1) Minimum Viable Company

In order to cultivate a minimum viable company, it is important to focus on a few elements and fit together the different pieces that we see into a bigger picture.

Value Proposition

According to Ann Miura-Ko, “Features [...] aren’t the product — they’re merely enablers of value propositions: promises of how the product will drastically improve a customer’s life.”

These value propositions must be extraordinarily compelling. To succeed, a startup must be at least a 10x improvement for their customer in at least one way. Without digging too much into it (I intend to write a more in-depth blog post), Hookdeck allows tech teams to completely avoid building ingestion and queuing services for the delay processing of webhooks. That's a lot better than spending a month setting up AWS and building a custom solution that needs maintaining.

Our intuition says that we can 10x the webhook development workflow by providing a tool that makes it coherent, which would allow developers to avoid setting up tons of tooling just to get started on development. That means we could offer a development workflow and the infrastructure that improves the experience working with webhooks along the whole development life cycle.

Ecosystem

It is also important to consider the ecosystem into which we are delivering our product. There are 3 main actors in our particular ecosystem:

Webhook sender
Company consuming webhooks (developers we help are in this category)
Customer

By helping developers in the second category, we also help webhook senders by removing the pain of having to build tooling (dashboard, CLI, etc) and reducing their resources (retries on dead endpoints, timeouts, etc).

We improve the development and monitoring experience of webhook integration for developers by allowing them to deal with only 1 tool that diminishes the complexity of dealing with webhooks at scale by protecting from spikes in traffic, among other benefits (for example inspecting and replay features).

We also spend lots of time considering how to improve the experience of our product and keep customers satisfied. Missing webhooks leads to frustrated customers, as webhooks trigger an event which completes an action for these clients (an email, a payment, a fulfillment). As these webhooks get used and integrated more, the need for more webhooks and more integrations grows even stronger. The constant here is "more webhooks needed," and with Hookdeck we make it so simple and reliable that developers can tackle more projects and release them quicker.

Business Model

How do we get our product to customers? We are still working on it, but the axis of reflection is Hookdeck benefits when developers build and release more integrations. The goal is to help as many developers as possible deploy their integrations production through Hookdeck.

This is a win for the ecosystem, because webhook senders have clients that are more deeply integrated with their product, developers can improve the experience of their product with more features, and customers are the ones to enjoy the benefits of a better experience.

Looking Back at 2020 and Goals for 2021 #3

New New September #1

Instantly & reliably manageyour webhooks

Instantly & reliably manage
your webhooks