Make it Easy to Use
The first step in making your API easy to use is to provide instant gratification to those who wish to use it. While you may want them to register for access, the process should be simple, and self-service. Prospective partners evaluate your API when it is convenient for them, whether it is at 3 am, noon, the weekend, or a holiday. If they don't get access, the momentum is lost and they may never return.
Good documentation and frequent community interaction is essential to help partners work effectively with your Web services. But even the most modest of programs tie up far too many of your developers, who wind up spending their time on the phone helping partners with development troubleshooting. The better your documentation and the stronger the community, the more productive the developers will be, and the happier they'll be working with your API - with less help directly from you. If it is too difficult, most developers simply won't bother, and they'll move on to other opportunities.
Providing clear, well-documented examples in a variety of languages (i.e., Java, C#, Perl, etc.) will also encourage developers to implement your API. A few good examples and pre-written libraries can be more effective than hundreds of pages of documentation, although you still need the critical reference documents and FAQs as well. Ideally, you should provide all of your examples and libraries under an open source license, which allows your partners to cut and paste from your sample code into their applications without inhibitions.
Developers appreciate vendor attention, and maintaining easy lines of communication is important for gathering feedback. Learning how the API is being used, what features or services are driving adoption, and which are most favored by active users is critical in maintaining and improving any API strategy. This input directly impacts the product and roadmap.
Finally, provide mechanisms for your developers to interact with each other, and with your team. This can be online forums, email exchanges, blog posts, or a variety of community options. The key is to foster many to many conversations, not just your team supporting each developer individually. As your program scales, it is almost certain that any question asked by one developer will be asked by others as well when they reach the same point in development. Allowing developers to collaborate and communicate among themselves will reduce your support costs and empower them to engage as part of something bigger than simply a developer/vendor relationship.
Keep it Going
As a critical business initiative, you need a dedicated project owner for your API program. This can take the form of a product manager, a director of content distribution, or an executive assigned to partner alliances or business development. Regardless of the title, this owner and evangelist must set program goals, define features, establishes metrics, and most importantly, be ultimately responsible for the success of the API program.
Keeping your partner community aware of your ongoing interest and support is also important. Encourage your customers to share best practices, and share your own learning's. The best way to make a partner happy or to encourage developers to continue to build with your API is to publicize interesting partner applications or success stories. The critical factor is making sure that all your partners realize that they and their applications are important to your company, whether or not you've updated your APIs recently or not.
The web services you provide as part of your API need to be kept fresh. You can't just put your API out there and expect magic to occur. Monitor the feedback from your partners and respond to it. That could mean adding a new feature, providing fresh sample code, or participating in your community's online forum. The key is to keep things moving and growing.
Measure for Success
A key goal of any partner program is to attract participants that would otherwise be hard to identify or recruit, whether that means specific companies, certain kinds of users, or large volumes of people. Defining your specific goals and measuring results against them is important to help align the program with your overall business goals. Useful metrics may include revenue goals, number of new partners, number of API documentation downloads, number of unique users, or even number of Web services transactions. Measuring the goals over time will identify areas of success and potential areas that need improvement.
Different businesses will have different metrics they want to measure. For example, a media company that provides APIs for access to previews of forthcoming movies would measure success by how many individual users watch each preview, and if those users are in the regions the company is targeting with its other advertising. On the other hand, a social networking site might measure its API's success based on the number of different interesting applications developed for its site, and how many people are using each application.
A little-known analytics company was vying for market share when they launched their API. The seven-year-old company provides qualitative "clickstream" information to find consumer behaviors. So the company decided to recycle some of the data they never sold. They launched
Compete.com and started giving away the stats other companies charged to access. When they launched the site, their traffic doubled. Then in May 2007, Compete opened their API so people could use their data on other sites across the web. The outcome was a huge spike in traffic and awareness. Compete received more visibility in 6 months with an open API than they had with 6 years of public relations and marketing. They also identified an additional key vertical and they established a new segment by partnering with major search engines.
The important thing is to define measurable goals and track actual numbers against those goals, so that you can know if your Web services are performing as expected. They may even create new opportunities you never expected.
Conclusion:
Web Services and Business Development 2.0
Web distribution channels are built on partnerships. New customer acquisition and community-building among developers is increasingly dependent on interconnections between businesses across the Web, and just having an API does not accomplish the goal by itself. How the API is used and distributed will determine the success of the Web service. Your API is useless if it doesn't help grow your business.
To ensure your success you need to follow the "golden rules" of scaling your business development channel using Web services:
- Define goals, but know they may change.
- Don't wait for the right moment; it might be too late. Launch it now and learn from your early adopters.
- Make it easy for partners to work with you by giving them access to your information when the time is right for them, and providing them the tools they need.
- The care and nurturing of your web services channel is an ongoing effort - ignoring your API will directly reflect on your business.
- Measure stuff. Track who is using and how often, look for new partnership opportunities, and acknowledge those who are driving your business.
The one thing that is consistent is change. The business development executive's role is increasingly about volume and reach, and less about a few big brands. It is not about being a destination site; it is about providing the right information at the right time to your customers.
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