Quicknode

May 19, 2023 — 4 min read

For this Feature Friday, we had the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Kau, co-founder and CEO of Satsuma, a pioneering company focused on advancing decentralized app development through improved blockchain indexing. Jonathan shared his insights on Satsuma's growth, the trends they are witnessing in web3, and the exciting new partnership with Quicknode. With a strong software engineering background and extensive data tools domain experience, Jonathan and his team are well-equipped to drive the future of blockchain indexing.

Since its inception, Satsuma has undergone significant growth and transformation, thriving even amidst challenging market conditions. The company has achieved remarkable success in just eight months, partnering with prominent web3 projects such as Decentraland, Treasure, and Aragon.

Learn more about Satsuma.

Get the Satsuma Subgraph Hosting Add-on from Quicknode Marketplace!

Q&A with Satsuma 👇

Could you introduce yourself by sharing your name, prior experience, and current role within your company? Additionally, please briefly explain your company's mission and what it offers to its customers.

I’m Jonathan Kau, co-founder and CEO of Satsuma. At Satsuma, our mission is to enable the development of more decentralized apps through better blockchain indexing. Our first product is a drop-in subgraph hosting service with higher reliability, faster performance, and better developer tooling.

I’m a software engineer by training and owned data tools at Y Combinator. Now, I’m an engineer turned salesperson, holding all sales & go-to-market functions at Satsuma.

How has your company grown and changed since its inception, and what do you have planned for its future?

Even though we launched our service in the midst of a bear market, we’ve seen amazing growth over the past eight months. We’re lucky to work with top web3 projects such as Decentraland, Treasure, Aragon and more.

We’re continuing to find ways to save developers time. For example, we have projects in-progress to improve developer iteration speed by another 10-100x with faster indexing & reindexing.

In the world of web3, what are some of the most prominent trends you are currently observing? Which ones do you believe will gain momentum in the coming years?

We’re excited about the rise of web3 gaming and its potential for onboarding the masses. Some of our customers, like Treasure, are seeing continued user growth even through a general market downturn.

Similar trends are happening within DeFi. While the industry is overall down from the peaks of the bull market, there’s been growing adoption of synthetics and perpetuals.

What inspired you to develop Satsuma, and how did you conceive of the idea?

Both my cofounder and myself have backgrounds in web2 data infra and analytics, and were initially working on tooling to help web3 projects understand where their users were coming from. Our struggles with existing tooling and conversations with potential customers led us to realize that there was an underlying need for better indexing technology.

Can you provide insight into Satsuma's progress by sharing any metrics or milestones indicating its traction?

We announced our $5M seed raise in April and averaged 80% MoM growth in the six months up until that point.

As mentioned before, we’re lucky to work with amazing customers like Decentraland, Aragon, Treasure, Lyra, and Syndicate.

Can you provide insight into the target market for Satsuma and what types of clients you work with?

As a custom indexing platform, we work with customers across many different sectors like DeFi, gaming, and NFTs.

We find that the best fit are customers who are already using subgraphs, or are looking for an indexing solution to power a dApp off of their own smart contracts.

Subgraph Hosting available in the Quicknode Marketplace

What excites you most about the partnership with Quicknode?

We're incredibly excited about our partnership with Quicknode for several reasons:

• Complementary Services: Quicknode's reliable and scalable infrastructure for blockchain node management complements Satsuma's indexing services perfectly. This collaboration means we can offer a more comprehensive, end-to-end solution for our customers, making it easier for them to build and scale their decentralized applications.

• Improved Performance: Quicknode's high-performance infrastructure will allow us to provide even faster and more reliable indexing services. This directly aligns with our mission to save developers time and enhance their productivity.

• Expansion of Reach: Quicknode's broad user base presents a great opportunity for Satsuma to reach more projects in need of efficient and reliable blockchain indexing. We look forward to serving these projects and helping them succeed in their web3 journey.