Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight: Tom Hacohen, Svix

Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight: Tom Hacohen, Svix

Company Name: Svix
Founder Name: Tom Hacohen
LinkedIn: Svix Company Page
Industry: Software / Developer tools
Investors: Y Combinator, a16z, Aleph, and others
Location: USA

This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Startup Labs, a program for developers at early-stage startups to learn how to build, prototype, and demo on Twilio. We had the pleasure of chatting with Tom Hacohen about his startup, Svix.

What is Svix?

Svix is the enterprise ready webhook sending service. Webhooks are a pain. Sending webhooks requires significant engineering time, resources, and ongoing maintenance. Svix offers an API which lets you build a state-of-the-art webhooks sending solution in minutes so you can focus on your business.

Why is it useful?

People have come to expect webhooks, either to consume in their own service or in no-code tools. Webhooks transform software products from useful applications into critical, real-time data infrastructure. With webhooks, your customers can drive workflows around your product and elevate its stickiness and usefulness.

Why did you start Svix?

At my previous company, our customers kept on asking us to send webhooks, but we kept on saying no as it would take too much time and effort to build and maintain them. Especially since we wanted to provide a good and reliable webhook experience. Though it’s only after a friend of mine asked a question about webhooks in a Slack community we are both members of, that I realized that this is a common problem, and one that’s worth solving. After that conversation, I started Svix in order to make webhooks easy and reliable, so that everyone can offer webhooks to their customers without having to reinvent the wheel every time.

Svix was featured alongside Twilio on Postman’s list of best APIs for developer experience ! What made you decide to make your developer experience a core part of your product?

It was great seeing Svix mentioned as one of the top APIs in terms of developer experience along with other awesome products such as Lob (Svix customer!), Stripe, Plaid, OpenAI, and of course Twilio!

I have very strong opinions regarding developer experience and I can’t imagine not having it as a core part of our product! There are many reasons why that’s the case. The most obvious one is that a great developer experience leads to happy engineers, who are the ones using our product. Though another one is that by having a great developer experience (DX), especially with such a critical infrastructure service like Svix, you enable developers to follow best practices which increases the reliability of the integration and shortens the time it takes to release it to production.

What’s next for Svix?

Svix already powers the webhooks of companies both large (Fortune 100) and small (startups) across a variety of verticals (financial institutions, fintech, healthcare, AI, logistics, etc.). We will continue investing in sales and marketing to further fuel our growth.

In terms of the product, we have a long list of functionality we would like to add, and a couple new products on the horizon. I can't share too much yet, but stay tuned for the next few months. They will address some additional needs we kept on hearing about from our customers.

Lastly, we also plan on continuing to grow the team and are hiring for a variety of roles. Please check out our careers page for more information.