One of the hardest decisions a startup can make
3 months ago, Richard Scappaticci Jr, Ben Rubin, Brooks Pike, and I, made an extremely difficult decision.
Routefusion has a very aggressive product roadmap; we realized if we didn't make some major architectural decisions with our stack that we wouldn't be able to achieve our goals this year, while at the same time risking the scalability of the Routefusion platform.
To be fair, Rich and I wrote our system that has processed many of millions (otw to billions) to date in a few months #startuplife. It has gotten us by for the past few years, and helped us close some AMAZING customers, but it became bulky making it harder and harder to innovate in.
Thus, the classic tech startup problem arose... Do we re-write our entire system from the ground up with everything we have learned in the past few years, or do we keep piecemealing together the current system Rich and I wrote on our couches in between Overwatch games?
Traditional logic would say that you DO NOT rewrite the system, but we are anything but traditional, and we are in a category defining industry that is changing daily, so we knew that if we spent 3 months re-architecting our backend, it would drastically improve our product and our GTM for new features, a risk we were willing to take.
So for 3 grueling months the engineering team has been working 70+ hour weeks, building a brand new backend while also supporting customers in the current one.
It has been one of the most stressful times of our lives... It felt as if we were stagnant; while people around us were releasing new features, we were just re-releasing the same ones.
Well now, I can proudly say that our team has done it! We have migrated over 5 customers to the new platform and are working to move all of them over by the end of Q3.
Our new API is built with GraphQL which to my knowledge is the only financial services (FinTech) API built with GraphQL. We think it is pretty cool, and will allow us the flexibility to build features and experiences that have never existed in the financial services space, a true separation of Routefusion and anyone else.
This new API and backend is a testament to the drive, courage, and selfless behavior our team has to progressing financial systems all across the world. Routefusion is here to lead the future of payments tech, we exist not because we want to, we exist because the world has asked us too.
We are extremely excited to finally start releasing new and incredible products again. Thank you again Engineering team!!
P.S. If you would like to view our new docs, please head on over to routefusion.com/docs, and give us a shout if you have any questions! 😊
