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🔩 Sharpened Steel: A Stainless Deep Dive 🔩

This project analyzes Stainless, a company that automatically generates - and maintains - SDKs from OpenAPI YAML specifications. The goal is to better understand the product, market landscape, and propose preliminary S&M ideas through a hands-on and proof-of-concept approach.

We've broken down the analysis into four segments: (1) Product, (2) Sales, (3) Marketing, and (4) Finance.

💻 1. Product 💻

The core of Stainless's business is SDK generation from OpenAPI YAML files.

We've built an MVP to better understand and demonstrate this process (redirects to Vimeo video):

Watch the demo
Steel Product Demo (Vimeo)

We generate local SDK configurations by parsing a provided YAML, prompting for the desired SDK language (i.e. Python or Node), and then use Jinja templates to create language-specific SDKs which are then stored in the 1-Product/output-sdk folder. This MVP helps us understand the underlying mechanics of products like Stainless, Speakeasy, and OpenAPI Generator on the open source side.

Key Features of the MVP:

  • SDK Generation: Creates Python and Node.js SDKs from local OpenAPI YAML files.
  • README Generation for each Language: Automatically generates a README.md for each SDK, outlining the API and its endpoints.

Future MVP development steps include: auto-generating SDK endpoint tests, creating a Click-based CLI, containerizing with Docker, and implementing GitHub Actions for remote connectivity and YAML-driven automation.

📞 2. Sales: Growth Engineering 📞

The objective here is to identify potential customers via an engineering-first approach. We've focused on three target groups:

  1. Public OpenAPI YAML's: We used https://api.apis.guru/ - an API that aggreagates API's - to source publicly available OpenAPI YAML files and then wrote a script to parse contact information, documentation links, and the YAML files themselves. A proof of concept to show creative ways of driving growth via sourcing OpenAPI YAML files. The pulled data is in 2-Sales/openapi_info.csv.
  2. API Companies: Next we leveraged the power of web scraping. We developed a Playwright-based web scraper to extract a list of API companies from API-Tracker. This approach can be extended to platforms like the Postman Public API Network. The pulled data is in 2-Sales/api-tracker-pull.csv.
  3. API Platform Engineers: We then targeted API platform engineers. We leveraged Apollo's database to identify US-based API platform engineers as a target audience. The Airtable link to the raw data is here.

Next steps include enhancing workflow efficiency by integrating data into Attio (CRM), using Clay for enrichment, developing a lead-scoring model, and running scaled outbound campaigns with tools like Instantly.

📣 3. Marketing: API Community and Content 📣

We propose a three-pronged marketing strategy:

  1. Events: A calendar of relevant industry events to participate in.

    3-Marketing/api-events_table.png

  2. Video/Webinar Content: A schedule for creating and publishing video content (e.g., tutorials, demos, webinars).

3-Marketing/video-schedule_table.png

  1. Blog Content: A plan for blog posts covering technical deep dives, use cases, and industry insights with a focus on customer testimonials.

    3-Marketing/blog-schedule_table.png

Given the nature of the product, product-led and marketing-led will be key but the business can also uniquely target companies with public YAML files which provides a unique sales targeting angle.

💵 4. Finance: Competitive Landscape and Pricing 💵

We performed a preliminary competitive analysis to understand the ecosystem and get a sense of pricing. We also jotted down a few investor-esque questions based on our current understanding of the business. See comps_and_ecosystem.json for our competitive analysis. A few observations:

  • Speakeasy: The notable "K-Nearest Neighbor" comp that also recently raised venture so will be a notable competitor. A few highlights are their Terraform offering for the infrastructure market and their local CLI which offers a more controlled SDK development experience.

  • Terraform Opportunity: Terraform and cloud infrastructure market seems like a very attractice opportunity to enter as it's an underserviced segment that Stainless can capture with our YAML-driven platform.

  • Partnerships There are interesting potential partnership opportunities in documentation (depending on Stainless's build vs. buy strategy) as well as with CLI players like CircleCI and API management companies like Kong.

A quick sketch to understand the core levers of the business. Reach out for any questions and thoughts!