Ask HN: How do I sell my API?
6 comments
You might be interested in Bannerbear, an API image and video generation service. The founder talks about being an API first business in his blog [0]. Here's a good piece of info about API first products for technical founders [1]:
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API Products are a good fit for technical founders
This article focuses on API product ideas. Why?
API products are low-friction for the customer - you aren't asking a user to fundamentally change their behaviour, you are just solving a problem they already had and allowing them get on with their work. Let bigger startups build high-friction software that changes habits (note-taking, project management tools, etc) and focus on "plumbing" if you're a solo founder.
API products involve interesting technical challenges - as a technical founder you probably suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome where you keep getting bored of a product you've built and want to build a new one. You're more likely to stay interested in a product as a technical founder if it presents interesting technical challenges, and APIs can be good for that.
API products don't require heavy investment in UX - if you're a technical founder and design isn't your strong suit, API products are a perfect fit. Customers of API products care less about how the landing page and user dashboards look, and care more about whether the API "just works" to solve their problem.
API products enjoy less churn - this one is a hypothesis but arguably if you create an API product and integrate with your customer's platform, it will take a long while for them to churn. Anecdata; there are API products that I have been a paying customer of for years.
```
[0] https://www.bannerbear.com/journey-to-10k-mrr/
[1] https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/1001-saas-product-ideas/
```
API Products are a good fit for technical founders
This article focuses on API product ideas. Why?
API products are low-friction for the customer - you aren't asking a user to fundamentally change their behaviour, you are just solving a problem they already had and allowing them get on with their work. Let bigger startups build high-friction software that changes habits (note-taking, project management tools, etc) and focus on "plumbing" if you're a solo founder.
API products involve interesting technical challenges - as a technical founder you probably suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome where you keep getting bored of a product you've built and want to build a new one. You're more likely to stay interested in a product as a technical founder if it presents interesting technical challenges, and APIs can be good for that.
API products don't require heavy investment in UX - if you're a technical founder and design isn't your strong suit, API products are a perfect fit. Customers of API products care less about how the landing page and user dashboards look, and care more about whether the API "just works" to solve their problem.
API products enjoy less churn - this one is a hypothesis but arguably if you create an API product and integrate with your customer's platform, it will take a long while for them to churn. Anecdata; there are API products that I have been a paying customer of for years.
```
[0] https://www.bannerbear.com/journey-to-10k-mrr/
[1] https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/1001-saas-product-ideas/
Here is how I did. I have published the service I built on HN & PH. It was only a demo page that did not need signup to try. I had the pricing section as well, but when the user clicks the "Pay" button - I displayed a pop-up "Contact <email> for the pricing. As an early user, we have a discount for you". I manually created and sent a PayPal invoice in response to the emails.
We integrated the PG only after 3 months when we received at least one email per day for an entire week. In between, we were quickly patching the servers when needed, listening to the paid customers and building features and making improvements.
We integrated the PG only after 3 months when we received at least one email per day for an entire week. In between, we were quickly patching the servers when needed, listening to the paid customers and building features and making improvements.
How do you drive traffic to your page if publishing the service on HN & PH fails? I built https://moderationsystem.com for businesses that need content moderators and I'm currently trying to figure out the best method to acquire new users.
"I want to avoid building a FE, payment integrations and user management so I can focus on data quality and latency."
If you use Divjoy, this would be 1-2 days' effort.
If there's a market for what you're selling, don't be afraid to set up your own site. Even if you also sell on an API marketplace.
Depending on what you're selling, perhaps also consider connecting with Zapier?
If you use Divjoy, this would be 1-2 days' effort.
If there's a market for what you're selling, don't be afraid to set up your own site. Even if you also sell on an API marketplace.
Depending on what you're selling, perhaps also consider connecting with Zapier?
I’ve been using rapidapi for hotstoks.com and I’m not happy with it. The product is slow and full of glitches and discovery is non-existent. There are no alerts if users signup to your api and lots of other annoying product issues.
different angle (maybe unhelpful): which kinds of customers do you aim to market the API service to? e.g. if you're trying to sell to small businesses, the overwhelming majority of them may not be sophisticated enough to consume an API, but they might love having a simple UI instead. at the other end of the spectrum, if you're trying to sell to enterprises, maybe they want SLOs and SLAs and TLS and SSO to integrate with their existing user access solution(s) and ...
I want to avoid building a FE, payment integrations and user management so I can focus on data quality and latency.
Are there other places to sell an API (e.g. an API that converts multiple RSS feeds to analytics reports) or have you or someone you know successfully made maore than break-even on an API marketplace?