or: How To Participate In The API Economy With Your Own API Marketplace

The API economy represents a pivotal strategy in digital transformation, where organizations unlock their internal capabilities and data to a broader ecosystem of developers, partners, and employees. This approach is key to creating innovative products and services, enabling companies to monetize their internal assets, spawn new revenue streams, and catalyze innovation.

Understanding the API Economy: A Gateway to New Value and Revenue

At its core, the API Economy revolves around making services and data accessible through APIs, thus forging new value and revenue opportunities for businesses. It’s not limited to exposing internal assets to internal users; it extends to business partners, third-party developers, and even the public. This economy encompasses a network of providers, consumers, APIs, and the products that integrate with them.

APIs: Unlocking Enterprise Capabilities for a Wider Ecosystem

In an API-driven economy, APIs emerge as the fundamental tools for organizations to open up their enterprise capabilities. This mindset fosters the creation of new customer experiences by harnessing the collaborative efforts of developers, partners, and employees. By embracing this approach, organizations can cultivate a thriving ecosystem that adopts and repurposes their APIs to innovate and develop new products and services.

The Power of APIs in the Digital Economy

APIs are rapidly becoming a central offering of companies, encapsulating the intrinsic value provided to users or partners. In this digital landscape, the API is not just a tool; it becomes the essence of the business offering, while digital channels serve as conduits for brand-consumer interactions. The digital economy thrives not merely on new software assets but on the innovative exposure of core assets through APIs. The API economy is about strategically unveiling an organization’s digital services and assets via Application Programming Interfaces in a managed and effective manner.

7 Key Questions to Unlock the API Economy

Given the boost it might mean for your business, which steps and checks do you need to take part in this APIs as a Product (AaaP) mindset?

✔️ Do we have a target audience for our APIs?

Who will be able to benefit from what we’re developing? Is the possible market for this willing to have strategic partners like us and actually use what we have to offer? Did we do our homework to see if there will be traction for this?

✔️ Are we having the API first mindset?

If there is a need for what we might provide, are we already developing APIs in a “API first” mindset? Do we have guidelines for developing APIs, including good practices for easy to use, well documented and secure APIs?

✔️ What platform can support our new APIs? What is the best medium to monetize them?

This comes down to the API Management platform you want to use. It is crucial that you build your API marketplace with the right provider; one that is flexible, scalable and with strong security features.

✔️ How should you price our APIs and handle payments?

It’s important you recognize the value of your offering and balance that with the costs you might have running and developing the APIs. Will you charge per call, per month, per year? Who can handle these metrics and analysis so you can generate revenue?

✔️ Do we have a marketing plan set up?

Just like a retail product, an API product is more valuable and profitable if it is known to its target audience. Having a good marketing strategy and an easy way for prospective customers to access your offering is key to getting it sold.

✔️ Do we have Customer support?

When an API is made available, and it becomes a product, you need to provide customer support. Due to their nature, APIs as a Product enable deep integrations between different products and sometimes even ecosystems. This makes them extremely valuable but, at the same time, expectations regarding their usage without any issues are also very high. There needs to be dedicated customer support for any issues that might occur, otherwise you might affect the trust of consumers using your marketplace.

✔️ Are we willing to continuously improve our APIs?

As your customer base grows, new requests and feature requests will come your way in order to improve an existing API or expand your API offering. Addressing this customer feedback becomes a good way of retaining customers and attracting new ones.

Empowering Developers and Businesses with apinity marketplace

Having the right partner can determine a successful entry into the API economy. With the apinity marketplace you have an all round tool to publish, advertise, secure & control your API usage.

The apinity marketplace acts like a discovery tool for APIs to developers from the insurance industry or other regulated industries; it allows them to plug in, and helps companies to discover which APIs they are using, all the while also analyzing how well they are performing.

While doing this it also provides you a standard framework for developing & publishing your APIs, managing their lifecycles and adding extra security layers.

With our analytics offering, you have full visibility of the usage of your APIs; you can construct use cases based on their usage and gather insights that could be valuable for your business. This holistic overview of your offering also allows us to provide you the accurate billing of your API usage.

In combination with our analytics module our customer support team acts as a helpful intermediary in quickly determining issues with your APIs, available through the marketplace.

We reduce the overhead of having a dedicated support team to handle customers directly, by allowing a first stage evaluation of the current status of your APIs published with us.

All in all the apinity marketplace is a great partner to start your adventure in the API economy. Reach out to us to learn more and download the apinity factsheet now!