How Public APIs Deliver Powerful Growth to Businesses
How to move faster, engage customers, and innovate with API products
The use of public APIs has become common in the technology market. Through them, developers can leverage data and functions to build new products with less effort.
If you don’t understand how these applications work, here is an article I published on Product Oversee, where I explain everything to you better.
With this knowledge, you will be able to understand APIs and how the concepts discussed throughout this article can help you in your context.
Let’s go.
Continuous Growth
Well-designed API infrastructures enable cost savings, revenue growth, and new business models for any company.
Big names in technology such as Google, Amazon, Slack, and Facebook use this solution to scale more.
With less effort, companies can transfer data and capabilities to other systems inside and outside organizations.
Continued growth comes from the ability to expose your application to those who access your web platform and to everyone who looks to third-party solutions as a way to solve their problems.
In other words, when we “open up” a system with public APIs, we extend the service’s ability to expand beyond the web platform.
With these interfaces, the service is no longer provided only on your platform but is made available in the channels of those who consume your API in some context.
Without public API: my services are consumed only by those users who sought my platform as a solution to their problems;
With public API: my services are made available by my platform AND by third-party systems that use my API to provide the solution I have.
And why should I use a public API instead of building my infrastructure?
The Shortcut Through APIs
Public APIs can provide teams with the potential to create products and validate hypotheses quickly since they will be using existing infrastructure.
When a team wants to bring a solution to its user, it must take into consideration the effort, time, and cost that this will entail. In this context, APIs come in as a way to shorten the development time and reduce the effort to build a given solution.
For example, let’s imagine that we are in a logistics company and we need to notify the user whenever his or her order undergoes a status change.
We believe that this way users will be more aware of the delivery date and there will be a reduction in the number of orders returning to the distribution center.
If we wanted to send a text message to him, we could use the Telegram API as a way to shorten the validation of this hypothesis. This way we would have access to a free messaging system and the user could be notified in the app.
This approach would allow us to experiment with the solution without having to build an entire messaging system of our own
API As Mean Not an End
It is worth pointing out that the use of a public API within a validation process does not cut the possibility of having to build your infrastructure in the future.
Here we get a bit into the MVP pillars addressed in the Lean Methodology. When we talk about an initial validation, testing a solution, for example, we seek to reduce as much effort as possible for this.
We want to know if our product has a fit and how our users will respond to it. In the Telegram example, the API used serves as a means for us to understand if sending the messages helps us solve the problem with delivery.
As an MVP, sending the messages through the Telegram API may not be the best solution, but using the messaging interface can allow us to reduce effort.
As with other solutions, building our infrastructure may be necessary when we need to include different business rules or want to reduce dependence on other companies software.
Enterprise Software Vs Third-Party Software
One of the main benefits of having exposed endpoints is that they enable communities to build solutions specific to their needs.
This way, people and companies can bring their market knowledge and develop solutions on top of the infrastructure provided by the API.
The big point is that the data and functionality present will be used in a larger number of cases than are present in the platform that provides the API. Companies that use APIs to develop new products are not looking to build something better than what exists in the source platform.
The goal is to provide some kind of solution that may not be present on the API owner’s platform, but that is possible to build using the functionality provided in the public application.
In the example of the logistics company sending messages to its users through Telegram, we are using the public API in a use case that would not be possible through the app.
Some Bullet Points:
Making your company’s service available through a public API can allow your business to scale in a more sustainable way;
APIs can be an interesting way to test hypotheses since using an existing infrastructure reduces the effort in the process;
The use of public APIs does not exclude a possible need to build your own infrastructure.
Finally, we should not look at APIs only as a technical requirement for development teams.
In other words, APIs are the products responsible for creating today’s customer experiences and the tools that drive value in modern economies.
Well, product mindset and the pillars for developing useful APIs are topics for another discussion.
Thanks!