Benefits and Tips for Offering a Third-Party API Program
Partner programs that offer an API (application programming interface) for 3rd party developers can be a great way to:
- Acquire users inexpensively. Ultimately, users of the third party application will learn your brand and make their way back to the mother ship.
- Cheaply increase your development efforts by incenting third party developers to build interesting applications on top of your API or include your API exposed services as a complement to their core application.
- Ultimately, increase your revenue.
When designing your API program, consider the following.
- Start off small, offering a small set of core services. If this proves popular, then selectively increase the API offering.
- If you also offer a client application, you may not want to offer every single feature so that users eventually end up migrating to your own application client. You may also want to disallow competing applications, only allowing your API to be used as a complementary piece of content in third party apps that do not directly compete with your business.
- Set a minimum split amount that a developer’s third party app must produce in business before they get paid commissions. This will save time and money in micro-payments.
- Publish the split, and avoid any negotiation. It takes too much time.
- Standard contract ready to go.
- Good documentation, forum, sandbox development environment, and make sure to budget time for a developer to monitor the forum.
- PR for your API. Development groups and local programming meetup’s make a great spot to spread the word.
- Use simple API technologies, like RESTFull services or simple HTTP XML or JSON services if you can. Avoid complex SOAP services if you can help it because not everyone can do SOAP easily (ahem… Ruby).
So get going on your API program, and get on to the internal arguments of what services to expose!
Review of Web Analytics An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik
This is one of the first books that I have read on the topic of Web Analytics. This book is not a deep dive of a particular tool like Google Analytics or Omniture, but rather a comprehensive description of a web analytics framework (Trinity) and a 6 month plan to implement. The book is targeted more towards medium to large companies. A small startup like my own couldn’t begin to implement all of the suggested actions. In some chapters, Avinash clearly notes which strategies (such as the testing chapter) are best for companies with limited resources, but overall he doesn’t always do this. I would have like to see him make minimum suggestions or short cuts for companies that don’t have even 1 FTE dedicated to web analytics.
A few key points from the book that I really found beneficial:
- Heuristic Evaluations: An easy way to quickly determine if a web page is designed well by going over a checklist of about 20 basic design rules of thumb
- 10/90 Rule: Spend 10% of your web analytics budget on tools and 90% on people.
- Web Analytics function should align with the business, not IT.
- 10% variability in web tools is not uncommon.
- 2% is standard conversion rate
- In Google, type in “site: <www.yourdomain.com>”. This will show you how well Google has indexed your site. If Google shows 50 pages, and you know you have 200, then something is stopping its spider from indexing your entire site.
- http://snipurl.com/poplink. Great tool to quickly view your website ranking across multiple search engines for a search phrase.
- 80% of the time, company employees are wrong about what customer’s want.
- About 20 search phrases represent the majority of search engine traffic to your website.
I definitely recommend this book, but be ready to pick apart what you can realistically do in the amount of time you can afford to spend on web analytics.
About
Thanks for visiting! My name is Keith Forsythe and this is my blog about product development, product marketing, mobile devices and general business practices at an Internet Startup.
I am currently co-founder and Director of Product Development at RideCharge, Inc (Taxi Magic), a startup mobile and web taxi booking service. Prior to RideCharge, I was an IT project manager as CVS/Caremark, and a software engineer at Baxter Healthcare. I have a MS in E-Commerce Technolgy from DePaul University and a BS in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana.
