Interview with Lucy Guo the COO and Co-Founder of Scale!
Tell us about how Scale was founded. What inspired you to create it?
We initially got accepted into YC with a different idea - a data-driven mobile healthcare assistant that finds and books appointments with the best doctors. There ended up being zero time for product development as we ended up spending all our time manually calling doctors. We wished there were an API for human work and started talking to several companies (at all stages). We quickly realized that almost every single company has manual human processes they rely on. These companies were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in time and resources to build tools and manage these workers.
We wanted to solve this problem, so we built Scale API - an API for human intelligence. With just a few lines of code, developers can deploy humans on-demand to do tasks such as image recognition, content moderation, phone surveys, and more.
How did you balance full time position with Scale and your other entrepreneurial activities?
I try to spend a day off every week, although it's turned from doing fun projects like Pokecrew to just being "me-time".
How do you to effectively market Scale?
We do content marketing to get in-bound customers. This means creating informational pages, writing blog posts, etc.
How is the Scale created and what is it made out of?
We're on the MEAN stack, although we're in the process of switching to React now.
Describe to us an example of your typical workday.
Managing Scalers, working with our designer on product, sourcing potential candidates, interviewing candidates, random ops/marketing related tasks, one-on-ones with employees to figure out how they want to grow, etc. Honestly I do everything as a founder!
What are some of your biggest challenges while working on Scale (both the company and the product)?
For the company, hiring is a huge time-consumer. We have high standards and we're being incredibly careful about making sure our founding team are perfect culture fits, so this eats up a lot of time.
For the product, scaling operations through engineering (via building quality control, skill-screening, machine learning, etc.).
How will Scale generate net revenue?
Our prices reflect our cost + x% margin (depending on volume).
I used the Mechanical Turks by Amazon before and to me it was tough to set up, documentation was almost non-existent, and was very clunky. How did you make your APIs so simple to use?
People are used to simple REST APIs, so that's what we created. The complexity lies in everything else.
What are some exciting features we should expect from Scale in the next iteration of the product?
Look out for new endpoints and tighter quality/speed controls!
If you want your startup to be interviewed, please reach out to me at contact@taehongmin.com. Thanks!