It starts with what the line of business is really good at already, which is understanding the customer, putting themselves in their shoes. The only difference here is the customer is a developer. It's not necessarily who we normally think of as the consumer of the product or service; but it’s essential to design your API products for that target audience and provide them with a superior customer experience, a great user experience, then get the word out about how to find and use it.
There’s some real marketing involved: you have to not just have the tools and the technology, you have to recruit developers. You can use things like leaderboards and gamify some aspects of the marketplace to attract people and get them to adopt your API, whether that's internally or whether that's your trusted partners or any external developer.
The next step is simplifying the process of what they have to go through to adopt your API product. That's the process of discovery: how they can try it out; is there documentation that answers their questions; and how do they subscribe so that they can get security credentials to get access and put it into production?
You need to provide the full range of examples, of documentation, and one way many companies measure that is to reduce the time to first call of an API. Whatever you can do to reduce that time will make a difference for that developer – and make a difference for adoption.
Finally, line of business is very metrics-driven and constantly looking at performance – for instance of their APIs. You have to give that same level of analytics to the consumer of that API, to the developer, that lets them know if they are performant, that it is working, how much they are being charged, if you're charging for your API. Giving them a view into what's happening is a key element that will differentiate you in the marketplace.
To summarize, keep your consumer in mind and who stands to gain tangible benefits from an API marketplace – and in this case, it's a developer.
Want to know more? Watch this 30-minute demo to learn how to get the most out of your APIs with a custom, turnkey enterprise API marketplace.
