API Deck

G.J. DeWild launched API Deck in 2018 with a simple insight: as the number of SaaS platforms exploded, so did the integrations problem. Companies like Plaid and Codat had solved this for fintech and accounting, but no one was building a unified integration layer for all of SaaS. G.J. saw the market gap and decided to build it.

Between 2018 and 2021, G.J. and his brother bootstrapped the company while closing early customers on small angel tickets. They focused on building a strong foundation rather than rushing to scale. During this period, they weren't making much revenue, but they were laying the groundwork for what would become a high-growth platform.

The real inflection came about one and a half years before the interview (around mid-2021) when G.J. launched the first unified API. This was the turning point. By then, the team had grown to 10 full-time people—90% engineers—who handled both product development and daily customer support.

G.J. invested heavily in automation and tooling to solve the core problem: how do you maintain and monitor 100+ API connectors without breaking under operational load? The answer was building Portman, an internal API monitoring solution, and leveraging OpenAPI specs to create contracts around how APIs should behave. This infrastructure allowed them to scale from 100 connectors toward their vision of 1,000 to 2,000 integrations.

Once the unified API product launched, customers came through a product-led growth motion. Companies discovered API Deck organically as they searched for solutions to their integration problems. The value proposition was clear: instead of building point-to-point integrations, developers could tap into a standardized layer that handled 100+ platforms across 9 categories (CRM, accounting, e-commerce, HR, file storage, etc.).

Pricing was usage-based—around $10K per year per customer on average ($800-900 MRR per account). The pricing tied to two levers: the number of API calls and the number of unified APIs customers used. Importantly, G.J. didn't charge based on the number of end customers linked through integrations, which made the product more attractive for customers solving multiple use cases.

The PLG motion worked extremely well. Customers came in self-serve and proved the value of the platform. But G.J. recognized there was untapped opportunity in enterprise and larger deals. Recently, the team added one commercial person to the team to pursue a hybrid motion: doubling down on PLG while also doing targeted outbound to enterprise customers.

On the funding side, angels were charmed by two things: the velocity of customers discovering the platform organically, and the sheer amount of connectors shipped by a tiny team. Despite only doing $25K MRR when raising, G.J. managed to get a $10-15M valuation cap on his seed round, raising over $1M from angels last year. This happened because investors believed in the decacorn potential of the market opportunity.

As of the interview, API Deck was doing $50K MRR (up from $25K a year prior—100% YoY growth) with 75 paying customers ranging from pre-revenue startups to public companies. They were adding 15 new connectors every four weeks. The team was burning $30K per month, but G.J. wasn't nervous because they had investor interest and were targeting a VC round later that year.

G.J.'s vision is clear: API Deck will be a decacorn. The market opportunity is massive—every SaaS company needs integrations or they're "dead in the water." By being the unified integration layer, API Deck captures a slice of that critical infrastructure spend. The company is betting on combining PLG (which got them to $50K MRR) with outbound sales to accelerate growth and capture market share before larger competitors move in.