hadn't done that from the origination of the project, to comb through the project because you might, as a human, spend weeks just looking at your codebase to see how you can apply DST to your project. Just a restructure, so you can do.
And now it's like, well, yeah, that's kind of like, let's just do that because I'm not looking at that code. I'm not gonna spend, I'm not gonna miss my child's birthday because I'm looking to the code. No, I've deployed some sort of infinite loop that helps me do that kind of thing. I mean, that kind of plan.
And so now, maybe we have more code, but now it's even more possible to have more code and no bugs. So that's a strange potential world. It is weird. I used to use this kind of, it's not really trick or a product device or something like that.
It would just be like, hey, if I just fell off my bike and hit my head and just kind of like came to in the startup and with these current state of our codebase and current state of our customers and all this stuff, what would I think would be the most important thing to work on, right? Like to try and clear the exercise of like clearing all the sun cost or the momentum or the continuity and say like, okay, if I just started fresh right here, like what would be the most important thing to do? Or what would I do next essentially? And I'm feeling like I have to do that like every six weeks now.
I'm like, okay, wait, hold on. The parameters of what's possible have shifted. Is this thing that we thought was a good idea before or thought was a blocker or something like that? Or even like a principle of the company, like is that still relevant?
An example of this has to do with our documentation or a change log and the way that we keep up communication around the SDK around our releases. So Tildra, we ship the website, children.com every week and then we ship the SDK every month. And essentially the .com, which is free, children.com, free whiteboard that people can use and please do. It's really good.
This is a lot like Excalidra is how people describe it very often. Which is, you know, we're friends don't worry about it. You probably pre-date Excalidra, don't you? No, they pre-date us.
In fact, one of the reasons I started working on this project was I had contributed to Excalidra a bunch and implemented a feature there. And I was like, wow, this code base, because it was very organically very open source kind of code base. I'm like, this was harder than it should be to add this feature here. And like, you know, there are like 100 switch statements in this code base where you switch on, you know, like whether you're dragging an arrow versus like, you know, drawing or something like that.
And I could kind of see the, I was already thinking in this mode just based on my other open source projects, but like, I was like, I could kind of see the outlines of an SDK, right, where all those things are pluggable rather than hard-coded. And yeah, I could pull down that thread a little bit and it turned out that there was a demand for it. So you had the SDK in mind from day one. This started as, yeah.
So the .com was and kind of always kind of still is, like, essentially a demo of the SDK. But it's a demo that has like, I don't know, I think like 130,000 registered users and like half a million monthly users because you can use it while logged out. So it's a good demo. It's a very good demo.
Yeah. Luckily, we get a lot of the infrastructure at reduced rates. So I'm off. So we haven't had an answer yet to do it, but it is a good thing.
It helps. We'd license yesterday. So it's awesome to have something you can send your boss. But like, yeah, we released the .com.
It's part of what it does. It's a demo, but it's also a place to like dog food the SDK before we ship it, right? So it's like, yeah, let's have our half a million people just kind of fuzz tests over this thing, report bugs and crashes and things like that. Rarely happened, but it's good to give us confidence.
But the communication around like, okay, here's what's in the next release, right? That's really hard. It's really hard to maintain because like PRs are going in all the time. It requires this like manual narrative synchronization across like the team.
And sure, this is a problem at any team, right? And usually requires a lot of kind of like middle management and then it's not a manager in order to be able to have a cohesive story of like, this is what's happening in TealDRAW for this next release. So this was happening in the code base. But yeah, now I have an automation.
The cloud code runs on a Mac mini in my living room every day that says, what are the PRs that landed in the last 24 hours? What is the current state of this like next .md file? And let me just create the essentially the release notes that we would publish today if we shipped what was on main right now. And that just happens every day and it's good.
And like we spent a lot of time making it good, but it still it's like the idea of having that document like as a startup, as a 15, 20 people like, that's terrifying, like making a commitment to a high effort like thing to maintain that is not like a like test don't fail if our change log is wrong, right? There's no way to automate around that. And to say like to customers, yes, you can look at this document because every day it'll be up to date. Like that's the type of commitment I would never have made just because it's like, like if it's wrong, like I won't know it and like it's gonna require constant like recommitment to the work there.
And so those are the types of things that we just didn't do. So we didn't do intentionally like from the strategic level. We will not do these things that require all this maintenance. We need to do things that are automatable that break loudly and so forth.
But these days, in this case, like, wow, I guess we can just do that, you know, like we can publish docs every time we land a PR, you know, we can like update the change log, you know, like there's a lot of things that, yeah, it just changes what's possible, I guess. This is not coming from somebody who, if I understand correctly, you are writing code daily. This is not like a, you run the company and you're sitting behind the scenes, you're active in the day to day. What does that, what does that like to, I suppose not only be in charge, but also be in charge and still write code on a daily, I guess direct code maybe is a better way to say it.
It's not that different than how it's always been. I mean, like, this has always been, I mean, there have been times where I've written less code because I don't know where we were fundraising or I was doing a lot of hiring or other things, right? Like, or where, you know, to my great shame, like most of the code that I wrote would happen on like Saturday mornings, you know, or evenings. There was a bizarre time where Teodra went from being my nights and weekends project to my company, back to being my nights and weekends project, even though I was still running the company.
But yeah, the thing that has changed the most for me is that there were a lot of things that I had to say, like how to know to or like not now to because the time required to do it was a lot. And because the work itself was very like opinionated or very like tasty, tasty type of stuff, whether it was subjective, right? It was like Teodra was full of those types of things. In fact, that's kind of, it's one of its value propositions, right?
Is that like, what does a good arrow look like? I don't know, a good arrow could look like anything, but you know what? I know what a good arrow looks like. And I will ensure that our arrows are great.
And that's just one of those things amazing heroes, by the way. The best of ever seeing it in the best years of my life went into those arrows. But yeah, like some of those things like, okay, they're just hard to work on because the iteration is gonna be slow or it's just gonna be like, it's gonna take multiple shots at this before I understand the problem, really all that stuff. But they're not necessarily things that I'm super comfortable handing off to other engineers because they're, I don't know, they're, yeah, they're like, they're clearly a Steve feature, like they should be a Steve feature, but it's really hard for me to commit to Steve features during the times where I'm most busy.
But I feel like I can work on those features a lot better these days because the work of the programming, the work of getting it to a point where I can like say, that's, we're going in the right direction or not. And then doing another iteration or trying a different direction, all those things. That time is just compressed. And so yeah, like if it is a kind of a design feature, design interaction or something like that, we're not really sure how it should work.
We just have to do a lot of different, like take a lot of shots at it, which is the place where I kind of add the most value as a programmer. That stuff has accelerated massively, right? Because at the end of it, I might throw all of those versions out and say, okay, well, now I know what the feature should be. Let's even hand off that thing to get built by someone else or let's take that extra time in order to review it or something.
But like the sort of the decision making within the design phase of these features, like it's massively accelerated. Because yeah, I can run multiple coding agents at a time trying different things. I can analyze things really quickly. And yeah, just take more shots on goal, I suppose.
Do you find yourself wanting to be in those details more than because like a, here's where I'm trying to go with this is that I feel like there's this necessary slow down, not because you can't go that fast, not you physically, but the organization given the new constraints and leverage we can pull. I almost feel like folks will want to go a little slower, not to go slow but to be in the details, to be in this deep feature, for example. Do you find yourself sort of like lifting off the gas a little, not because you can't push it down, but because you want to personally be involved in very particular Steve details? That's an interesting question.
I think it depends. I think it depends on whether I'm working, if you can think of, especially with Tildra because it's an SDK, right? Kind of as a tree, there's the very core parts of the SDK and then there are the things that depend on it, right? There's like the kind of the, Tildra.com being a thing that depends on the Tildra kind of core library.
There are these starter kits, right? That depend on the core library, but nothing depends on them. Tildra.com needs to work because like users depend on Tildra.com, right? But we have other things that no one uses.
I mean, like they don't have users, like the starter kits don't have users. The documentation doesn't have the same like relationship to user data that the .com has, things like that. When we find ourselves on those like leaf nodes of that tree, like things that don't have any dependencies go fast, like full throttle. In fact, you should because it's like an opportunity to practice going full throttle, you know?
You learn to trust the model, trust the system, you know, trust the letting go. Even makes mistakes, like, you might as well, because like this is the place where you can do that and you won't be able to do that on the core or the more dependent upon parts of the whole operation. The other places like internal tools, we have like this intelligence tools that we've built for ourselves. I can, my sales guys can look at a summary of, oh, you know, which PRs are landing, you know?
Like, okay, put that in a language that I can understand or something. Like, abstract this for me, tell me which types of customers I might even mention this to, right? Like, we're putting in accessibility features. All right, well, here's how to talk about this to the customers.
And on the flip side, I can look at sales and I can see, you know, I'm essentially just taking all of the CRM data and handing it to Gemini and saying, like, tell me a story about this, you know, pull out the stuff that matters. And also just tell me, you know, are there any product insights that have come out of these conversations or the meeting notes, et cetera? Just give me something to work with. And I can just refresh that any time I want, which is great.
This is another thing that, like, it would be insane for me to tap my account executives on the shoulder and be like, hey, stop what you're doing and write me a 500 word essay about the deal that you're working on, you know? It would be great to have, right? It would be awesome to have. It's just like, I would never do it.
Now I have that. And it's not perfect, but it's not low bearing either. So it's like, it's still great. Those internal tools are another place where we've, we've just ripped like, and then sometimes they're broken, sometimes they're not broken.
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Again, norlayer.com slash the change log. It's definitely the era of internal tooling. I think you can build so many things that help you move the data points. You have like, you're given an example here where things fall through the cracks, not because you don't have humans evolved because clearly you don't have humans evolve.
But it's that the synthesizing the data out of certain artifacts has just largely been impossible not because it's been impossible because it's been the time on it has been impossible. And now you're sort of freeing up this data to you as a visionary and someone who has clear taste to make choices that you could never really meet. If we should have the data available to you. I didn't have the insights, I suppose.
I have like the, yes, I think like granola, like I use granola for my meeting notes and stuff. But I never read the meeting notes. Like it's cool to know that there's a summary of my meeting, but I just, I don't refer to it. The only time that I ever use it is when I shove those meeting notes in a big group to some other element and say, can you pull out some, how can I be a better, how can I improve my one-on-one's or something like that?
Right. Because that's the type of thing where normally I would need a consultant or a coach or a, I don't know, a therapist, maybe not a therapist. But like, you know, I need some other experts. It's a feedback loop.
Yeah, like to do some real thinking about these particular artifacts, which by themselves don't really mean anything. Like, or at least don't mean anything to me. Hubspot, you know, the amount of information that goes through a CRM every day is just massive, right? It's a working tool.
It's like a get, you know, a coder repository. Like, things are coming in all the time. Like, you can't stay on top of it. You can work within that, you know, but like actually zooming out is very, very difficult.
And yeah, it's fantastic to have essentially an army of consultants that I can just throw at all of these things. So here's what's interesting about your saying that, is that you, as someone who's leading, you're able to stay in the minutiae while zooming out, which has largely been next impossible to have the macro and the micro at the same time without losing major context in your brain. Cause you can kind of like just let granola do this thing behind the scenes and summarize 10 or 15 conversations you've had in some degrees to learn, for example. That's a macro.
The micro is the day to day when you're in the minutiae of what is the feature? How are we moving things? You know, I'm automating cloud, all these things. And you don't have to give up the other to get the other.
And I think that's a unique position to be in. That's the thing I think when you have these A and a skeptics out there, which I wasn't A and a skeptic and Jared and I were both like, gosh, this is hype wave. Is it real? Is it not?
And we all kind of were there. And I think until you've gotten past that threshold to see what's beyond just the word AI or the acronym in this case, that you can truly understand what is possible for someone who knows how to fully leverage and stay in the details, but also zoom out. I think I'm really lucky to be like a technical founder because I kind of know both sides of the problem, right? Where I'm learning both sides of the problem.
Oftentimes these internals are a way for me to learn about a part of the company that I might not know about. So it is like, I didn't know how our CRM organized data were some of the routines until I was like, all right, well, I want to build a tool to help me visualize this or help me understand it, right? And just like anything else, right? Like that's like, I'll learn the things that I need to learn in order to build a thing that I'm building.
And oftentimes I try to build things that will force me to learn the things that I need to know, like that I know that I need to know for other reasons as well. But also just like, yeah, I know that like I'm, it's not that I know what the AI stuff is capable of, but I know the problem and I know the type of problem that I can solve with AI. And having a bunch of analytical like intelligence problems, like where the bottleneck is cognitive work is in a way a kind of like a luxury, right? Like it would be very hard for me to think of things to do with, like I have no problem finding use cases for using whatever AI models because so much of my life is trying to get that macro, right?
It's trying to get the intelligence or insights out of, out of a, even with only 15 people, it's still a complex system, like we're producing knowable things like all the time, whether that's bugs or customer feedback or code or like conversations with customers or, I mean, you name it or analytics and all that stuff. So at the moment, I feel very, very lucky to both have a problem which can be solved and can be at least can be addressed with these tools, the ability to work with those tools, like capital, not to worry about the cost of working with those tools, which is fantastic, but nothing of a problem to really sink my teeth into without having to be the same scale of problems that you might have, you know, I don't know, at a Shopify or something like that, which, yeah, you couldn't really fit into your head, or maybe you could, I don't know. To pass me, they push back on that. If anyone can do it, it's, yeah, I think.
Speaking for the audience, Tabas Luca, the founder and CEO of Shopify, who went from bespoke random Ruby app store front to Shopify, ICO, stock market, massive, which is cool. Canadian powerhouse. That's right. Yeah, that's for sure.
A feed of nature for sure. Tell us about the SDK business. What is business like selling SDKs? It's like some advice that I got really early on when I started to start up, which is that like, if you feel like you're doing anything really creative with your lawyers, then you're probably doing something wrong.
Like if you're asking any like original questions, so your lawyers and you're probably like, stop because you're like, don't do that. Like don't try to break new ground in terms of anything like that. And I think, you know, similar advice with what I was going to market is that like, starting to start up, or just selling anything, it's just so hard that if you find yourself innovating in the go-to-market or if you find yourself innovating in the thing that you're selling, like, you know, you should ask yourself, is that really what I want to be doing? Or should I just be using a much more normal good market and just focus on differentiation, product market, all this, right?
Unfortunately, selling SDK, there's not a lot of great examples of companies that have gotten past, you know, a certain size, selling code, selling NPM libraries essentially, right? And so yeah, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to kind of innovate in how you do that, right, and experiment much more than I expected. The good news is that we're kind of figuring it out and that a lot of the, and I'll talk about specifics, but like, when I started, I was really scared, honestly, that like, if I try to commercialize this thing that I sell to developers, then people will like, not accept that, right? Like if you require a license key and already to use an NPM package or something like that, like then your adoption will go to zero, right?
If you put a price on something, then people will just immediately create an open source alternative to it or something like that. Somehow I think we've actually kind of made it out of that problem pretty well. So, and you know, like, we're not break even, but we're gonna be close and we're probably gonna actually break even like this year. Good graph.
Even with like 20 people, I think we're gonna do that this year, but it's interesting. And some of the decisions that we made about changing our license, about how we work with like license keys, how we like, identify people, all that stuff. In retrospect, I'm so happy that we did them. And I can talk about the specifics, but like, when you look at some of the things that have happened this year, the kind of the big stories and open source and big stories and like developer tooling, like they're not happy stories.
They're mainly stories about how AI is like really disrupting the revenue channels, the kind of traditional revenue channels around open core software, right? Yeah. And that's not been the case for us. Where our story is closer, it's not as good as super bases, but it's closer to super bases.
And in the fact that like models recommend us, people use us, people like us, and then people pay us, right? That we're delivering value and we have the mechanism set up to capture the value that we're creating. That's great. Like, if I were trying to sell premium features on top of teal draw, which is one of the things that one does with this type of thing, I would be terrified right now because, oh, it's just some code on top of a known open source library.
Like, I can do that all day. Like, I can have a ton of my clods doing that at once. But if it is, you know, like, all right. So anyway, selling it as decay, the way that we do it, teal draw is we distribute it on npm.
Again, it's like, so it's available. You have to sign in at the CLA. If you want to contribute, yeah, but it's not MIT license. It's under essentially commercial license.
Which license did you actually choose? You said source available. Which one did you choose? Was it self-made?
I think we adapted one that Microsoft used. I didn't want to interrupt it. I just wanted to get that clear when you were going. No, no, no, no.
It's the teal draw license. I think that the important thing is it's not HPL. It's not like BSL or, you know, the kind of color ones. Honestly, for most organizations, either it's MIT or it's Apache or it's nothing or it's, okay, we'll talk to sales.
Like, either it's like fully permissive in a way that is not going to complicate your next funding round. You know, when the lawyers do due diligence and they say, hey, why are you using this library? Do you have a license to use this library? You know, if it's not totally compatible, like fully, you know, don't worry about it.
It's MIT. Just go nuts. Like, do whatever you want with it. And it's not HPL or GPL where, you know, there's requirements on the parent's organ, like your app needs to be open source as well or something like that.
If it's anything else, it's basically all the same. Which is that, okay, we're going to have to, like, buy a license. We're going to have to arrange a alternative license that we can use. So it has its, like, little particularities, but essentially it's not permissive in the same way that MIT or Apache is.
So yeah, there you go. Everything else kind of fits in the same bucket, which is, like, not permissive. Anyway, what it is, it's like- Being source available and choosing a license is super important to run an SDK business. That's why I wanted to get that clear because the license you choose and to make your source available is where the rubber meets the road in terms of adoption and even experimentation and obviously converting to a customer, if you're a true.
If you're beyond the, you know, the development and you're actually in production with it, for example. But continue. I just want to get that clear. Yeah, yeah, gosh.
So we are SDK business. This could be the prior side of, like, how the story of how this thing about- I'll tell you the current. You know what? I will actually go into a brief history of it, right?
First, like, the V1 of Tildra was MIT licensed. It still is. If you want to use that version. When I formed the company, we basically rewrote the thing.
And that version was like, in alpha, and that alpha was public under Apache license, but there was always a statement basically like, we're probably going to change our license when we hit 1.0. Unless we just decide to do something completely different. But if we're going to maintain this, this is going to be the project of Tildra, which is the SK, like, we're going to change license. And yeah, when we did the 2.0 of that, when we released that version of it, it was just a non-commercial license.
It's just like, you can use this in academic work, in student work, in things that don't make money or, you know, inside of companies that don't make money, or maybe not inside of companies. But if you wanted to use this in any commercial settings, you need to buy a license. How much does that license cost? I don't know.
Talk to me. Then we just put that out there and cross our fingers and hope that anyone would show up. And I was shocked that a ton of people showed up. And we did almost a million dollars in revenue in that first year with like such a bare bones, like go to market, license structure, you know, sales structure, anything, right?
It was just like, let's negotiate every single deal and try and figure out how much value we're providing and argue that Tildra is a valuable thing. And we have this very simple, like, you can't use this in a commercial setting. You can use this in a commercial setting, you know, under these sort of conditions. All of the licenses that we sold at first were perpetual, meaning like, you pay, you get a year of updates, and then if you want to buy another year, like, you get another license, otherwise, you can just keep using those updates that were released within that year, like, forever.
I don't care. It's really like the most generous type of like commercial license that you can imagine. But I needed to know whether anyone was even out there. Like, if we had sold, you know, $100,000 worth of licenses with the most generous terms possible, then, you know, we could only sell less than that, essentially, with more restrictive terms.
But that's the way that we did it in the first year. And I say we would. It was like, just the way that the six of us came up with as a way to do this, that would make sense. And we needed to validate this because there was no guarantee that anyone would be willing to pay for this.
But yeah, by the end of that year, we had switched to a system where you could use Tildra, even in production, even in commercial apps, for free, but it had a big made with Tildra in the corner. And that was our kind of like V3 watermark license. If you wanted to get rid of this made with Tildra, then you'd have to buy license. But you could use it.
Anyone could use it, even in a commercial setting with this watermark. And part of the reason why we did that was we needed to know where this thing was being used. We started to realize that we were bottlenecked in selling the SDK and just knowing who was using the SDK so that we could talk to them. And that little, there was no license enforcement for the V2 or the V3, I think.
No, for the V3, there was, but it was all local, like we're not pinging a server or anything. But I made sure that little SVG was hosted on a CDN and we could look at that CDN and say, okay, who's requesting this little watermark SVG? And that gave us at least some idea of which domains were using this. Okay, we should go talk to this company because they're clearly using the watermarker stuff like that.
Maybe they're going to want to become customers. But it was bad. It was a bad idea. It was a bad idea because when we did talk to customers in that setting, they wanted to pay much less for Tildra than they would have before when there was no difference at all within the SDK, except for a piece of paper that said you could use this commercial app or not.
And it was because in the minds of the customers, the conversations we kept on having were like, oh, well, that sounds like a lot of money just to get rid of a little SVG in the corner of the canvas. Right? Is that we had essentially anchored the price that we were charging to the pain of this little watermark rather than the value or whatever of the canvas. People were building, like investing.
You could be like 20 people working on top of Tildra and stuff. They're putting millions into this project. But that SVG really didn't feel like more than $10,000 a year type of thing. And so we, the summer of last year, we kind of did the next iteration of a license, which was much more restrictive, which said you need a license key to use this thing and it will not work in production without a license key.
You can use it locally. That's fine. But as soon as it detects that reactors in production mode, if you don't have a license key, it'll just disappear, right? Which was pretty extreme.
We bounced this by saying, like, if you have a hobby project or a non-commercial project, which is something that like, you know, is a student project or anything else, like, I'll give you a license key forever for free, like, I don't care. And if you have something in between a commercial project and a commercial project, you're kind of evaluating it. Here's a 100-day license trial license key, if you can use. And at the end of that trial license key, either you can decide not to use this or you could say, actually, this thing is just going to be a hobby project.
I'll give you one of those licenses, or you talk to sales, and if you're using this in a commercial app, you can do that. The reason why we did that and the reason why this was so important, besides the fact of removing that low anchor to the price point, was that it allowed us to know who was using this. Like, if a person signs up for a license key and says, here's my email, or here's the domains where this license key needs to work, like, that is such a, like, you know, we don't blow up their inbox right away, but like, that's a person we can talk to, right? And we didn't really have that before.
We were just constantly trying to chase, like, okay, where did our watermark load and all that stuff. Now, of course, the developers who are using this, the developers who are getting, like, login keys and are on our Discord and stuff, are usually not the people who decide whether to buy Teal Draw, right? They're the experts who are going to bring this into their organization, they're the people who are going to answer the question, how do we build this thing, do we build it ourselves or not? But they don't always have the company credit card, you know?
So oftentimes, we don't even ever talk to the actual developer who, like, you know, whatever got a license key or something like that. We don't care about that email address, but it gives us enough information in order to start looking at, okay, well, who in that organization is probably running this project, who should we reach out to, you know, who should we try and get an intro to, and they're, yeah, I don't have a huge sales team, but like, and I think I have a really good sales team, but that's the type of work that they do in order to actually make deals happen out of this interest. And all of those things currently are working really well. And you know, we have, like, some, like, like, Google's using Teal Draw in a product.
Shopify is using Teal Draw, and they're internal products, like Autodesk is using Teal Draw. Like, we're growing within these companies and, like, almost all of the AI design tools that are out there right now are, like, using Teal Draw from the canvas. It's awesome. Like, it's really good to see something that I didn't think was possible at all, which is to make a venture-scale, potentially venture-scale company based on front-end tech, right?
Actually start to kind of, like, you know, for the engine to at least turn over, you know? And it's really, really, yeah, it's encouraging, it's exciting. It's even more interesting that your distribution is via MPM, you know, you're not even really having to pay for your distro. You're just paying for it in the sense that you don't have to hold on the infrastructure, right?
Because the things that we don't have to care about are insane. Right. Yeah. I mean, like, super hamartons.
For a while, the biggest cost to Teal Draw, apart from developer salaries, was DocuSign, just because, like, the cost of doing business for a product like this is so low. Now, developing it expensive, of course, engineers are expensive, other infrastructure is expensive. Our biggest marketing tool, TealDraw.com, we have really great relationships with our cloud providers and things like that, or CloudFlare, but, you know, it's still, it's like, compared to a normal marketing budget, totally reasonable, totally acceptable. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.
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You know, this is a weird analogy. I just literally thought of this in this moment because I want to make this point to compare to SaaS. That's my point. Like, I get your argument, and I 100% agree with it, but my suggestion is that it's largely margin-based in a much higher scale because you're not SaaS, and it's kind of like the concentrates that don't ship with the water kind of thing, you know?
I just heard that MinuteMaid is no longer making their frozen cylindrical thing that they would say is a concentrate anymore. And I thought it was kind of cool because like here you got MinuteMaid shipping this thing you've had in the freezer probably since you were a child, right? Maybe that too. Maybe a 20-year-old version of it or something like that.
Probably the same too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, but you got this concentrate in this tube that ships without the water, so you got less cost, right? You got more that can fit into the case, maybe dramatically less weight, so a lot easier to maneuver around.
Yeah, of course. Yeah, all the things, right? Now they're kibosh in this thing. Well, how is that a thing?
Because that's like an SDK versus SaaS. Like SaaS is me giving the whole bottle with the water and everything, and the SDK is like here's your concentrate version of it. Do what you want. You don't have to put it in water.
You can put in something else we want to do. So this is like the SDK version of it. I mean, I think there's another conversation that I've kind of been watching happen which is about the impact of AI coding and other things on SaaS is like why the heck would I pay for this if I could essentially build it a weekend, that type of thing, which I'm going to prevent myself from diving right into that, even though I think it's really, really interesting, and we'll have an impact on Teal Dress feature as well. I think selling an SDK, yes, absolutely.
Our margins are good, right? It's just that you can sell a, if you add the water yourself, you can sell it for three times as much, right? And all those other problems about inventory efficiency and things like that, they're solvable problems, right? They're complex, but they're solvable.
And I think SaaS, similarly, like, oh, it'll require a lot of infrastructure, like, okay, we can solve that. Like, oh, but reliability will be a problem, like security will be a problem, all right? We have people, we have capital, we'll solve all those problems, and then we'll be able to sell our Canvas, you know, like a Miro or something, like, sell the whiteboarding experience for millions of dollars a year for enterprise, right? Makes sense.
Certainly has made sense. From how hard is my life perspective? Selling SDK is easy. What's, you know, what's your security, Steve?
I don't know, what's your security? I'm never going to touch your data. Like, I don't care. Like, what do you, like, I don't know what you're talking about?
It's a great response. Yeah. I don't know what your security is. Exactly.
Like, I am not involved in that problem. Like, that's part of the whole point. You can at least, I don't know. Can you build this feature?
Like, well, no, but you can build that feature. In fact, here's how, and here's a thousand examples of how to do it, and especially these days, like, it's trivial, you know, to customize this stuff in some really deep ways. Like, that's exactly what we've built this thing to do. So much of the normal places where, like, support, like, all this stuff is just, it is crazy where we don't have to spend time compared to almost every other product that I've ever worked on, because we are one step removed from users, right?
We are, we're not even exposed to the same risk that the, our customers are, right? Like, we sell a lot into an edtech. Edtech is brutal. Oh my God.
Like, you're, you're on the line for, you know, a government changes the way that it distributes, you know, funding within a school district, and like, and you just lose that customer. Like, or you lose all of the customers within that state or something. It's crazy how hard those people are fighting, nothing but respect for people doing business in education technology. But we're not directly related, like, we're not as exposed to that problem as those customers are.
We're providing the tooling for them to build their product, right? And they're, our customers take on that, I suppose the investment, the risk of bringing them us into the product and it's our job to make sure that we do the best weekend at the thing that they run as in for. But like, every now and then, we're like, how many people are on teal.com, you know, like, how many people are registered? We're like, I don't know.
Let me go check. Like, oh, cool. It went up. But like, yeah, it's, uh, we, our attention is towards things that are, um, it's, the, the sees are a lot calmer in selling SDK.
It's just not obvious how you sell an SDK. Have you done a masterclass? I mean, we got the short version here for listeners of the pod, but is there, is there like here's how to sell an SDK.com or like, do you have anything with that? Because I'm sure there's others that would like to skip to the end because you went through a heck of a process to get there.
Yeah. I'd like to talk more about that. And that's something that myself and I, uh, I had to go to market, um, fill out also talk about a lot, which is I'm like, man, there, this is new information in a way that I didn't expect to kind of be producing new information kind of back to what I said at first is like, these are not the problems that anyone wants to have, but they are the problems that we have, uh, or the places where anyone wants to innovate, but it is a place where we've innovated. And, uh, yeah, I'd like to talk more about it.
I spoke recently with like the CEO of like, AG grid, AG grid is like a data grid component. Almost the exact same story, uh, as, as us with, we're going to market 100% inbound ourselves, 100% inbound, right? Trying to change that, trying to change that. I mean, like, we have a lot of different differences in terms of how we price, uh, that's, that's the other pricing is, is a really challenging part of this.
Um, but the, uh, you know, there's, there are companies out there that are doing the same type of thing, but there's not a lot of like literature on it. There's not a lot of like best practices or anything. It's still a very, very new way of running a business, um, just on the pricing, there are so many ways of pricing of charging for like an SDK use, use like this. Um, and kind of fellow travelers here would be, uh, maps, like map box, right?
No one's going to build a map. We're going to buy that or they're going to license it. Text editors, data grids, um, kind of charts and diagram libraries, like, uh, like if you're doing a lot of, um, automatically laid out charts or even mermaid.js at a certain point, you would want to be customer of them. Kind of like front end infrastructure.
Yeah, but that needs deep thought. It's not something you can, you could probably do some of it over a weekend, but you have to have extreme institutional domain knowledge that you've obviously got. Yeah. It's a, my, my line is always like, look, you guys could do this.
Like there's not, I mean, I think we're a pretty special team of, you know, people have tried to build that special team, but like at the end of the day, we're, we're programmers. You guys are programmers like, you, you could build teardrop. You just, I wouldn't want to take a while and then if you got it right, let's Steve do that. Please like, Steve, do that.
Even if you got it right, like, no one would notice because that's just the way that the canvas is supposed to work, right? Like I could build a text editor. If I did my job, right, you wouldn't be able to tell that I built it. Yay.
Right. Like that's a terrible. Not the best use of my time. No.
And, and, and there's, there's enough bad canvases out there that I can point to or early subpar canvases out there that I can point to to say that, like you might not get it right or you might have to ship it early and your users will know. And here's something that you can use today, right? It's a strong value proposition for, for companies. I know that they want to use this type of thing.
But how much does that work? You know, how much are people willing to pay for that? The biggest number that we put in front of a customer was half a million dollars a year or average geosized floats, but it's, it's not half a million dollars. Yeah.
What was the response to that offer? Yeah. Well, I think that the conversation with the half a million dollars a year, your guy was like, uh, we are a consultancy that builds large projects. Uh, and we only have one customer.
Basically, we were consultancy with one client and I was like, that's an interesting, like, uh, who, who's your, who's your one client? They're like, it's the US Department of Defense. That's three column, actually. Yeah.
And, uh, yeah, I was like, Oh, okay. Cool. And they described this project and I'm like, man, this is like, it's all the things that we would, we would want to have it like well funded. Yes.
Uh, uh, it needs to work and needs to be good and needs to be something that they can rely on for the next 10 years of a thing. Basically, like all of the, the tick, all of the boxes of the things that would, you know, would leave me to believe that Teal Draws can be a, like major part of the sloop, like whether this deal even happens or not, right? Whether this project happens or not. So, um, not every project is like that.
Obviously there are a lot of projects where Teal Draw plays a very small role, even in a big project, but yeah, there's a number of apps that just would not exist without Teal Draw just because of the, the kind of lack of alternatives. Number one, but, but also just a unviable, it would not be viable to build this themselves and then build their product on top of it. So those, those people, probably just went and done something else. Um, anyway, uh, yeah, how much is that worth?
Well, we're, we're thinking that out, we'll talk again in a year. A lot. Okay. Try to have a better answer for that.
That's part, I think the detail to be in those negotiations, because like when you're in those sales negotiations, it sounds like you're learning too about your customer, how like how your value permits into their, their software stack and truly what your value is. Like that's, I think, like I was kind of like taking it back by your desire to negotiate every deal, but that's also a learning process you have to do for a measure could be a year or even two, or potentially a whole entire version like you've done, because that gives you a learning process. It gives you a learning process. I think everyone should, should try that as well, because it also gives you an opportunity, really low friction opportunity to just ask for more money.
And everyone says like, Oh, you should raise your prices, raise your prices. But like, it's a lot easier to just, you know, come off of a call being like, all right, those, those folks agreed pretty quickly to the number that I put out there, maybe on the next call, I'm going to kind of, you know, ask us for a bigger number, right? And there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with that. Like that is the process, right?
You can just iterate on it faster. Everyone does it, but it's, you don't have to change your landing page. The other thing is that like, one of the things that we took away, just kind of again, like the, how do you sell an SDK thing? When I first started talking to customers, I would be pricing based on how big the customer was, right?
A lot of, like a lot of SDKs will do this. They'll say like, age grid prices based on the number of developers who work on the project that's going to have this, this feature in it, right? That's going to use the age grid code base, right? Or like, how many times will this component load or how much, how many minutes will this thing be active or how many connections or all that, right?
And what I found was that the pricing based on the size of the company did not make sense. A lot of times we're talking to small teams at a really big company. And we want to be in that company. We want to sell to them.
We want to have them as customers, but in order for that to work, we have to bring that price down, but now we're going to give that whole company a license to use the product for like a small price. And so the, kind of the genius unlock was just saying like, all right, this is a, like, because we were negotiating, because we had that ability to make these types of moves, we could say, Hey, you're a large company. Let's just limit this agreement to just that feature or just that application or just that, that part of the product. And I'm happy to give it to you for whatever price that seems, would seem out of fit with the size of the company, right?
Like, right. But hopefully you like it and hopefully like other people at the company like see this and say, Oh, I want that. My part of the product or hopefully grows. And then we have different agreements with those teams or those other, or we renegotiate this agreement next year or whatever we have to do.
But that type of thing would have been really hard to do with like a pricing calculator on our landing pages or something like that. That would have been really hard to do with a number of connections for charging per connection or something like that. So it's terrible because like, again, as a, as a programmer, I like to automate things as a software guy. Like I like to set up systems and nothing could be further.
Yeah. Just negotiate time through, you know, but, but it's, you just got to do it. Like, otherwise you're, yeah, you know, I think what you find your deal repeating itself. That's when you're like, okay, I've done 20 of those, let's turn that into potentially a package or I've done, like, gosh, I got to customize this proposal again, but it's been the same thing the last 10 times.
Maybe it's time to dial in that particular type. If you're able to, yeah, that's where I found it. Is selling an SDK similar or exactly the same as self-hosted? I think the same question differently.
I don't know. Oftentimes what I see with self-hosted is that there's a commercial app, right? Like Century would be a great example, right? Like you have a hosted commercial version of the product that you can also self-host.
I think Cal.com is similar. There's like, there's a lot of these and I think it's a good model, right? Because you get a little bit of the best of both worlds. You get like broad adoption that will tell you what features are really important, like, there's no people will request anything.
But once they start building it for themselves, they know that they really need it. And so having some sort of open source or sort of self-hostable path is a great way to learn about your customers, if nothing else. And I think having your code be open and we're available and self-hostable, all that kind of keeps you honest. And I think it leads to a higher quality code base, leads to a higher quality product.
You can't really hide in the same way as you can. There's reasons for it. And so some people just want to care about open source in ways that I wish I could. I wish a lot of works for us as well, because I also do care about these things.
But in that case, you're giving a full product and you're saying, you can put this product on your servers, right? It's different than an SDK. The SDK is like, here's the engine. Go build software on top of it.
It's like the thing that you get when you use teal draw is that engine. And of course, in order to make it easier to adopt, we've built a lot of these starter kits and modules and things like that that you can use to, for example, to do multiplayer collaboration. It's really good as well. We nailed it with the back end.
And that back end is not a service. That is, here's code. Put it on your server or deploy it to the top of your self. Like, I don't want to ever touch your data and I won't.
But it's all the things that are sitting around us this SDK that help move it. But like, hey, we want to build a comments feature on top of teal draw. And is that part of teal draw? And I have to say, no, that's not part of teal draw.
Or can we just have teal.com? But inside of our own internal organization, I have to say, like, no, actually, you have to kind of build that layer yourself. And I have to say, after like four years of saying no to that, I'm having second thoughts about whether I should be saying no to that. But the interesting thing is, and here's what I was talking about, like AI kind of eating SaaS products or changing the way that SaaS products work.
At the beginning, the companies that were asking for teal draw kind of like in a box, like, can I just have like an application around this SDK? They were almost all motivated by concerns of data sovereignty. So they were like German, or like, you know, or European, and maybe they were part of a university or government, or they just felt very strongly about this. And they were like, we can't use these SaaS products that are based in America because of the data requirements in our country or in our organization, right?
Or we have to use open source software. We have to use software that we can modify ourselves. Or they were like in air gap facilities, you know, like we're in an engineering facility that is, you know, 200 feet underground, and we need to collaborate. Or we still need to do these things.