At Moesif, we primarily market to developers and other technical audiences like product managers and developer relations teams looking to make their own developer platform successful. Getting developers to adopt your API or tool is hard and requires heavy investment in experimentation and measurement in order to achieve the results you’re looking for. At the same time, much of the online advice you hear for B2C or B2B marketing simply won’t work when marketing to developers.

One of our API-first brethren in San Francisco recently shared with us how they built their synthetic testing system to monitor uptime and latency. It was a large undertaking involving a huge Redshift warehouse, Datadog and many man months of engineering effort. At the end of it, they could measure latency’s completeness, whether it was functionally correct and, when it moved out of bounds, alert CSM/engineering teams.

If your business model involves selling to developers, you probably have already realized that much of the traditional processes and metrics applicable to traditional enterprise sales or consumer marketing don’t work. Specifically, selling to developers usually means attracting them to your platform and helping them succeed in building something, whether that’s a new app, integration, or automating an internal process.

In today’s unprecedented economic downturn, it’s more difficult than ever to find and close new customers. The onus is now on maintaining existing customers as productive users of your product. By closely monitoring API metrics, Customer Success Management (CSM) teams can get an early warning on those that are at risk of churning, and rectify things before it’s too late.

As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.

“When you’re working from home you should try and do it systematically and methodologically”, says John Bennett a veteran work-at-homer. “It’s a lot like running a business from home, which is what I do”. John night know a thing or two about it, since he’s been working from home in upstate New Hampshire for the last 20 years.

2020 isn’t half done and society has already changed fundamentally. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many people into unemployment because customers can’t visit their stores anymore. When revenue drops, business owners have to ask themselves: What part of their workforce is crucial to operating the company? For companies that sell software services to developers, you could get the impression that a “developer relations” (DevRel) team could be critical for that company.

This is a companion piece to Jeremy Glassenberg’s talk at the March 2020, API and IPA Meetup in San Francisco. The full video of his talk is below and on Moesif’s YouTube Channel. As popular web services extend their developer platforms for partners to integrate directly into their interfaces, design trends are forming from experiences in the world of embedded integrations.

As APIs handle enormous amounts of data of a widely varying type, the critical question for any data provider is how specifically to secure this data. An authentication method that gives power to developers to build applications for all of their needs, determines who could access the APIs to protect sensitive data and ensure the request aren’t tempered. Authentication is when an entity proves an identity. Simply put, authentication is the act of verifying that you are who you claim to be.