72 karma · joined March 17, 2016
Nabis (YC W19) Scaphold.io (YC W17)
The question was framed slightly differently in that that person asked about TAM, so this is what I responded below and I think it's still a valid explanation to repost here:
"Great question, that's something that we've been thinking about for a while and I want to start out by defining what our market is. Given the various categories of offerings in the market today amongst managed hosting, DBaaS, and PaaS, Scaphold falls under the PaaS side of things. We do offer plenty of value-added features that attempt to make server-side development a lot more hands-off.
However, at second glance, you could argue that Scaphold actually creates a new take on PaaS. Previous services have faltered at trying to do too much in one platform by essentially wrapping and containing all the services you need underneath one shell. So we're treading in unfamiliar territory where we think there's actually a lot more value in providing an interface for all your data across the web, as opposed to a complete wrapper around it in a self-contained manner. This way, developers can actually get the best of both worlds:
1) Having the benefits of using a backend as a service platform that offers value-added services like hosting, performance monitoring, tooling, app management, etc. And...
2) Flexibility in picking and choosing what services you need (like Auth0 or Stripe), tying in your own custom logic (through a provider like AWS Lambda), and even perhaps the database layer as well.
Essentially, the vision is to allow developers to think as if they were rolling their own backend, while stripping out the time-consuming aspect of connecting these pieces manually. It's a much more modular approach where we sit as the hub of all your data across the web.
To bring this back to the original point about TAM, this would ultimately open the door for us to a much larger market that includes any cloud service customer since they're not married to Scaphold as a backend. Scaphold essentially becomes an extremely versatile way to tie in your data that's hosted just about anywhere and combine it with the existing services you already use. That also reduces the pieces that we have to manage as well. My answer is by no means supposed to be a definitive way of thinking about TAM, but merely one way that we're evaluating it. If you or anyone reading this has any thoughts on this, we'd love to talk more privately about this and the direction we're taking Scaphold."
To your point about the extra endpoint, I know they have different ones for simple, Relay, files, and from what you're saying not Apollo Client. To me personally, it seems a bit counterintuitive that they offer so many different endpoints when one of the premises of GraphQL was to have a single endpoint that was decoupled from the client. Open to your thoughts here to see how we can improve your experience as a developer from the client perspective!
1) You currently can't use Oracle DB with Scaphold. We have a hosted database that comes along with each app right from the get-go.
2) There is support for websockets through GraphQL Subscriptions. Each new type that you create in your schema will expose the ability to subscribe to events of that type.
3) There are a bunch of PaaS services that exist out there, but the speed at which you build apps on Scaphold is undoubtedly faster. We give you the ability to think about your data in a modular way by appending large pieces of functionality to your app without having to write any server-side code. But you also get the flexibility to bind your custom logic to the same API through your own hosted microservices. Out of any BaaS platform on the market, we provide the most feature-rich platform that can actually help you launch into production and scale to large workflows. So far we already have a few large customers aboard and growing fast.
If you're interested to hear more about our feature set, I'd love to chat with you more directly about your specific use cases and see how we can address those. Feel free to join our Slack and PM me directly (http://slack.scaphold.io). I'm @vince
However, at second glance, you could argue that Scaphold actually creates a new take on PaaS. Previous services have faltered at trying to do too much in one platform by essentially wrapping and containing all the services you need underneath one shell. So we're treading in unfamiliar territory where we think there's actually a lot more value in providing an interface for all your data across the web, as opposed to a complete wrapper around it in a self-contained manner. This way, developers can actually get the best of both worlds:
1) Having the benefits of using a backend as a service platform that offers value-added services like hosting, performance monitoring, tooling, app management, etc. And... 2) Flexibility in picking and choosing what services you need (like Auth0 or Stripe), tying in your own custom logic (through a provider like AWS Lambda), and even perhaps the database layer as well.
Essentially, the vision is to allow developers to think as if they were rolling their own backend, while stripping out the time-consuming aspect of connecting these pieces manually. It's a much more modular approach where we sit as the hub of all your data across the web.
To bring this back to the original point about TAM, this would ultimately open the door for us to a much larger market that includes any cloud service customer since they're not married to Scaphold as a backend. Scaphold essentially becomes an extremely versatile way to tie in your data that's hosted just about anywhere and combine it with the existing services you already use. That also reduces the pieces that we have to manage as well.
My answer is by no means supposed to be a definitive way of thinking about TAM, but merely one way that we're evaluating it. If you or anyone reading this has any thoughts on this, we'd love to talk more privately about this and the direction we're taking Scaphold.
To provide examples of what we've seen so far, we've seen block chain models, chat bot apps, and music apps hosted on Scaphold to give you an idea of how complex they can get.
There are only a couple in very nascent stages right now. We see this as a good sign since it means that people are in need of more tooling and platforms around such a new technology. Of the other platforms that we're most concerned about, one has built a CLI and another one that's similar to ours hasn't launched quite yet. We differentiate by building a platform that's robust, has end-to-end services like analytics, integrations, and permissions, while still maintaining a level of ease and familiarity through a web interface.