Visiting my API provider FAL in San Francisco
✨ This week I visited my API provider @FAL in San Francisco
It's funny to go visit the ACTUAL physical place where you send tens of thousands of CURL requests to every day (well kinda cause they host stuff not in the office of course)
FAL is responsible for hosting ALL the AI models I use for my site Photo AI and keeping those stable, affordable and most of all VERY fast
My site Photo AI now produces over 1 million photos per month (and some videos), and every single one of those goes through FAL's infrastructure
They take the work of setting up servers with GPUs and managing them out of my hands, and on top of that for a very affordable rate so it'd be more expensive for me to do it myself
I discovered FAL the first time because they were somehow able to run a lot of the models I used (back then Stable Diffusion) ridiculously fast: where before it'd take me 45 seconds to generate a finetuned AI photo (meaning a photo of an actual person), with FAL it'd take 3 seconds! So about 10-15x faster! Insane
Their whole edge is speed and they do everything they can to optimize AI models to run faster, and it's economically smart for them too: they often charge the same $ per megapixel, so if they are able to run things faster, it costs them less GPU time, so less $ spent for them, but they can charge the same $ = more profit (but usually they then make it cheaper for me too)
One of the coolest things they did recently is built a superfast Flux trainer that runs in just 30 seconds, and at high quality. This means when users sign up to my site Photo AI, they upload their photos, and a few minutes later they're already taking AI photos of themselves
They're also really stable though and that's important. If FAL goes down, Photo AI goes down, and customers get very angry. Imagine people signing up and paying, and it doesn't work. I get about 30 new customers per day and have 2000+ active customers, if it goes down people get very angry, very fast. Luckily FAL literally almost never goes down!
I was kinda shocked how lean they are when visiting their office, it's just about 20 employees but they have a big impact, and big enterprise customers like Adobe signing up. Obviously each employee is very impactful for them to be able to run it like this. Very impressive and indie in a way
I heard it's good to align yourself with your API providers you rely on, so I've also invested in them now a bit!
They took us out for 🥟 Dim Sum and what surprised me was how international they were, it's 2 🇹🇷Turkish founders (ex-Coinbase and Amazon), and then they have people from Brazil, Venezuela, China, Bulgaria. They're in America but it's actually barely American. Maybe obvious but Silicon Valley really doesn't care where you're from or how you look, it's only about what your skills are and how you can contribute
I think the next thing for AI now is video (yesterday Veo 3 came out for example, a groundbreaking video model with speech dialogue). AI companies now are trying to enter Hollywood to try sell the promise of AI video to them which can save them a lot of money vs. recording actual footage. FAL is a provider for those video models so can provide those big media companies with affordable and reliable AI model hosting. In a way they're just addressing a tiny part of the market now with people like me, when the big market is all the companies that produce image/video content.
So yes go meet your API providers! You'll discover there's actually people behind the API endpoint! 😂
P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:
