John Musser, October 16th, 2007 Comments(1)

There were a number of interesting sessions at yesterday’s Business of APIs Conference hosted by Mashery. Dave McClure, who previously oversaw the launch of the PayPal developer network, gave an engaging, to-the-point talk entitled “Successful Developer Programs”. If you’re running an API developer network or even thinking of running one, here’s a summary of good ideas and important questions to ask yourself:

Who’s your audience?

What kind of developers? Indies, small co’s, enterprises? They are not all the same.
What makes them tick?
What problems do they have?
Are there geeks already solving your problems?

Your product better be cool

Cool = new, innovative, latest tech
If it ain’t cool, make it cool
Provide code examples
Make them either rich or famous (or both)

Your team = more geeks

Hire extroverted geeks (tough). Bloggers, writers; wiki, forum addicts; try conferences; find the alpha geek driving a crowd of geeks
Credibility is important
Recruit a geek advisory board: with target languages/platforms; customer verticals; should already be successful, making money, well known

Geek metrics

Examples: # new customers; # downlaods; # active developers; # transactoins, $ revenue from APIs
Tip 1: make sure your non-geek boss signs-off
Tip 2: assume < 1% convert to active use

API biz model = biz model

Bake your business model into your api; no free rides
Hopefully your api is a business development deal
If your api helps geeks make $, you win

Education = it’s the only thing

To win you must educate (product mktg)
To educate you must speak (blog)
To speak you must do/show (code)
Tip: do not require registration or login to educate, ever.
Perhaps require login to make money
Your api should be invisible to the customer

Marketing = sell the geeks, not you

What do geeks crave? respsect (always), attention (sometimes), money (sometimes)
Help sell them: BFF
Product directory of 3rd party app
Preferred/certified dev program
Affiliate/incentives for your geeks
Send them a steady stream of customers