'Step out of your comfort zone and don't be ashamed of your code': Vedran Cindric, CEO of Treblle

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

My name is Vedran, I'm 33 years old and I've been a developer for the past 15 years. I started out with back-end development in PHP/MYSQL and progressed to learning HTML/CSS/JS as well as DevOps. I really love writing great, efficient, and optimized code. Before starting our current startup, Treblle, I ran a development company for the past 10 years with clients all around the world. With our development company, we completed over 100 projects and launched multiple products and startups for others.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

The startup is called Treblle and it makes it super easy to understand what’s going on with your APIs and the apps that use them.

What is the origin story?

We ran our own development agency for the past 10 years and worked on a lot of API-based projects all around the world. I built most of them and would spend my days providing integration support, debugging with other developers, writing docs…To help myself and the agency I started developing a small logging tool that I would turn on/off when I needed to because it wasn’t scalable at that point 😂.

Slowly we started expanding what the early prototype did, we managed to figure out the scale part and we started sharing it with our clients. They loved it, so they started sharing it with their developers and we got a ton of super positive feedback and traction. Internally we also started using Treblle on all our projects daily and we decided to take a leap of faith and focus on the product full time.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

There would be no Treblle without the current core team. Tea and Darko have provided me with tremendous support even from the early stages. They believed in the product and that we can all execute on the highest level. What I love the most about the team is that at any point in time you can lean on any team member to get any job done. It doesn’t matter if it’s taking a sales meeting, developing, designing, planning, or assembling IKEA furniture for the new office.

The reason why we are the ones to solve the problems is that we’ve always kept a small but lean team. And when you have a small team you have to use various hacks to boost productivity, gain extra time, and be super-efficient. That’s how we approached and built this service. For our clients, we saw Treblle as an extension of Tea, Darko, and me. While we were sleeping they could go to Treblle and get the answers they needed. That takes a lot of effort in all stages from design, simplicity, thinking, and development.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

We would be building startups for others like we have been doing for the past 10 years. We’ve probably built at least 10 startups in the past 10 years that have raised money and most of them are still alive and kicking.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Just like everybody else we measure MRR to make sure that we have a healthy path to succeeding in our product-market fit. From a business side, that is an important metric and we are still at the early stages but it looks promising. Besides that what we like to measure is the number of projects people create with at least 1 API request on it.

If someone creates a project and has at least 1 API request in Treblle it means they added one of our SDKs to their API and successfully started using it. That, to me, means that we did a good job on all fronts. From marketing and spreading the word to people, to building great SDKs and finally building a product that is simple and useful to other people.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

What I love about the traction is that it allows me to speak and talk to some of the best developers around the world. We try to reach out to most of our clients, ask them what they think and if there is something we could do better. You learn so much about your product and how others are building APIs. I’ve had many great conversations with people in billion-dollar companies, educators but also more importantly fellow developers who work with APIs every day just like I did.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I’m a PHP guy for life <3 From the moment I first started dabbling with PHP when I was 12-13 with Xoops, which was super popular at that time, to today when I get to work in Laravel - a truly amazing PHP framework. There has been so much excitement in the PHP ecosystem with PHP 7 and 8. It feels like the language is just coming alive and so many cool things are happening.

What I’m worried about or sad about is that in today's market a lot of people are becoming developers for the wrong reasons. Not because they love that but because they are chasing the money. Of course, that isn’t bad but at the end of the day, in my opinion, if you wanna be a great developer you have to love it. Another thing that worries me is that people start off by learning the most popular framework, especially in the JS world, and never learn the basics.

It’s my strong belief that you shouldn’t be learning React or Angular if you don’t know the basics of JS. The same goes for CSS and any back-end technology. In order to be the master of a framework, you have to understand how the underlying language works.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

I’ve read so many great articles on HackerNoon and always wanted to be able to contribute on the platform myself. You get to a point in your development career where you’ve read so many tips, tricks, and so many different people around the world have helped you, for free, that you feel like you owe the world to do the same. I think that’s the beauty of development.

I like that it's language and framework agnostic, that what I wrote gets published as is even though there are sometimes controversial topics in the articles. Like the comment I made about GraphQL in my last article 😀.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and don’t be ashamed of your code. For so long I’ve been terrified of what people would think of the code I write, is it good enough, can I do it better, more efficiently...That’s good in a sense that pushed me to write even better code but also blocked me in so many ways. If someone tells you your code sucks don’t worry you can make it better tomorrow. That’s the beauty of development.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

We’ve raised our seed round this year and I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of VCs from the EU, UK, and even US! I was very skeptical about the whole idea but I have to say that most of them are really great. They care about the product, the idea, and what you are trying to build. It’s not all about the money, they won’t tell you what color you should use in your app or website, what tech or similar. They try to help you as much as possible to take your idea, product to the next level. Again, 90% of the ones I spoke to were great which I didn’t know and surprised me.