Summary

• Customer: Syndicate builds infrastructure for shared web3 investing.
• Problem: Upon launching their new Collectives product, Syndicate was seeing downtime and slow indexing with the Hosted Service.
• Solution: Switching to Satsuma allowed Syndicate to debug their subgraph issues and restore service.
• Impact: Successful launch of Collectives and saving them developer time & headache every week.

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Full Interview

Can you give me a brief overview of what Syndicate does?

Nathan (eng manager): We build infrastructure for web3 investing. Syndicate's mission is to transform how the world creates and shares value by empowering more people and communities to invest.

What are Syndicate’s near-term priorities?

Nathan (eng manager): We’re looking to expand the number of investing networks (groups of people doing investing) on the protocol.

What were the problems you were facing before Satsuma?

Tony (engineer): I think one of the big ones was that the Hosted Service was quite opaque [in terms of] speed bottlenecks and errors, making it difficult for us to use. And so when we were launching Collectives, it was great to have you all as partners to scale our subgraph.

The other thing was just uncertainty around the Decentralized Service and that timeline. There was a lot of uncertainty around how the transition would work. Satsuma offered us security and peace of mind.

How did those problems impact Syndicate? Why did they matter?

Tony (engineer): When we launched collectives, there were some folks who weren’t able to start or join them because our subgraph was falling behind on the Hosted Service. It essentially kept people from using the new product.

It impacted employees because the subgraph reindexing time was quite long. Even when we thought we had a fix, it was so opaque that we were blindly trying things. Satsuma’s ability to look into that, drill down into what was wrong, and index faster was super helpful.

Nathan (eng manager): If I can double down on that, I think the observability is key. Having a database that is not observable is a non-starter for one of our production services. That was a huge huge pain point for us.

Why didn’t other solutions work for you?

Tony (engineer): With the Decentralized Network, it was the unpredictable nature of query costs and getting indexers to prioritize your subgraph. We know that you can stake GRT, but there were a lot of manual steps around that. We were also quickly transitioning and it was unclear if we would have enough indexers.

Nathan (eng manager): The decentralization is super fascinating and something we want to see in the world. But in terms of where we wanted to focus our limited engineering resources, we didn’t have the time or resources to solve some of the pain points with the Decentralized Network.

Why did you choose to switch to Satsuma?

Nathan (eng manager): The thing that definitely convinced me was the enterprise level support you were able to give us. You all came in clutch for us at a time of a huge product launch when we had a lot of issues with the Hosted Service and their lack of observability. That clarity Satsuma brings gave us the confidence to move forward.

Tony (engineer): We’re a small team with a lot of product area to cover. Satsuma’s specific expertise in indexing is invaluable.

Nathan (eng manager): It was clear from day one that we shared the same mindset as to making indexing more transparent and taking it off of our plate. You all take a customer first perspective as opposed to a purely technology first perspective.

How has using Satsuma impacted Syndicate?

Nathan (eng manager): Returning a huge amount of dev time to the team to focus on product. Also gives us certainty and clarity in the future, knowing that this doesn’t have to be constantly on our roadmap every 3 months as The Graph changes their timelines. Also gives us comfort knowing that we have all the data ETL’ed to us for future products that we want to build on top.

Tony (engineer): The GUI (dashboard) you’ve offered is quite nice. Having an organization level view into which subgraphs are live and being able to switch between them. Your tooling is a lot better.

Nathan (eng manager): In short, for me, it feels like you demystified The Graph. At times it was so so opaque, but now it is much more transparent and clear. And it’s also changed the way we write our subgraph handlers. We always knew we needed to optimize our handlers, but didn’t know where to start.