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A good API product isn't good enough if it's not properly displayed. The developer portal - or API portal - is an essential piece to improve your adoption rate and reduce your time to first call. It's the final piece of a good API business strategy. Here's what's make a good developer portal for exposing your API.
Have you heard of the worst API (Application Programming Interface) ever documented? No one has. That’s because ambiguous APIs don’t get used.
On the other hand, APIs that clearly solve a need and are easy to use get a cult-like following. They spread by word of mouth with developers finding any reason to try them out.
To optimize your APIs adoption, clever technology isn’t enough. You need to stay focused on the developer’s needs, instead of the API features. More than that, you need to make it easy for developers to consume your API.
At Blobr, we’ve been working on the ultimate developer portal. We know that the easier it is for developers to integrate your API, the greater your success will be.
Our portal has your customer’s best interest at heart. We’ve built all the functionality your API needs so developers can easily access it, understand their use through simple documentation, and have instant access to their invoices and analytics.
Here’s how Blobr’s developer portal can optimize your API adoption rate.
Packaging a successful API isn’t easy. You need to deeply understand developers and provide an excellent integrated experience. The Blobr platform takes care of the biggest concerns for API consumers.
The success of your API will mean a growing number of consumers. Blobr provides the platform for developers to access your APIs and support them. As your API becomes increasingly popular, our serverless infrastructure will allow your API to scale.
With geo-redundancy, your data will be backed up in multiple locations. This means there will be no interruption if one site fails. It also makes your API available in every region. Developers can trust in your APIs reliability.
Customers are impatient. They expect a seamless experience and often quit if there are any lags or delays. Our platform ensures a low latency of less than 50 ms for speedy API delivery.
API security is a major concern for companies. Our interface provides you with control over your API endpoints. And we use a granular approach to your exposed data. If there is a misuse you have the ability to dynamically modify the data without risking your entire business.
Together these features create an integrated infrastructure you and your customers can trust.
Next, let’s look at how your customers can access your APIs.
The first step for a developer to adopt your API is the access point. Blobr gives you the tools to package data providers’ APIs into products and make them available through a beautiful window.
Blobr’s development platform excels at ease of setup. Depending on your business model you can grant individual access or make your API available to anyone through registration.
Here developers can discover your APIs and try them out in a sandbox with no risk or cost. Developers benefit from the ease of use and clarity of what is available.
The interface is simple and easy to use for end developers. Providers can add an API to Blobr and make it available in 2 minutes. Consumers can take as little as 5 minutes to access and integrate an API product.
As a Blobr client or partner, you can use this portal directly to manage your account, API subscriptions, and API keys for your products.
Once a developer has found your API, they should have the lowest barriers to use it, which means simple and easy-to-follow documentation.
API documentation is how developers will interact with your API. It is therefore the most critical element for success. It can also be one of the biggest investments in the creation and maintenance of your API.
At Blobr we take an innovative approach to API documentation. The traditional approach to API documentation uses a dictionary format. This makes it difficult and time-consuming to navigate.
We’ve reimagined documentation to be arranged by use cases. Documentation is now more like a phrasebook which makes it easier to navigate and shorter. The end developer can clearly see the benefits of the API and why it’s beneficial to their work.
The innovation doesn’t stop there. Document creation can be extremely time-consuming to create. Plus there are the expenses of hiring a technical writer and working with the business and development team to understand the API use case. This is precious time that could be spent on more technical work.
To solve this challenge, Blobr has created a knowledge base of documentation for each use case. This modular approach allows you to automatically generate your API documentation in this user-friendly style. It also removes all the costs associated with creating and maintaining documentation.
The best part is that you can define exactly what you want to be included in your documentation based on the data points you select.
Finally, based on research done by our developers, we also present our documentation as a workflow. This makes it easier to understand, which leads to optimal API adoption and integration.
With our analytics features, you and your customers gain instant insight into how well your API is working. Understand exactly how your API is being used, monitor consumption, and discover who your most valuable users are. These measurements can help optimize your API adoption.
Analytics are displayed in a dashboard which increases developers’ confidence in the reliability and availability of your API.
Consumers’ subscription costs are completely transparent. They can access all of their invoices in one place with a detailed breakdown of their use.
Equally, providers are able to configure and adapt their approach to monetization with real-time measurements and tracking.
These insightful measurements of your API usage will help you improve, grow and innovate your API products.
Developers don’t want to spend time reinventing the wheel. They want to integrate pre-built APIs that solve their problems. They also want to know the best ways to use your API.
With our workspace, you can create, control and analyze APIs that solve developers’ needs. In the developer portal, they can be accessed, understood, and integrated in minutes.
The Blobr developer portal provides everything your customers need to integrate your APIs:
These features are a huge benefit to your API individually. But the real benefit is the combination of these features altogether. They provide a solid infrastructure for your API success. Let our Blobr developer portal take care of all your API needs so you can focus on developing new API products.
Start a free trial to test out Blobr for yourself or speak to one of our experts to find out more.
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