But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well.
Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience.
I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.