The Five Steps to Scaling Your Business Development

Transcription

1 The Five Steps to Scaling Your Business Development Using Web Services. What is an API? Biz Dev 2.0 caterina fake flickr Executive Summary Business has always been about connections. Whether it s communication with your customers, alliances with partners, or ties with suppliers, connections are a critical part of your business. Traditionally business development was about the salesmen with the Rolodexes who could close a handful of big deals. Today, the rules have changed. In the Web-based economy, business development is about connecting people with the relevant information at the point and time they need to consume it. Web services allow companies to do business across firewalls, reach a broad range of partners, and create new business opportunities. The Web services model is applicable to a range of businesses, from information plays like WhitePages.com to messaging systems like Twitter to infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services and semantic web services like Thompson-Reuters Calais. The concept works like this: A company makes a web service that is accessible via an API (application programming interface). Each business partner registers to obtain an access key. Using those keys, partners can use the service programmatically to get and send data. A well-managed API gives prospective partners, or a community of developers, a way to develop an application using your content or services. They can try it, test it, and even build something that begins to scale demand for your content. Using monitoring and metrics, you can identify the handful of partners or developers that have been the most successful in helping you meet your business goals. In the process, you end up with a self-managed business development funnel that yields the world s most qualified leads. Using APIs as a mechanism for content and service distribution, or as a tool to allow partners to build value added services on your platform has become an enticing concept. But the question still remains: If we build it, will they come? The purpose of this paper is to answer that question by showing you how to create a successful business development channel built on a Web services strategy. The Five Steps to Scaling Your Business Development Using Web Services rev 1 1

2 Define Goals When developing your API, it is important to consider the ultimate goal. Do you want to promote your underlying service, deliver new eyeballs to your site, sell more products, make your content available for distribution, or simplify partner integration? Define the business objectives, prioritize them, and look at the best way to reach the high-priority goals. Initially supporting a small group of partners allows you and your company to get comfortable with an API model in a more controlled manner. It also allows you to learn how partners want to consume the information you are making available. With this experience, it is then simple to modify your API as necessary before opening it up to a larger audience. Making your API more broadly available can lead to different types of partners, new Web services, and a massive increase in awareness and distribution of your content. A public API strategy allows for a mass distribution model. Companies such as ebay, Salesforce.com and Facebook improved the value of their Web based applications by allowing individuals and companies alike to build new businesses based on access to their platforms. Compete, Trulia, and Whitepages have embraced another model. These companies have simply made their content available to the ever-growing global population of over 15 million developers as an opportunity to build brand awareness. These developers integrate content into their Web sites and blogs, or combine the content with one or more Web services to create a mashup. Giving access to your platform or allowing others to use your content away from your site can be seen as a daunting task, requiring particular attention to control and scalability across thousands of partners. Each has the potential to produce a large audience and a great deal of new business. Setting goals might be as simple as, We don t want to say no to people who want to partner with us. A good example of this comes from a company called Thumbplay, the largest mobile content provider in the US. In the first two years in business, the company implemented forty partnerships. In the first two weeks of launching their partner API, the company implemented the next forty partners. Since that time, the company has continued to rapidly increase the number of partners driving new subscribers to their service. Because they could see an immediate impact, the company decided to launch a public facing API in hopes of identifying business opportunities they never imagined. The Five Steps to Scaling Your Business Development Using Web Services rev 1 2

3 Launch it Now Like any new initiative, sometimes the greatest obstacle to success is simply getting started. Going from planning and development to launch takes time. Don t get bogged down. Demonstrating a short time-to-value is critical. Create an API for a subset of your services, identifying one or two key areas of business to focus on as a starting point. It is easier to add additional services later rather than trying to build everything before you test the waters. Your Web service interface needs security and access, quality of service measures, scalability, and service-level agreement standards. How do you provide these non-core features and still get to market quickly? A part of the solution is up to you, however, a fair amount of the necessary but unloved work can now be outsourced to the small but growing set of services providers such as Mashery. As a provider of on-demand API infrastructure, Mashery provides the infrastructure surrounding your entire Web service. Partners can self-provision access, you can manage business rules associated with your content and services, and the necessary reporting and monitoring of your API activity. As you launch your API, it is important to know that things will change. Be prepared to make adjustments to your goals along the way. Here s an excellent example: a large media company launched a public API with the hopes of attracting developers to build plug-ins for bloggers to leverage its content. The company successfully marketed their API using a $5,000 bounty and registered over 1,000 developers in the first week. The company quickly learned how people really wanted to use the Web services the company had made available. Based on the needs exposed by its early adopter business partners, the company fine-tuned its goals and focused on making more services available. Once launched, it is important to gather input and learn how your Web services are being used, and therefore you may take advantage of every opportunity to improve the API and the overall program. Feedback from developers and partners can provide both tactical and strategic direction to optimize the new API, particularly with new types of partnerships. With feedback and experience, your web services can be optimized. Starting with a small group of partners offers rapid improvement cycles based on operationally relevant feedback, which is why releasing something good enough quickly is better than taking too long to deliver the perfect API. The Five Steps to Scaling Your Business Development Using Web Services rev 1 3

4 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, 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. The Five Steps to Scaling Your Business Development Using Web Services rev 1 4

5 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. The Five Steps to Scaling Your Business Development Using Web Services rev 1 5

6 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. The Five Steps to Scaling Your Business Development Using Web Services rev 1 6

7 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. The Five Steps to Scaling Your Business Development Using Web Services rev 1 7 Mashery, Inc. 25 Kearny, Suite 500 San Francisco, CA sales@mashery.com (415)