He Learned to Code on Paper. Now He's Fixing the Internet. | Chai Choudhary, Workers

I've been building on-deck ODF and now solo founders for about seven, eight years.

The amount of customer pull that I'm seeing with Workers.io is really some of the strongest customer pull that I've seen.

in seven or eight years.

Why do you think that is? And why are people moving away from folks that maybe you're in an annual contract with and deciding to pay for you, even though they're already committed to a competitor because they think this is just so important to them? What is it that's actually driving that behavior right now?

Yeah, I think there were a few decisions that I made early on, which now in retrospect, I can say that probably that's what is driving some of it.

Number one, we really wanted the product to be extremely easy to use, right? You wouldn't want...

only the smartest engineer in your team to be using a product.

So that was one.

The second was how we priced it.

I think like initially I got a lot of suggestion around pricing it as at bar with like what the competitor charges.

But then at the same time, I was like, okay, if we make it easy enough to use and reasonably priced, it's just going to be used way more often in these teams.

And then it'll also be much more difficult to replace it, but we'll end up generating way more revenue.

So those were the few things.

Also, I remember like initially when I started working on this, like we ended up building a lot more for our customer and that kind of increased the surface area that they had to like learn to start using the product.

And slowly we realized, okay, like we need to shrink that down and basically build a lot of the tooling for ourselves so that we can make it a very hands-off experience where you just connect your product, Define the promises that you care about and you get the guarantees based on the amount of compute you spend.

And yeah, so basically a combination of a lot of these things ended up adding to the now sales becoming a much more easier than it was when I was just attempting formal verification stuff.

You know, one thing that's also really interesting that you just talked about, I think it's worth us maybe pulling on this thread a little bit is this idea of, kind of making it easier for customers.

And by making it easier for customers, it's almost by doing the work for them.

Instead of it being tools that they use, it's tools that you use.

And that really feels more like we're talking about this sort of service model versus sort of your traditional SaaS.

What have you learned about that over the last year of building? You've built for roughly the same types of people over the last year.

and this current thing that you're doing with workers.io is clearly the one that's most resonant.

But what have you learned about that idea of software versus service?

Yeah, I think like when I was, First building it, even today, I don't think of it as a service thing.

A lot of these decisions that we made were also for the fact that I wanted to understand what the challenges were when we were just focused on delivering the outcome.

I've been building on-deck ODF and now solo founders for about seven, eight years.

The amount of customer pull that I'm seeing with Workers.io is really some of the strongest customer pull that I've seen.

in seven or eight years.

Why do you think that is? And why are people moving away from folks that maybe you're in an annual contract with and deciding to pay for you, even though they're already committed to a competitor because they think this is just so important to them? What is it that's actually driving that behavior right now?

Yeah, I think there were a few decisions that I made early on, which now in retrospect, I can say that probably that's what is driving some of it.

Number one, we really wanted the product to be extremely easy to use, right? You wouldn't want...

only the smartest engineer in your team to be using a product.

So that was one.

The second was how we priced it.

I think like initially I got a lot of suggestion around pricing it as at bar with like what the competitor charges.

But then at the same time, I was like, okay, if we make it easy enough to use and reasonably priced, it's just going to be used way more often in these teams.

And then it'll also be much more difficult to replace it, but we'll end up generating way more revenue.

So those were the few things.

Also, I remember like initially when I started working on this, like we ended up building a lot more for our customer and that kind of increased the surface area that they had to like learn to start using the product.

And slowly we realized, okay, like we need to shrink that down and basically build a lot of the tooling for ourselves so that we can make it a very hands-off experience where you just connect your product, Define the promises that you care about and you get the guarantees based on the amount of compute you spend.

And yeah, so basically a combination of a lot of these things ended up adding to the now sales becoming a much more easier than it was when I was just attempting formal verification stuff.

You know, one thing that's also really interesting that you just talked about, I think it's worth us maybe pulling on this thread a little bit is this idea of, kind of making it easier for customers.

And by making it easier for customers, it's almost by doing the work for them.

Instead of it being tools that they use, it's tools that you use.

And that really feels more like we're talking about this sort of service model versus sort of your traditional SaaS.

What have you learned about that over the last year of building? You've built for roughly the same types of people over the last year.

and this current thing that you're doing with workers.io is clearly the one that's most resonant.

But what have you learned about that idea of software versus service?

Yeah, I think like when I was, First building it, even today, I don't think of it as a service thing.

A lot of these decisions that we made were also for the fact that I wanted to understand what the challenges were when we were just focused on delivering the outcome.