API Strategy for Decision Makers

Chapter 2. Creating an API-First Strategy

In this chapter, we’ll walk through the entire API lifecycle from inception to deprecation. We’ll dig into different ways to develop a strategy to monetize APIs and drive growth of the API business. Many of the topics discussed here are for API-first businesses where the consumer of the API is a customer. However, there are other business models around APIs, such as partner programs.

Discovery

Discovery is top-of-funnel awareness and exposure of your API. Discovery promotes your API to developers and provides them with an understanding of its value proposition. Any successful product requires a plan for discovery in order to drive successful adoption. However, technical audiences are typically skeptical of sales and marketing, which can make product discovery a challenge. If you build a massive inside sales team to push an API solution onto decision makers, the success rate of outreach can be lower than what you might experience with other buying personas.

Unlike in the past, professional developers in an individual contributor role enjoy a tremendous amount of ownership and autonomy to make decisions on which technologies to adopt to accomplish their task. This means buying software is more decentralized than before. However, most professional developers are task-oriented, with an ever-increasing backlog of tickets to complete. Even if sales reaches out to the ideal customer with a healthy budget who could gain tremendous value out of ...