There is a lot of thought leadership around API-first development, where companies go straight to a public API strategy. But how do the rules change for companies that are building a public API around an established product? This presentation explores the unique challenges facing API-second companies.

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VICTOR OSIMITZ
SLICE TECHNOLOGIES
MAY 2015
Lessons from “API-Second”
Development

2. Two API Strategies
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There is a lot of thought leadership around API-first development, but do the same rules apply
for API-second companies?
VS
o API is core to these companies’ strategy
from the start
o Fundamentally organized to empower
developers
o Challenge: develop a valuable core
technology underneath a well-designed
API
o These companies already have a
successful product and are interested in
growing through API partnerships
o Different set of technical, product, and
business challenges
o Challenge: develop an intuitive, compelling
API on top of a legacy code base and
technology stack
API-FIRST DEVELOPMENT API-SECOND DEVELOPMENT

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Slice Is An API-Second Company
SLICE: YOUR SMART SHOPPING ASSISTANT
Track shipments automatically
Store shopping receipts
Monitor your spending
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Item level data extracted from email receipts
Founded in 2010, built out the consumer apps
and back-end, started work on public API in 2013

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Developers Led Us to API Strategy
EBAY: SELL YOUR STUFF
Track shipments automatically
Store shopping receipts
Monitor your spending
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o By 2013, other companies were inquiring
about using our technology
o Collaboration with eBay: Sell your Stuff
o We decided to build a public API to enable
more developers to access purchase
histories

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API-First vs. API-Second
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU?

6. User Focus
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KEY DIFFERENCES
API-FIRST
API as product: Developers
are the customers, API is the
UI, DX is the UX.
API-SECOND
API as by-product: API is
often seen as a functional,
un-sexy data pipeline for
internal consumption.
The core technology is the
differentiator, API only affects
developers, not decision
makers.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Should you strive to delight our API consumers?

7. Product Focus
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KEY DIFFERENCES
API-FIRST
Openness and robustness
are deeply ingrained into API
companies’ products and
culture.
APIs succeed in part by
enabling a broad spectrum of
use cases.
API-SECOND
Legacy infrastructure often
built to a specific use case,
technical debt most likely to
be found in the API layer.
Tendency to be cautious
about making the API
available to any developer,
due to perceived or actual
brittleness.
API value prop may be
unclear next to an existing
product.

8. Go-to-Market Focus
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KEY DIFFERENCES
API-FIRST
Freedom breeds creativity
and new market possibilities
that an existing company
may never have imagined.
API-SECOND
Without an open strategy
from the start, there may not
be a consensus on what is
core IP and must be
protected, and what can be
open.
There is likely to be a
temptation to hide everything
behind NDAs and contracts.
Resist this temptation!
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Should you allow third parties to build products that compete with your core product?

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Strategic Questions
HOW DO YOU GET STARTED?

10. Use the A-P-E Framework
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SET YOUR A-P-E GOALS
What to
ACHIEVE
What to
PROTECT
What to
ENABLE
API strategies require absolute clarity on what you want to achieve and
how you are going to achieve it.

11. What Do You Want to Achieve?
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WHAT TO THINK ABOUT
Setting data as our primary goal
enabled us to offer our API
completely free in many cases,
and far below our competitors’
prices for larger integrations.
OUR EXPERIENCE
Diversified
revenue
stream?
New user
acquisition?
What
else?
Raw data
collection?
Brand
awareness/
recruitment
channel?

12. What Do You Want to Protect?
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WHAT TO THINK ABOUT
Figure out what your core asset
is, and protect it in a black box.
But keep your API completely
transparent.
PROTECT CORE ASSETS
ONLY
API documentation is
hidden behind a login
Manual approvals are required
for API access
You worry somebody will
reverse-engineer your technology
You worry every time a
developer signs up
If any of these are true, you
haven’t thought enough about
what to Protect…

13. What Do You Want to Enable?
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WHAT TO THINK ABOUT
Generally, you should allow as
many use cases as you can, but
answering this ahead of time will
help you design your API for the
key cases you want to Enable.
KEY USE CASES
MASH-UPS
PRODUCT
INTEGRATIONS
PLATFORM
ADAPTATIONS
COMPETITOR
ACCESS

14. Case Study :: Slice API
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Answering the A-P-E questions makes difficult decisions easy:
Should we allow competing product on our API? How should we price it? How should we protect API
documentation?
o Raw data: more inboxes
from more diverse
sources
o Revenue: to cover our
costs, but not to serve
as a profit center
ACHIEVE PROTECT ENABLE
o Our parsing technology
remains a black box.
The API exposes a
simple object model but
reveals nothing about
our core technology.
o We can be perfectly
open about our API
because there’s no way
to reverse-engineer our
core technology from the
API.
o Any experience that
leverages purchase and
shipment data.
o Use cases as diverse as
Gone!, Stuff by eBay,
Trov, IFTTT, TheFind,
financial services, etc.,
and we try to say yes to
everybody who wants to
use our API.

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Thank you!
api@slice.com
@slicedev