Founder spotlight: How Fern’s hands-on approach sets it apart in the developer tools space

If your API docs confuse developers, they won’t send in a support ticket; they’ll just give up.

Danny Sheridan knows this better than most. As co-founder and CEO of Fern, he’s building a platform that makes public APIs more usable by generating SDKs and developer documentation that is clear, frictionless, and fast to implement. Companies like Square, Webflow, Intercom, and ElevenLabs rely on Fern to deliver a world-class developer experience to their customers.

“We are in the business of making developers’ lives easier,” Danny says. That mission seems to be working. Fern has grown rapidly since completing Y Combinator in 2023, helping high-growth teams streamline the developer onboarding experience.

Danny and his co-founder, Deep Singhvi, have been building together since college, where they met at the University of Michigan. Deep was studying computer science, Danny business administration. Their first company—a scrappy Amazon e-commerce business—scaled to $3 million in annual revenue and gave them early experience working side by side.

After graduation, Danny joined Amazon to work with marketplace sellers, while Deep went to Palantir to build and deploy software for organizations like the Department of Justice. Years later, they reunited to solve a pain point they’d encountered repeatedly: developers were spending more time figuring out how to use APIs than actually building with them. Fern launched with SDK generation as its core product but quickly expanded to documentation generation and an AI developer assistant called ‘Ask Fern.’ 

In this exclusive interview, Danny shares how Fern turned developer experience into a competitive edge—critical for any startup whose growth depends on API adoption. Here are a few of his tips for founders:

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Tip 1: Let customer requests shape your product roadmap

“When offering our product to customers, there was a question that repeatedly came up,” Danny says. “‘How do I document APIs and SDKs?’ At the time, we viewed that as out of scope, but it came up enough times that we decided we needed to offer it to customers.”

Today, Fern delivers both SDKs and branded, automated developer documentation, giving customers like Square and Webflow a single solution for building and explaining their APIs.

Tip 2: Go the last mile

“One of the things that differentiates Fern in the market of developer tools is that we will go the last mile for our customers,” Danny says. “Usually software draws a line in the sand earlier than Fern is willing to.”

For example, Intercom liked their collaboration with Fern so much, they asked if the team would be more active in managing their API developer experience.

Fern calls this “deployed engineering,” inspired by Palantir’s forward-deployed engineers that embed directly with customers to configure Palantir’s software and solve their thorniest problems.

“We very much believe in driving our customers' success through our product,” Danny says. “That means spending more hands-on time with them and offering enterprise-level support.”

This kind of customer empathy was inspired by both co-founders’ previous employers. “We both come from company cultures where we were empowered to go get the last 10% of where the product and the customer's needs were not met,” he says. 

Tip 3: Choose the right tools for the job

One of Danny’s biggest learnings runs counter to the scrappy startup founder ethos to build lean.  

“I’ve learned that you want to pick the best in class, highest quality software vendor when choosing new tools,” Danny says. “As a venture-backed startup, either you succeed or you fail and everything should be focused on the next milestone. For us, it was one million in annual recurring revenue – that was our goal.”

As Fern works toward that million dollar goal, they need payroll software to scale with them. “So the question is, what’s the most effective way to set up payroll and systems access so I can focus more of my time working toward that one million ARR goal? The answer is picking the highest-quality tool” says Danny. “We were backed by Y Combinator in 2023, and when asking other people what they use for payroll, overwhelmingly, the answer was Rippling.”