Saturday morning update – Singly App Challenge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM5RfyvUzzE
Here’s a quick check-in from @lschutte on the Singly App Challenge – things are moving quickly here!
Jun 2
May 31
How APIs should be: Drop in keys, running in 1 minute
Editor’s note: Guest writer Merijn Terheggen is an entrepreneur who is currently working on a platform that provides a collectively reviewed perspective on the world’s information at www.factlink.com. Follow him on Twitter at @merijn481.
Shameless plug: Singly’s App Challenge Weekend (read: Hackathon) is coming up June 1-3 with $10,000 for the best app using the platform. Read more at http://singly.com/appchallenge
If you’re a startup providing an API, what makes your API successful?
As a startup offering an API, you know that you’re communicating a product and you have to use a clear and concise message. It needs to be immediately clear for developers how your API solves their problem and how it adds value. Your message is easy to remember and repeat so that happy developers spread the word.
Getting to a minimal viable version of your API means getting traction and adoption. Once users use it, get value from it, and provide feedback (and crap all over it in the process, which is good), something magical happens: the product gets a chance to grow into something beautiful, and your startup expands with it.
In order to get that traction, you need developers to convert from “first contact” to championing your API inside their organization. The typical funnel probably looks like this*:
- Visit your site after reading about you on HackerNews, Reddit, TechCrunch, etc. (Start with 100%)
- Understand your product (still 100%, right?)
- Sign up and configure an account (10% of visitors have a pain you solve)
- Configure a local environment (2%, depending on how easy it is to get started)
- Start making API calls and building (1%, this is out of your hands and dependent on developer focus)
- Happy developer ready to think about making the API a permanent part of her app (<1%, based on if your API actually delivers)
* Numbers chosen by dice roll.
Though 90% of visitors don’t ever sign up, that’s fine – they don’t have (or realize they have) the problem you solve, so they’re not your target. The biggest relevant drop-off exists between signup and making the first API call, and it’s critically important for them to make the call and get proof that your service is valuable. Your API’s ease of bootstrapping is like your site’s time to page load, and if it’s too long, your users will give up and leave. Heroku and Stripe have done a fantastic job minimizing the time it takes to start using their service.
The bottom line is that the single most important step in converting developers to permanently use your API in their product is how easy it is for them to get started after they sign up.
So let’s get into what you can actually do, from a developer’s perspective, to make your API useful in 60 seconds. The key is to get the developer up and running with minimal effort, and there are surprisingly few API’s out there that actually do this.
1. Ensure there are as few dependencies as possible in your package (please don’t make me compile MySQL bindings again) and that everything necessary for the API to run is included. Singly has put together a few skeleton applications that you can clone-and-go, as well as the omniauth-singly gem you can drop into your existing Ruby apps.
2. Make it part of the build process to install the API on a clean image and run all tests on it. Tools like Vagrant, Capistrano, Chef and Puppet are great for creating test infrastructure. As your product grows, your testing infrastructure needs to grow with it and cover any platform it’s used on, but a fresh system should always be able to get going with 1-3 commands.
3. Provide a zero-config sandbox someone can play around in without any commitment. Mongo has a great browser-based console that lets you get to know it without any personal effort. These tools delight, and can even catch developers that would have passed you by but realize while playing that they have a use for you.
Singly is an API company. It provides a simple platform that offers developers the ability to connect their app with many data providers, including Facebook, Twitter, etc. The platform runs on Node.js and developers can get to using personal user data from 9 services (more on the way) in no time at all. I’m really excited about the product and possibilities.
Singly teammate wins the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon!
One of our teammates, @TylerStalder, headed to the TechCruch Disrupt Hackathon last weekend. Of the 89 teams that demoed at the end of the event, Tyler’s team took first place. Tyler’s the guy on the ThingScription team in the Singly t-shirt:
While you’re here, don’t forget to sign up for our $10,000 App Challenge:
