You are in a sweet spot. You got a fat six figure job in the coolest department of your company, building out your API platform. You have a decent budget (never as much as you want) to throw hackathons, run Google and Twitter ads, and you can buy schwag to give away at your events. Sure there is a lot of pressure to deliver, but you are doing pretty well. All you gotta do is convince 3rd party developers to do thing with your companies APIs, develop web, mobile, voice, and other applications that generate buzz and deliver the return on investment your bosses are looking for.
It is all about you and your team. Let’s get to work growth hacking! Attract as may new users as we can, and convince them to build as much as we possibly can. Let’s get them to develop SDKs, write articles for us on their blog, speak at our events, favorite things on hacker news, and whatever activities that we can. Your objective is to extract as much value from your API operations as you possibly can, and give nothing back. Expect developers to work for free. Expect your hackathons attendees to come up with the next great idea, build it, and hand it over to you for very little in return. This isn’t a partnership, this is an API ecosystem, and your team is determined to win at all costs.
Your API isn’t a two-way street. All roads lead to your success, and your bosses getting what they want. You don’t care that 3rd party developers should be compensated, or that they have any rights to their intellectual property. The 5% of them that successfully build applications, we will offer them a job in exchange for it, or we’ll just replicate it internally, decrease their rate limits, and increase their error rates so that they can’t compete. Sure you want people to still feel inspired, but not enough so that they’ll ever be able to sustain their applications–the only sustainable application around here will be owned by the platform. After all, this is all just business–it is nothing personal.
Note: If my writing is a little dark this week, here is a little explainer–don’t worry, things will back to normal at API Evangelist soon.
