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When I first visited San Francisco in the late 2000s, what stood out to me immediately were all the billboards from tech companies. They were everywhere around me, right from the moment I stepped off the plane. Until then, I had only seen billboards for various lifestyle brands and they always felt distant to me. But not in San Francisco. Most billboards spoke to me directly as an engineer, and it felt like I had found “home”. ...

Over the years, I’ve repeatedly heard things like: “SSO is a complicated beast” “Implementing SSO requires so much manual effort with each customer” So when we started getting a trickle of users asking for SSO in Typesense Cloud, I put it off for the longest time, dreading the painful implementation. We soon reached a critical mass of potential users asking for SSO and a few even saying it’s a show-stopper. ...

2021 was a difficult year for Typesense, but not in the way you would imagine. The problem was not growth. We were growing comfortably month over month with little fuss. But our competitors were raising millions of dollars and doubling their team sizes and their on-paper valuations. Every other week a new angel investor or venture fund would reach out. Some wanted to genuinely learn about us, some wanted to know more about the search space, and a few others were just curious about us because they were thinking of investing in one of our rivals (it’s a small world, so word gets around!). ...

This was a personal dream come true. Typesense made an appearance on the iconic Nasdaq billboard in Times Square, New York today! 🎉 We reached several important milestones in our journey this past month: ⭐️ 10K+ Stars on GitHub 🌐 250M+ Requests/Month on Typesense Cloud 🐳 3M+ Downloads on Docker 🔒 SOC2 Type 2 certification (by an independent external auditor) for Typesense Cloud I would watch my LinkedIn feed feature a seemingly never-ending stream of VC-backed companies announcing their fundraising on the Nasdaq billboard and feel a bit of FOMO. But it turns out, we didn’t need VC funding to be on this billboard. ...

Over the last 18 months, we’ve had conversations with over two dozen VC firms who cold-reached out to us. We’ve also had conversations with about a dozen customers and friends who expressed interest in investing in us (including my physician when he found out that I worked on Typesense)! To everyone who has reached out to us about investing in Typesense, I really appreciate your support. While some of these conversations almost convinced us that we should be raising funds, after a lot of soul-searching between Kishore and myself, our current state of mind is that we want to build a business around Typesense that’s primarily funded by customer revenue, rather than external capital. ...

When I first started working on Typesense six years ago, I set myself a simple rule: I shall write some code everyday before or after work. That’s it. No deadlines, no quarterly goals, no milestones. I did not have a choice really — I was about to get married and was already working full-time in a demanding role. As you can imagine, building a search engine from scratch is not a trivial undertaking, so that was my way of not having to deal with additional stress. ...