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.
At a glance it does sound like a very small potential market which makes me curious as to why YC would fund them. Perhaps there's a belief that the market will grow as these tools lower the barriers to entry (facilitated by GraphQL) for building applications?
The fast-growing cloud service market at large is one we're trying to tackle, and you're correct in that GraphQL does indeed provide a lot of value in helping us get there.
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.