Gold In Them Hills

What’s In A Name?

Gold. Platinum. Diamond.

Every API firm has their own unique description for top customers.

What isn’t unique is that every API firm allocates their "Gold Effort" towards winning these groundbreaking deals. Countless hours of building schematic drawings, organizing API docs, scrapping together endless Postman collections, slide presentations, and personalizing colors & logos on each page. These are all commonplace when preparing for these large customer workshops.

Unfortunately, this "Gold Effort" rarely yields equivalent outcomes.

Even when the stakes are the highest with the largest prospective customers, attempting to visualize an API integration is frustrating and difficult.

As a potential buyer, there are questions that will inevitably arise during these workshop sessions with an API firm:

• Which endpoint in your schematic diagram would power my end customer experience?
• Which webhook event outlined in the slides you’re showing me comes in first? What end customer action triggers the next webhook and how long after should I expect it?
• What fields in the codeblock you’re showing me from your API docs should I surface to my customers? Which are simply informative?
• Do I have to read all of your API docs? Which parts should I ignore and which should I focus on for my use case(s)?

Gold effort rarely equates to gold outcomes.

From Gold to Bronze

This API visualization problem for Gold customers also permeates beyond the highest customer tiers.

If it takes 100s of hours to organize API docs, build new API flows, draw out schematics, tell the end customer story in slides, replace the logos, branding, colors...then you start to scratch the surface of the ROI required to make this type of effort economically viable.

What CFO would realistically dedicate all of these resources away from the core business? It’s a game of numbers and the clear victims in this equation are not just Gold customers, but ALL prospective customers.

They get long emails.

They get API documentation to go read at home.

They get non-personalized presentations.

They get slides & verbal pitches that discuss the hypotheticals.

The irony here with the non-Gold customers is that the majority of these customers “keep the lights on” at API firms. They are the behind the scenes customers that not only jointly contribute significantly to the API firm’s bottom line, but also are most at risk of being poached by a competitor.

The API demo problem affects customers of all sizes, from the largest to the smallest prospects.

Elemental Change

API firms need a way to showcase their software visually to ALL customers...with a tool that yields a ROI to make any CFO blush.

The last thing you want during a customer conversation is to be unable to showcase your APIs.

You need to capture attention with maximum personalization and minimal effort.

You need the ability to finally tell a story of the possibilities created by the API.

You should be able to give EVERY prospect that "aha" moment where they can finally feel your product and truly understand your end-to-end API functionality.

The Gold Standard

When choosing a platform to help visualize the power of your API suite, look for something that can simultaneously demonstrate the following features:

• your full API request & response code block, with the ability to surface specific data to the end user interface
• pre-built UI templates & easy customization of new UIs that fully represent all of the use cases powered by your API, all while being positioned alongside the full API code block
• live & responsive functionality in the user interface that allows your customers to actually feel the product change and the code block update as they interact with it live in a demo
• live monitoring & processing actions of your platform as the customer interacts with your demo, surfacing live requests, responses, webhook events, external SDK callbacks, and background requests that help explain what's happening behind the scenes during the demo
• the ability to mock, hit sandbox, UAT, or production environments based on the desired use case
• supportability of the ancillary but equally important features of your platform - SDKs, iFrames, webhooks, etc.
• the ability to build configurable non-code narrative & design pieces of your API story
• and finally, all of the above should be personalized in each demo with the prospect's logo, colors, and branding, regardless of their size

Most demo platforms are built to support companies that have products where there is no API code. As such, these platforms aren't equipped to address the problems API firms face when needing to show their code based products in the market to customers.

Others, like Coast, offer a platform that is purpose built specifically for API firms. We know the problems API firms face, we've worked at these companies, and we've been in your shoes.

We have designed our product exclusively to help API firms showcase their software and we are obsessed with empowering these teams to win more deals, close larger customers, accelerate TTV, and reduce existing customer churn.

Show ALL of your customers, Gold, Silver, and Bronze, your maximum effort...effortlessly.

🌊🥇🥈🥉🌊

Coast | Tech Crunch | LinkedIn