Recap: The Business of APIs @ Fintech Devcon

This morning our CEO Ryan sat down with Justin Overdorff (Lightspeed, frmr Stripe), Cara Hayward (CurrencyCloud), and Peter Lord (Codat) to discuss the business of APIs.

Led by Charley Ma, the panel had a lively discussion covering topics ranging from GTM strategy to outlining the ideal partnership between business teams and engineering. We’ve included some of the highlights from the panel below!

What do you look for in business hires?

Cara: Curiosity is crucial. Startups are like onions, you keep peeling away and revealing new problems. Attention to detail ensures you don’t miss anything as you move fast.

Ryan: Raw horsepower and versatility come to mind first. Products are changing all the time at a fast-growing business and business hires need to keep up, you can’t get too comfortable. They also need to be able to understand technical concepts and have meaningful conversations with the engineering team. API is more than an acronym.

How do you think about pricing strategy?

Justin: Startups get scared of pricing and often fall into decision paralysis because of it. Founders and execs become scared of irreversible decisions, but that’s just not the case. Yes your pricing will change and customers will be upset and that’s OK. They will stick with you if you are building the right product. Pricing is never perfect the first time and it doesn’t need to be.

Ryan: If your product isn’t a commodity, your price should be as high as reasonably possible to start- you can always come down and you want to capture more upside earlier to maintain leverage. For more transactional SaaS businesses, there is a lot of pushback for signing customers to long-term subscriptions but just because there is pushback doesn’t mean they won’t do it. Truework was 100% transactions during our first two years and now we are 50% subscriptions. Don’t be afraid to challenge your customers on this.

What do you think is under-hyped right now in the fintech space?

Cara: Valuations.

Peter: Crypto.

Justin: The fintech name itself. Everything doesn’t need to be an API!

What do you think is under-hyped right now in the fintech space?

Ryan: It took me a while to warm up, but I do believe NFTs are under-hyped despite the current bubble we see. NFTs will be here for the long term as digital art has been undervalued for quite some time. Lenders soon enough will see these works as assets and include them in their collateral assessment of borrowers, similar to how high-end art is currently insured and used as collateral.