As hackathons become more and more popular, organizing a hackathon has become close to a full time job. We would like to draw on our own experiences both sponsoring and participating in hackathons to offer some helpful tips for hackathon organizers. Below are a few tips to help you organize your next hackathon and make it successful for all parties involved.

Before the Event

1. Choose the right venue

When choosing a hackathon venue, the most important thing is to find a place that is appropriate for the size of your event. For very large events, scout locations that have huge empty spaces such as convention centers, warehouses, and stadiums. For smaller events, co-working spaces are a great choice because they are already wired up and ready to go. Wi-Fi is always a challenge, so make sure to gather as much information as possible about the internet speed, number of routes, ethernet availability, etc. At the very least, strive to provide wired connections to as many people as possible and rate limit so that everyone gets a solid connection and nobody is left out. Make sure there is space for demos, sponsor booths, and presentations.

hackTECH 2014

2. Develop a mobile app

Communication at hackathons is tough, especially if you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of hackers, sponsors, and judges. A mobile app helps you centralize information while also allowing you push notifications to attendees, contact sponsors straight from the app, and answer questions in a live chat.

MHacks Mobile Application

3. Get Sponsors

Your goal at the hackathon is to provide useful tools for your attendees. Find sponsors that can arm hackers with tools (such as APIs, devices, etc.) and send technical evangelists to help participants. Participants are most successful when they have a plethora of tools at their disposal and companies benefit from the valuable feedback on their products. Don't be picky with sponsors, if they can help and have good tools, it is in your hackathon's best interest to find a way for them to get involved.

4. Give sponsors instructions

One of the biggest complaints we hear from sponsors at hackathons is that things seem disorganized and they don't know what they are supposed to be doing. Sponsors are used to organized events and expect instructions. Before the event, send sponsors tentative schedules and tips on how to engage with hackers. Suggest hotels, give parking directions, and be clear on what you expect from them.You can really bring the sponsor experience to the next level by simply giving them the information they need beforehand.

5. Plan office hours

A lot of your sponsors are awesome and have amazing products. Give them the opportunity to talk to hackers and teach them how to use your product. It's a great way to support the community and also gets hackers really excited about your company. Getting to sit down and talk to them about your app, their job, or even just life. Facilitate these types of interactions by organizing open office hours for your sponsors.

6. Arrange speakers and panels

Reach out to interesting and notable members in the tech community and beyond. You will be surprised to find that many of them love to come out to hackathons to give a talk, fireside chat, Q&A, etc. From our personal experience, industry leaders often give very insightful talks that both motivate and raise morale at hackathons. Also, these guests are always impressed by the many different hacks which helps raise awareness for your participants.

YC Panel at MHacks

7. Don't let sponsors take over

Many talented hackers will stay away from events with large prizes because there's no way to win unless you use the most APIs/products that the main sponsor(s) have provided. When this happens, demo day/final presentations turn into infomercials sponsored by the biggest companies with the deepest pockets. You should encourage teams to build technically sound and creative projects rather than ones that are the most branded.

During the Event

8. Engagement

Your sole job during the event is to promote engagement amongst attendees and sponsors. No one knows the hackers at the hackathon better than you do. Many of them are constantly running into issues and need help and many of your sponsors happen to be experts in one or more languages and can help hackers tackle obstacles along the way. As an organizer, you need to facilitate these introductions and help people engage.

After the event

9. Solicit feedback

After the weekend is over, make sure to personally reach out to participants, sponsors, and partners and ask for feedback on the event. What went well, what could have been better, and what new ideas could be incorporated next time around. If there are unhappy sponsors, it is important to recognize their grievances and work with them to see how you can improve the experience, especially if you want to work with them again. At the end of the day, the hackers are the voices you should consider the most. Do everything in your power to get their feedback and share it within the organizer community.

10. Track progress of projects

For the most part, most people do not continue maintaining or working on their projects after the weekend is over. Reach out to attendees to encourage them to continue on their hacks. They may have the next killer app (GroupMe).

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A big thanks to everyone who contributed to this post. As always, let us know what you think about this list. What did we leave out and what do you like?

If you are organizing an event and would like Lob to be involved, reach out to support@lob.com!

The last few months at Lob, our engineers have started to create Lob’s new scalable API infrastructure. As we begin transitioning to this new infrastructure stack, we want to share and discuss the technologies we have decided to use.

Infrastructure

At the infrastructure layer, we are hardcore AWS fans. Our entire infrastructure at Lob is built on AWS and we view the platform as a major driver of productivity, especially for a company of our size. Below is a diagram of our system architecture and the AWS services we use.

Application Stack

The two driving factors behind our API design have been language independence and modularity. We want to give ourselves the flexibility of using any language or framework to write a given endpoint of the API. For example, on our address verification endpoint (which is pinged several times every second) Node.js is a logical choice because of its ability to handle a large number of concurrent requests. However, on our more computation-heavy endpoint for parsing and validating objects we may want to take advantage of the large number of libraries and tools available in a language like Ruby or Python.

By building our API in a modular way where each endpoint is its own internal API, we can pick and choose which language we want to use for current or future endpoints. That said, we don’t want to internally support too many languages so we usually try to stick to 1 or 2 preferred languages. Right now we predominately use Node.js and want to talk about some of the tools we have been using to build our custom MVC and APIs.

Node.js

Node.js has been a great boost to productivity for the Lob team. The asynchronous nature of the language and its ability to handle a large number of concurrent connections fits well into the architectural needs of our company. The Node.js community and strong support for npm means there are usually several open source libraries for performing nearly any task. There are also a large number of productivity tools available to help developers write high quality code more quickly. Below you will find information on some the Node.js tools that help us build at Lob.

Hapi

Hapi is a newer framework and is a “simple to use configuration-centric framework”. It has built in support for input validation, authentication, and other essential facilities that make it perfect for building an API . Aside from being a great API focused framework, it has built in support for view engines and makes working with Handlebars (our preferred engine) seamless. Hapi is also a very readable framework so the learning curve isn’t as steep as other fraweworks.

Bookshelf.js

Our current API offerings are backed by relational database storage rather than a NoSQL storage system which you will see in a large number of Node.js web apps. In order to interface with the relational database in Node.js we started using a great ORM called Bookshelf.js. Bookshelf.js is built on top of the Knex query engine and “extends the Model & Collection foundations of Backbone.js”. Bookshelf.js provides great support for defining models, inheritance, eager/lazy loading, and multiple database engines (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite3).

Mocha

We currently use Mocha for testing our Node code. There are a large number of great testing libraries in Node, but below are a few reasons why we enjoy using Mocha.

• Concise, readable syntax for creating sections and tests
• Support for both synchronous and asynchronous tests
• Flexibility in choice of assertion library (should.js, chai, expect.js, better-assert)
• Variety of test reporters including HTML, JSON, Markdown and Nyan

Gulp.js

We have been using Gulp.js in order to speed up the development process by automating common tasks. Below is an outline the workflow we are currently using with Gulp.

1. Compile CoffeeScript in to JavaScript
2. Compile LESS in to CSS
3. Lint the compiled JavaScript code
4. Run unit and integration tests
5. Generate JSDoc documentation

What We Do

Our goal with Lob has always been to provide businesses and companies with a means to automate processes and workflows around physical real-world infrastructure. We firmly believe that APIs are the answer and a focus on technology and engineering will help us achieve that vision. This is why we put the developer first, aiming to arm them with the tools necessary to streamline their businesses and applications.

Our most successful product to date has been our Print & Mail API, which allows developers to access commercial print infrastructure on-demand in a programmatic fashion. Our customers have taken advantage of this and we have seen a huge variety of use-cases ranging from enterprise applications to creative consumer applications. Our API has helped developers offer printed collateral from within their apps as a means to monetize and to bring creative assets to life.

By giving developers such a platform, we are able to aggregate and queue up demand, and in turn give our customers on-demand pricing. This is a powerful concept and has been extremely successful for us. As our volumes scale over time, we are able to pool more demand and push our costs down even further. When that happens, we pass those savings back to our customers. This is a virtuous cycle and we are always evaluating our business model to find ways to save our customers money.

Lowering Prices Across The Board

Today, we are proud to announce our first round of price cuts. We took a very close look at all our products and the processes we have in place with printing and fulfillment at our facilities. Across the board, we have lowered pricing 7.3% on average, with some products being lowered in excess of 20%.

We’d like to celebrate our success by showing appreciation to our current customers and making it that much easier for developers everywhere to continue building amazing applications on our API.

Take a look at our products and pricing here. We are always exploring and beta testing new and exciting products to offer through our API, so stay tuned for new product releases!

Check out our documentation and get set up at Lob for free.

It's no secret that hackathons are quickly growing in prevalence and size around the world. If you are unfamilar with what a hackathon is, check out this great piece by Dave Fontenot. At Lob, our goal is to give developers access to physical world infrastructure through an API, so that they can build cool features directly into their applications. Hackathons have been a very valuable medium for us as a company to evangelize our APIs, build our brand, and meet developers. We have seen many creative uses of the Lob APIs as hackers have built applications on top of Lob and as cool extensions of their existing applications.

As a hacker, these events are the best way to come together with others to build amazing products, solve interesting and challenging problems, and meet new people all within the span of 24-48 hours. When companies sponsor hackathons, they are presented with a great opportunity to meet talented individuals of all ages and backgrounds. With numerous software and hardware hacks, the insight into the most popular tools, APIs, languages, and development approaches taken can be invaluable for companies as they look to hire and develop their own products. If the organizers of these events are able to bring together all these parties in a well-planned fashion, then it is truly a one-of-a-kind experience for everyone involved.

Demo Day at MHacks 2014

In part one of our Hackathon Playbook Series, we wanted to lay out 10 things that sponsors need when they are considering sponsorship of hackathons. Sponsoring these events often requires a great deal of commitment for companies of all stages and it is important to make the most of your experience. We based this list off of our own observations and learnings sponsoring and attending various hackathons of all different sizes. No matter what event you choose to sponsor, the common theme of a successful sponsorship is a strong presence.

1. Engage Engage Engage

We cannot stress the importance of this as it relates to sponsors. Even though you probably have a nice spot in the venue with a table set up dedicated for your company, you should be spending a good chunk of your time during the hackathon walking around and meeting hackers. Ask about what they are working on, offer your help and constructive feedback, and tell them about your company. The large majority of hackers at these events won’t even know you are there if you stay at your table all weekend.

2. Bring Swag

Bring as many stickers, t-shirts, stationery, and other fun things as you can get your hands on. Hackers love swag (who doesn’t?) and bringing fun stuff accomplishes two things: 1) builds your brand and 2) attracts attention. Things like stickers have a viral effect and subtly markets your brand during and long after the weekend is over. When you have swag at your table, people will immediately gravitate towards you and more often than not, listen to a quick pitch about your product. If you don’t bring anything, you’re going to miss out on these opportunities.

3. Send Technical Evangelists

This one is absolutely crucial, especially for companies that are trying to evangelize technical integrations such as APIs. It is very important to have someone on the ground for the duration of the weekend that knows your product inside and out and can help to debug and answer any questions hackers have at these events.

Peter Nagel, Software Engineer and Dev Evangelist at Lob

4. Cleary Communicate Your Product How-Tos

Have clear documentation/instructions on your website that is immediately accessible. Explore other avenues as well. For example, the folks at MongoDB hand out small, aesthetically pleasing journals that are ripe with FAQs and helpful tips on how to integrate with their product. They hand this out as part of their swag pack and it’s awesome. You have to remember that hackers have to build out a functional product in as little as 24 hours so if your product is confusing to use, they will more than likely give up and use something else.

5. Bring Big Signage

Make sure to bring banners, table throws, and whatever signage you can get your hands on. Hackathons are usually held at big venues, so unless you have a visual presence that commands attention, it is difficult to stand out. Buy some stand-up banners and put it on top of your sponsor table so that everyone can see it from anywhere in the venue.

6. Provide Real-Time Customer Support

All companies should always make sure to beef up their customer support efforts, but this is especially true when it comes to hackathons. There has to be a way to interact with company reps in real-time. So if you can’t send people to be physically there, make sure to let everyone know that they can get answers from you in real-time via a support phone line, email, olark, twitter, and other mediums.

7. Offer Creative Prizes

For those companies that have an API, offer up a prize to the team with the best integration. Make sure you approach every single person that uses your API that weekend, thank them, and ask for feedback. For companies that are recruiting, offer up a prize to best overall hack or some other general category. This will allow you to personally communicate with teams that impress you. Prizes don’t necessarily have to be expensive. iPads and gadgets are always a hit, but often times what’s more valuable may be some sort of unique trophy, or perhaps even a private dinner with your team. The opportunity for hackers to pick your brain can be way more valuable than gadgets you can buy any time. Just keep in mind that simply offering up a prize is not enough, you have to do a good job of evangelizing it as well.

8. Provide Snacks and Fuel

When midnight rolls around, hackers start getting tired and burnt out. Even though the event organizers generally do a great job of making sure there is always enough food, you can never have enough frappuccinos, red bulls, chips, and candy. If nothing else, people will love you for bringing treats, but more often than not, they will also give you their attention and learn about who you are and what you do. We have personally had quite a few hackers find out about our product and actually use it because we offered up some drinks.

9. Bring Business Cards

Many people will say that business cards are becoming obsolete, but it is still the easiest way to hand out your contact info. We have found that hackathon participants ask for your personal business cards because it is always nice for them to be able to follow up with you after meeting at the event. You will meet lots of interesting and talented people at hackathons, so be sure that they have a way to contact you afterwards.

10. Meet and Build Relationships With Other Sponsors

When it comes to sponsorships, there is an innate sense of competition. Sponsors are competing for talent, technical integrations, and attention. Although this is true, you should be building relationships with other sponsors. If you go to enough of these, you start running into the same people. The two most recent hackathons we have been to were MHacks and hackTECH. At both events, we saw several cool apps that used a combination of sponsor APIs such as Pinterest + Lob, Sendgrid + Lob, and others. Some ideas are so impressive that they could inspire real product integrations.

For those of you who have sponsored hackathons or are thinking about sponsoring hackathons, we'd love to know what you think in the comments below. Stay tuned and check back for Part 2: Playbook for Hackathon Organizers.

1. More APIs From More Companies

We have discussed on several occasions how we believe APIs are the future. They will overtake software and become the backbone of business operations. 2013 saw the continued success of API companies such as Twilio and Stripe. 2014 will bring about the emergence of more startups built upon an API foundation.

Competition from industry incumbents is on its way. As the non-API industry giants see market share being eaten away by disruptive API companies, they will recognize the need to invest more in developers to build their own APIs to stay competitive going forward.

Companies such as Amazon will continue to monitor the API landscape to see what is gaining traction so they can either enter the market, making it all the more difficult for new startups to succeed or make strategic acquisitions. No matter what happens, 2014 will be a huge year for disruption and innovation in the form of APIs.

2. Hackathons Becoming Mainstream

The term “hackathon” will continue to proliferate through communities both technical and non-technical. Soon every university, high school, and tech company will be hosting their own white-labeled hackathons.

This phenomenon will be important to watch as the hackathon model evolves. Hackathons or code-a-thons were started with the goal of bringing together motivated and talented minds together to build awesome and useful things.

As hackathons become larger and more common, it will be interesting to see if the essence of these meetups can be preserved. With bigger sponsors, bigger prizes, and a bigger push to identifying talent, the hackathon model is shifting from a focus on innovation to a focus on money, business, and recruiting. In short, it is scary to see how hackathons are becoming more corporate. We hope that hackathon organizers stay true to being developer focused and making sure that have as many resources to work with.

Nevertheless, we remain convinced that hackathons will be an important staple of the developer community. It is the duty of all tech companies and startups to empower developers with the tools necessary to build and innovate. Corporates, startups, incubators, and co-working spaces alike will have to all contribute in their own ways to make sure hackers have an awesome venue to work in, cool prizes to work for, and a plethora of tools to work with. In 2014, we will see at least one startup whale emerge out of a weekend hack.

3. Open-Source Everything

2013 proved to be a huge year for the open-source community and we fully expect the momentum to continue into the new year and beyond. With the recent release of SteamOS in beta, Valve has embarked on the lofty goal of creating a Linux-based world starting from the living room. Like all open-source projects, their success will be dependant on the developer community’s patience and willingness to debug, provide feedback, and put in work.

Github just announced that their number of hosted repositories has skyrocketed from 5 million in the beginning of the year to a whopping 10 million by the end of the year. The most amazing part of this growth is the trajectory. According to Brian Doll (VP Marketing - Github), the first million repositories took ~4 years and the last million happened in 48 hours. This just shows that Github is poised to experience some truly explosive growth in 2014.

Open-source will become even more prevalent in 2014 as developers band together to work on important projects related to government, healthcare, privacy, and other issues that will be spotlighted.

Implications

As API’s become more mainstream it will be tougher to stay competitive. At Lob, we recognize that we will have to continue to make our product more accessible and easier to use. With more and more options emerging at a rapid pace, companies need to make sure they stay innovative.

Hackathons are getting more corporate and its going to get tougher and more expensive to vie for developer attention. From a developer perspective, although there will be more opportunities available, every single event will be that much more competitive. It will be difficult to stand out amongst the masses.

With more code to be open-sourced, ideas and software will become much easier to create making proprietary knowledge more scarce. While the community in large will benefit, it will be harder to create novel ideas as the probability of replication increases. Companies will have to find new ways to differentiate from each-other in addition to differentiating on the product. Startups are going to have to focus on customer support and user experience or else they will be left in the dust.

For some time now, we have been hearing about how software is eating up the world but we are seeing a fundamental shift towards APIs eating up software. In the past, customers demanded fully-loaded software applications, but today they are asking for access to the layer underneath: the API.

Garry Tan wrote a great blog post about how more and more APIs will take over various business functions ranging from SMS to printing. APIs will rule the way businesses communicate and interact in the future.

In the past, people would use Paypal for checkout – today, people use Stripe to build their own checkouts. Instead of managing and learning applications like Quickbooks, developers are using Subledger to build accounting right into their applications. The list of APIs replacing software solutions is just beginning and will continue to proliferate in the future.

Here are a few reasons why developers and businesses are choosing to use APIs instead of buying software solutions:

1.) Flexibility and deep integrations

APIs provide developers with the flexibility to incorporate features in the way they see fit. Software is limited to the functionality that the creators built into it and don’t offer the same level of integration that APIs enable. For example – Stripe gives you the tools to create your own payment solutions, but if you use Paypal you would be limited to their module. Twilio gives you access to SMS and voice infrastructure to create your own unique solutions and tight integration instead of buying out of the box software solution for two-factor authentication. Before APIs, developers could purchase software solutions but were limited in how they could integrate it into their existing applications. Now that paradigm is shifting: by having full access to the API layer beneath, developers can build their own custom solutions and ensure tighter integrations with existing software.

2.) Speed up development time

A common mantra we hear is to avoid “reinventing the wheel”. APIs give companies instant access to complex infrastructure that they don’t want to spend time or resources to manage. Software requires users having to download, manage, and configure applications. For example, if you require CDN for your image hosting solution, Cloudflare’s API would be a better fit since it provides instant access to a robust CDN to use as they see fit, whereas legacy software require time to set up, configure, and constantly manage a CDN for your company. Not having to worry about underlying infrastructure or hardware, setup, and maintenance and simply making API calls eliminates development hurdles and reduces the amount of friction needed to build new features into a product.

3.) Access to data

APIs give companies the ability to access underlying data whereas software applications may not. This allows companies to control how much data is shown and also manipulate the data to create dashboards or reports. The Linkedin and Facebook APIs are a great example of how new applications built using APIs can access Facebook or Linkedin’s social data whereas an out of the box software application wouldn’t have the data by itself. Another example is Google Map’s API, which allows customers easily enable mapping functionality and manipulate Google’s mapping data within applications. Previous to these APIs finding an out of box software solution that provides open access to their data would be near impossible.

APIs are quickly becoming the primary customer interface for technology-driven products. At Lob, we are excited to be changing the way that companies think about their printing & mailing needs while introducing technology-enabled consumer-centric business models into incumbent industries.

As the holidays are approaching, we wanted to share some ideas on how you can increase customer engagement using Lob’s API.

For those that don’t have time to set up or build these integrations, we have set aside some time this week to help any company that wants to send out cards. You can email us an Excel list of customers and the PDF and we will send it out on your behalf!

1. Send holiday cards to all/key customers

The holidays are a great time to show customers (specifically high revenue generating customers) that you appreciate their business. Using Lob’s API you can tie this directly into your yearly workflow and create certain customer metrics that if met, the customer would receive a nice card from your company.

We recommend either sending a postcard using the Postcard API or sending a card (setting 201) or letter (setting 101) using the Simple Print Service API

2. Allow people to purchase gift cards

For consumer-oriented companies that are looking to get an extra revenue boost during the holidays, we suggest offering the ability for customers to purchase gift cards for friends or family. Using our Simple Print Service API (Setting ID 201) you can send really nice cards that come in A2 envelopes that can act as gift cards. By generating a unique promo code on each card you can lock in revenue this December.

3. Create a holiday direct mail marketing campaign

The holidays are also a great time to launch a direct mail marketing campaign. Use the holidays as an opportunity to create a campaign to increase user acquisition to boost your end of year numbers. We currently allow people to either use internally generated targeted lists or use our Simple Area Mail API. Simple Area Mail (currently in BETA) gives you the power to blanket ENTIRE zip codes with postcards through a simple API call. It has never been easier to launch a direct mail marketing campaign. For those that want to send out mailers to entire zip codes please reach out to us and we can help you get this done via our new API.

We hope everyone has a great holiday!

As Lob gets ready to celebrate its first Thanksgiving as a company, we’d like to take some time to reflect on the things that we are most thankful for on a daily basis. These are things that have made our lives so much easier and maybe can help you out too!

Yesware

It is always helpful to know when someone has opened or not opened your emails so you know when you need to follow-up. Now you never have to worry or wonder if someone has actually read your email.

Rapportive

A simple way to guess anybody’s email address. As you can imagine, this has been a very powerful tool for us. Check it out, it’s magical.

Olark

Provides a chat box on our site for customers to talk directly with us. It’s our goal to constantly make our customers happy, and as such providing an effective and easy for them to communicate with us. This has not only led to great feedback, but has also helped us build relationships.

Zenefits

Zenefits has been a huge time saver - letting us set up new employees, provide a dashboard for them to manage their benefits, and get everything set up with insurance providers with the click of a button. What used to take weeks now takes less than a day!

Boomerang

This handy little tool makes you never get lost in your inbox again. Everyone has been there and forgotten to follow up with a customer or vendor. Boomerang lets you bounce emails back to the top of your inbox if there is no reply and set emails to go out in the future. It’s amazing.

ZenPayroll

Thank you Tomer and co. for giving us an easy way to make sure all our guys get paid! Easily the best payroll management service out there.

Basecamp

As you may have experienced yourself, there are so many project management options out there. We tried many ourselves and found that Basecamp works the best for us.

Base CRM

Integration with gmail allows us to easily track messages with customers and always reminds us to follow-up as our inboxes fill up.

Indinero

Indinero gives us an easy way to keep track of our revenue and expenses so that we can make sure we are on the right track when it comes to spending money.

Postman

Postman is our right hand man when it comes to building new APIs. It makes us so much more efficient testing and sending requests for our API. You can even save groups of requests into collections to share across the team!

Hacker News

A great way to keep up with the latest and greatest whilst getting constructive feedback from the developer community on new product and feature releases/updates.

#FlapjackFridays

Whether we are 10 employees or 100 employees, we hope we can always gather around our pancake stack every Friday. We think its very important to preserve our fun company culture as we grow.

Amazon Web Services

Accidentally delete your users table? Don't worry, AWS got your back(up).

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On the eve of Thanksgiving, what are you most thankful for? We’d love to hear about it!

Today we are very excited to announce that Simple Check Service is out of beta and publicly available! We have been piloting this product with select customers over the recent months and have been extremely pleased with the results. To date, we have processed well over $2 million of physical checks via our API. A big thanks goes out to our customers who have spent the past few months helping us test & debug this product. The results have exceeded our expectations and we are pumped to finally make this product publicly available starting today.

State-of-the-Art Quality

When customers print and mail checks via our Simple Check Service API, they can be assured that the quality is pristine and the security is military grade. Such elements include a colored background, watermarks, and microprint borders. The printing on the checks include thermal ink (disappears when rubbed) and Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) encoding that facilitates bank processing and reduces errors drastically.

In short, there are many safeguards and procedures implemented on the back-end to make sure that our customers are safe when they use our physical check API. We pay great attention to detail on all aspects of our products to keep our customers happy.

Our Customers

Many businesses both large and small are still paying their vendors, suppliers, contractors, etc. with physical checks. With many of our customers, this is an established process that they need to continue for the foreseeable future.

When payment amounts are huge, it is more cost-efficient to pay via checks than it is through other credit card and ACH services that charge a flat transactional fee. With businesses that get invoiced large amounts on a regular basis, our check API is a no-brainer.

Physical checks are a payments staple that we believe will be in heavy demand going forward. Integration of our API allows these businesses to automate the whole process and add it to their payment stack.

Pricing

Our checks are currently priced at $2.50 per piece. This was the beta price and it is what we are keeping for now as we release it from beta. As with all of our products, we are constantly reviewing our pricing to see if we offer even better pricing down the line as demand grows. With our API offering, we strive to offer high quality products and competitive rates.

Getting Started

Check our documentation to start integrating check payments into your business. We also have many wrappers available on our Github.

As we continue to build out our product offering, we will continue to work with our customers to refine and improve on all aspects of our service. If you have any questions, concerns, comments, or thoughts, please do not hesitate to reach out to us! We will be sure to get back to you quickly.

People are the lifeblood of any company and as such – finding new people to join Lob is key to our success. Your first few hires at a startup are arguably some of the most important hires you can ever make. Crafting a thorough and robust process from finding talent to onboarding/offer is very important to us at Lob.

With that said – we wanted to share with you all a bit about our hiring process. There are four key stages throughout our hiring process that we would like to highlight.

1.) Sourcing and finding talent

Early-on, we found our best candidates through our own personal network. The first 2 employees we hired were people that we have previously lived/worked with and knew that they would be in this for the long run. Additionally, we look for people who have had a pedigree of success. If you’re a developer, you should have personal projects or open source on Github that you can point to that showcase your skills.

After the first 2 hires, we found success posting jobs on heavily trafficked sites like Hacker News and AngelList. We found that these two in particular were very useful as they have the perfect audience both for our product (developer tool!) and potential new hires (developers!).

2.) Interview

Once we find someone interesting, we get in touch to schedule a phone interview. During our interview we typically ask questions centered around how they would solve some of the challenges we have faced in the past and ones we are currently deal with at Lob. This way we can see how they would approach these problems compared to how we approached them and use this as a point of discussion and debate. For the first few hires it’s important to not only find smart people but people that have done this type of work before and know industry best practices. While we can teach people how to do things, we expect to bring in people that have solved similar complex problems before.

3.) Trial run

The next step is bringing a candidate into the Lob office to work on a specific project together. We call this a trial run as it’s the best way for us to determine whether we enjoy working with the candidate and for us to get a real sense for how he or she thinks. We work the candidate to figure out a timeline that works for them (sometimes a few hours over a few days, or some time over the weekend).

We are prepared with a project that is real work that is aligned very closely to what that person would be doing if we hired him/her. This gives us a chance to gauge productivity and culture fit. We go into the trial runs with every intention on hiring the person we spend time with. We’ve been able to spot problems during the run and also identify strengths that we missed during first-round interviews.

The trial runs also give candidates a good way to measure whether or not Lob is a good fit for them in terms of both work and culture. We want the whole experience to be as much of a chance for them to assess us as a company as it is for us to get to know them. It is our hope that candidates join the Lob team only if the fit is 100% mutual.

4.) Offer

Finally if the trial run goes well – we make an offer! But it doesn’t just stop there, after we make an offer we make sure to work with the candidate to understand any concerns or questions they might have.

We have a very open transparency policy at Lob and make sure that every candidate has an understanding of exactly what they are getting into. As such, we make sure to let them know where we stand in terms of funding, cash, revenue, and other important metrics. It is crucial that the candidate feels very confident and comfortable that Lob is a place where they can take their careers to new heights. In terms of the actual offer, we recognize that every candidate has a different risk appetite and therefore requires a different salary and equity balance. We are willing to be flexible with our offers in this sense.

Did we mention we’re hiring?

We’re always on the hunt for new talent and actively hiring for various positions right now. If you or someone you know might be a good fit – don’t hesitate to shoot us an email at jobs@lob.com. We love it when people apply in creative ways (we’ve had candidates send us a API of themselves!) or point out specific things on Lob they want to work on to improve.